This is a longer version of the blog “short note on gender in Haiti.” I’ve expanded it in part because I don’t think the other blog was fair to Beverly Bell. It appeared that I was singling her out and she is by no means the first or only writer-scholar to project a Western partriarchical model where it arguably doesn’t belong, on gender relations in Haiti. Indeed, as i try to show here, to do so is has been, for some 80 years now, the norm. For an even long version of gender in Haiti, see “Explaining Gender in Haiti: Review of the Literature.”
Misunderstanding Gender in Haiti
Gender status in Haiti is widely misunderstood. One notable exception notwithstanding (N’zengou-Tayo 1998), most researchers and aid workers who have focused on gender in Haiti highlight the commonality of domestic violence and repression of women. In doing so they cite discriminatory legal codes (Fuller 2005), political violence against women (Fuller 2005), high levels of mortality during birth (World Bank 2002), the feminine struggle for identity manifest in creative literature (Francis 2004), female involvement in onerous, labor-intensive, economic endeavors (Divinski et al. 1998), and even the overall deterioration of economic and political conditions as unfair and repressive to women (UNIFEM 2006). Summarizing these views, the UN’s Gender Development Index (GDI) ranks Haiti at the very bottom in the Western hemisphere, making it seem to observers who do not carefully interpret the index that Haiti is the most female repressive country in all of Latin America, indeed the world, being considerably lower in ranking than even Iran or Saudi Arabia (United Nations Development Programme 2006).
Beverly Bell, author of the acclaimed book, Walking on Fire (2001), and one of the most vigilant contributors to the gender struggle in Haiti, illustrates how many feminist activist-scholars continue to obfuscate gender issues in Haiti when she writes,
“Haitian women place at the absolute bottom in female-male life expectancy differential, incidence of teen marriage, contraceptive use, primary school enrollment, secondary school enrollment, and ratio of secondary school teachers.”
Bell is wrong on every count. At 63 vs 59 years, women in Haiti live longer than men (UN 2010); hovering at about 43 per 1,000 births per annum for adolescent girls 15 to 19 years of age, the teen pregnancy rate is among the lowest in the developing world, half or less that of many Latin American countries, including the neighboring Dominican Republic (World Bank 2013; WHO 2007; UNFPA 2007; WHO 2001). At 52% to 48%, Haitian girls have higher primary school attendance rates than their male counterparts (UNICEF 2008), at 21% to 18%, they have higher secondary school attendance rates (ibid), and at 87% to 76% they have higher overall youth literacy rates (ibid). As for contraceptive use, it is true that more Haitian women, particularly rural women, eschew contraceptives. But generally not, as feminists often claim, because of male domination (see Schwartz 2009). It is in fact women, particularly middle aged women, who are most in favor of high birth rates. Old women control younger women, and many of them guard and manipulate male access to them–sexually–in such a way as to promote high fertility (see Schwartz 2009).
But I don’t want to pick on Bell. She is in good company. Social scientists, most of them men, have long portrayed Haitian culture as strongly patriarchic, male-centered and by implication, female repressive. For example, in a stark misrepresentation of rural life in Haiti first noted by Gerald Murray (1977: 263), the oft-repeated explanation for polygyny is that farmers use “extra” wives to tend additional gardens (Bastien 1961: 142; Courlander 1960: 112; Herskovits 1937; Leyburn 1966: 195; Moral 1961: 175–76; Simpson 1942: 656 ). But this is not now and probably never was true. Women in rural Haiti do not work in gardens on behalf of men. Quite the contrary, rural Haitian women may sometimes work gardens on their own and their children’s behalf, but when a man is present, the obligation to plant and weed falls to him. To reverse the situation would be, from the cultural perspective of a rural Haitian, absurd. And oddly enough it is almost a certainty that the cited scholars knew this. Why earlier anthropologists and sociologists said differently I can only surmise is due to Western expectations and the domino-type repetition of one scholar reiterating what was said by another that so often infects our research.
