White Gloves, Black Nation

Tracing elite and middle-class women’s activism and intellectual practice from the countryside of Kenscoff, Haiti, to Philadelphia, the Belgian Congo, and back to Port-au-Prince, this book tells the story of Haitian women’s essential role as co-curators of modern Haitian citizenship.

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This ambitious transnational history considers Haitian women's political life during and after the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–34). The two decades following the occupation were some of the most politically dynamic and promising times in Haiti's modern history, but the history of women's political organizing in this period has received scant attention. Tracing elite and middle-class women's activism and intellectual practice from the countryside of Kenscoff, Haiti, to Philadelphia, the Belgian Congo, and back to Port-au-Prince, this book tells the story of Haitian women's essential role as co-curators of modern Haitian citizenship.

Set in a period when national belonging was articulated in philosophies of African authenticity, revolutionary nostalgia, and working-class politics, Grace Sanders Johnson considers how an emerging educated and professional class of women who understood themselves as descendants of the Haitian Revolution established alternative claims to citizenship that included, but were not limited to, suffrage and radicalism. Sanders Johnson argues that these women's political practice incorporated strategic class performance, extravagant sartorial sensibilities, and an insistence on self-promotion and preservation that challenged the exceptional trope of the martyred male revolutionary hero. Bringing her subjects vividly to life, she reveals their politics of wayfaring, moving deliberately if sometimes ineffectively through the radical milieu of the twentieth century.