This essay considers the participation of Port-au-Prince women in municipal and national politics during the later decades of the nineteenth century. The growth of Port-au-Prince changed the dynamics of these contests, as newly arrived women joined expanding popular neighborhoods, and many assumed a central role in feeding the city. Women moved freely through the heart of the capital and the immediate countryside on personal, commercial, and sometimes directly political itineraries. While formally excluded from electoral politics, working women made their political desires well known, as they exerted an influence on the military movements that toppled the administration several times. These armed contests, as well as the stratification and militarization of the political scene during peacetime, provoked gendered violence. Simultaneously, working women confronted disdain from journalists who would discipline the women’s great influence. Nevertheless, these women commanded considerable respect in political contests that often seemed to have as their stakes the very independence of the nation itself.
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Research Article|
March 01 2021
Skirts Rolled Up: The Gendered Terrain of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Port-au-Prince Available to Purchase
Anne Eller
Anne Eller
Anne Eller is an associate professor of history and an affiliate of Spanish and Portuguese and African American studies at Yale University. She is the author of We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom (2016), which crafts a deep history of the Haitian Revolution and emancipation on Dominican soil during the Spanish reoccupation in the 1860s. Her current research, “Other 1898s,” considers the relationship of working people with the state in the Caribbean in the 1890s.
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Small Axe (2021) 25 (1 (64)): 61–83.
Citation
Anne Eller; Skirts Rolled Up: The Gendered Terrain of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Port-au-Prince. Small Axe 1 March 2021; 25 (1 (64)): 61–83. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912782
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