The point is that although Haiti is indeed poor and much of the population experiences extreme hardship, women have substantially greater status vis a vis their male counterparts than commonly acknowledged. Haitian women are considered the heads of homesteads, they are the “poto mitan,” the center post of the family, there children typically adore them and are quick to defend them against men or other women, sometimes violently. For those who have studied the issue, levels of violence and agression appear significanly higher among women, both with respect to one another and men (myself in 2009 book Sex Family and Ferility in Haiti and Gerald Murray’s 1977 disertation). The place Haitian women have in both the family and the economy is backed with economic power. Women almost completely dominate the itinerate trade on which Haiti’s domestic economy depends; they domiate the markets and the redistribution channels; and they control their husband’s agricultural activity to the point that it is women, not men, who harvest gardens and market the produce.
Lest my motives be misunderstood, I am not denying the importance of empowering women in Haiti: violence against women in urban areas is a problem. I believe this is a consequence of, a) the relative absence of family—parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, and cousins—who can protect or even seek revenge for the woman, and b) women in urban areas have far fewer economic opportunities than their male counterparts. In the rural areas we find the very different conditions.
In concluding, as with so many issues pertaining to life in rural Haiti, researchers and aid workers devoted to a particular agenda selectively and erroneously grasp information. The types of misinterpretations that result have left a generation of scholars, aid workers, and interested laypeople with a mistaken image of gender among the 65 percent of the population that live in provincial Haiti
Works Cited
Bastien, Remy. 1961. Haitian rural family organization. Social and Economic Studies 10(4):478–510.
Courlander, Harold. 1960. The Hoe and the drum: Life and lore of the Haitian people. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Divinski, Randy, Rachel Hecksher, and Jonathan Woodbridge, eds. 1998. Haitian women: Life on the front lines. London: PBI (Peace Brigades International). At www.peacebrigades.org/bulletin.html.
Francis, Donette A. 2004. Silences too horrific to disturb: Writing sexual histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, eyes, memory. Research in African Literatures 35(2):75–90.
Fuller, Anne. 2005. Challenging violence: Haitian women unite women’s rights and human rights special bulletin on women and war. At acas.prairienet.org. accessed October 19, 2006. Originally published in the Spring/Summer 1999 by the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.
Herskovits, Melville J. 1925. The Negro’s Americanism. In The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.
Leyburn, James G. 1966 [1941]. The Haitian people. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Moral, Paul. 1961. Le Paysan Haitien. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.
Murray Gerald F. 1977. The evolution of Haitian peasant land tenure: Agrarian adaptation to population growth. Dissertation, Columbia University.
N’zengou-Tayo M.J. 1998. “Fanm se poto mitan”: Haitian woman, the pillar of society [Fanm se poto mitan: la femme Haïtienne, pilier de la société]. Mona, Jamaica: Centre For Gender And Development Studies, University Of The West Indies.
Simpson, George Eaton. 1942. Sexual and family institutions in Northern, Haiti. American Anthropologist 44:655–74.
UN 2010
UNFPA 2007
UNICEF 2006. Fertility and contraceptive use: Global database on contraceptive prevalence. At www.childinfo.org/eddb/fertility/dbcontrc.htm, accessed May 3, 2006.
UNIFEM. 2006. UNIFEM in Haiti: Supporting gender justice, development and peace. UNIFEM Caribbean Office, Christ Church, Barbados. At www.womenwarpeace.org/Haiti/Haiti.htm.
United Nations Development Programme 2006. Human development indicators 2003. At hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2003/indicator/indic_196_1_1.html.
WHO (World Health Organization). 1999. World Health Organization multinational study of breastfeeding and lactational amennorhea pregnancy and breastfeeding: World Health Organization task force on methods for the natural regulation of fertility III. In Sterility and Fertility 72(3):431–40
WHO 2001
WHO 2007
World Bank 2002. A review of gender issues in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica. Report No. 21866-LAC. December 11th , Caribbean Management Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Region.
World Bank 2013 Adolescent Fertility Rate (Births per 1,000 Women Aged 15-19) http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.ADO.TFRT
