Cleante Desgraves Valcin, Haiti’s first woman novelist, dies

Cleante Desgraves Valcin died in Port-au-Prince on this day. She was born there on 13 January 1891 to a Haitian father and an American mother. In 1929 she published Cruelle Destinee, the first novel written by a Haitian woman; La Blanche Negresse followed in 1934, along with the poems of Fleurs et Pleurs. She co-founded the Ligue Feminine d’Action Sociale and its paper La Voix des Femmes, and she was the League’s president when she died. Haitian women did not get the vote until 1957, a year after her death.