“Tout Bagay Pou N Chanje”: Women on Politics, Markets, and Health in Haiti after Duvalier

Following the collapse of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, the buoyant voice of Jocelyn Hyppolite played on radios across Haiti. “Tout bagay pou n chanje,” everything must change, she explained. “Nou p ap pran nan blňf ankň,” we will not be fooled any more. Jocelyn was one of many women whose voice pierced the gender barrier of power in Haiti. After Duvalier, women entered at the forefront of national debates over economic and political change and population and health crises. On behalf of their impoverished sisters, bourgeois women evaluated the market reforms instituted by provisional president Henri Namphy. Those close to the private sector approved of liberalization, for the most part, but implored the state to do more to integrate women into markets. Feminist economist Mireille Anglade-Neptune and others, however, warned that integration meant subordination to a male-dominated manufacturing sector in an export economy that was both peripheral to and dependent on larger nations. Debate soon spilled over into the workplace, when women in Delmas picketed outside factories. Population growth and rural-to-urban migration underlined this debate over work, because Namphy intended new manufacturing to absorb surplus labor in cities. The spread of HIV/AIDS that same year, however, renewed interest in safe-sex, family planning, and population control. Terrified by the epidemic, factory owners in Delmas, who depended on surplus labor, began inviting feminist leaders to teach women workers the virtues of condom use. On the political stage, women resuscitated the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, founded by Haiti's first generation of feminists in the 1930s, and marched thirty thousand strong in Port-au-Prince to demand social justice. Of the dozens of new feminist organizations created, the most popular, Fanm Dayiti, adamantly opposed market reforms and new manufacturing. Other feminist organizations merged into Enfo Fanm, which led the awareness campaign against HIV/AIDS.