Haitian women have used protests and activism to negotiate their compromised positions in the national citizenry. Their protests reflect the nuanced and multiple social locations of women in Haiti and have varied from infanticide and marron‐age in the eighteenth century, to guerrilla warfare, public demonstrations, and political organization in the nineteenth century, to a “literature of revolution,” and the development of individual, national, and transnational feminist discourses by the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries.

La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women’s Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montréal, 1934-1986 is a response to the haunting absence of scholarly attention to Haitian women in Caribbean and North American political history in the twentieth century. I consider the ways in which elite and middle-class Haitian women’s concepts and practices of activism and feminism both emerged from and influenced debates on race, nationalism, and international politics among black activists in Haiti and North America during the U.S.

Throughout the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), supporters of the armed invasion pointed toward the transportation infrastructure as the principal contribution of the intervention. Although many of the thoroughfares were built using forced labor, Haitian-American contact on roads, bridges, and railways blurred the boundaries between the occupied and the occupiers.

This article uses Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain’s study of burial practices and kinship networks in the rural town of Kenscoff to consider the relationship between rituals for the dead and women’s rights activism following the United States occupation (1915-1934).