George Arnauld: Activist, Former President of the Union of Women of Martinique
George Arnauld was born in 1953 on the Habitation de canne à sucre, l'Espérance au François, which belonged to the Hayot family (a commercial group with plantations, shopping centers, department stores, car dealerships, etc.) and will remain. Until he was 15, his father was the manager of the Habitation. She grew up among the planters, cane cutters and moorers who lived in the "Negro huts" (the name used for the huts where the slaves used to live during slavery). Her mother ran a shop on the plantation and took care of the notebooks. It was the place where the workers came to buy food.
She judges that her childhood will have been happy but also hard when she saw the low salaries of the planters and cane cutters received from the hands of her father, the manager, who was armed with a cutlass and a gun for the occasion, the suffering mooring women who were subject to the “droit de cuissage on the part of the commanders” (Droit de cuissage is the meaning the right over her thigh. This custom from the European Middle Ages (5th century) and beyond allowed a feudal lord to deflower the bride of his serf on her wedding night. Today, this means that a boss has recourse to sexual favors by threatening a female employee to lose her job or by offering her better working conditions (bonus, promotion, or other). She is touched by the harsh living conditions, suffering, and misery that hit the staff and takes their social situation to heart.
She attends and witnesses several major strikes and social movements linked to the conditions of the sugar cane workers, in particular, the 1963 crisis when she was only 10 years old. His father systematically refused any social movement in his home, even if it meant using his weapons. In addition, he had several mistresses on the plantation from whom several children were born.
She also did not support the "haughty and arrogant" characters of the Békés and would even consider herself "racist" until she joined the Fourth International and the Internationalist Movement while she was a student. In 1990, she joined the Union des Femmes Martiniquaises during a mission she had at the National Education as Chargée de mission for the education of young girls.
Solicited by Solange Fitte-Duval, then President of the Union des Femmes Martiniquaises, she sees this as an opportunity to bring her feminist convictions to an association that structured these ideas at the political level. She became President of the Union of Women of Martinique in 1997 during a congress. She remained at the head of the association until 2009, when Rita Bonheur succeeded her. During her tenure, she participated in numerous movements to denounce the weak role or even the total absence of women in the highest hierarchical positions and the largest political bodies, pay inequalities between men and women, the fate of battered women and/or killed by their companion.
Although more presidents, today, she still leads this fight as well to restore the history of Martinican women who have integrated feminist and social struggles in Martinique, as current women are still victims of injustice or inequality in the face of employment.
She is also the Director of the Information and Orientation Center and a member and activist of the Groupe Révolution Socialiste (Socialist Revolution Group). She is married to Gilbert Pago, a historian and writer from Martinique.
Speaking of feminist activism in Martinique, we could also have mentioned Solange Fitte-Duval, member of the Communist Party and President of the Union of Women of Martinique from 1975 to 1993, Maïotte Dauphite, founder of the Paul Gauguin Museum, Yvette Ebion, President of the Women's Union from 1993 to 1997, Geneviève Marie-Angélique, or Renée de Montaigne.
Martinique writers and politicians
Paulette Nardal (1896-1985): politician and feminist activist
Paulette Nardal was born in Saint-Pierre (Martinique) in 1896 into a bourgeois family. She is the daughter of Paul Nardal, one of the first Black engineers on the island and the eldest in a family of 8 daughters. She was 6 years old when Mount Pelée erupted. She became a teacher before deciding to go to Paris to continue her studies at the age of 24.
She arrived in Paris in 1920 and enrolled at the Sorbonne University to study English. She thus becomes the first Black woman to study in this French institution. She took advantage of her move to Paris to take an interest in the cultural life of the capital. She went to the theater, attended concerts, and visited exhibitions and museums. She frequents the Bal Nègre, a famous old West Indian dancing cabaret and Paris jazz club dating from 1800, one of the rare places where she finds her cultural references.
She receives various young people from the West Indies or from the Black diaspora at her home in Clamart to help them and put them in contact. Among them, we can cite the young Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, René Maran, Jean Price-Mars, Claude McKay, or Langston Hughes.
She held a literary salon there where she began to defend the idea of women's emancipation and the concept of “Négritude”, an Afro-French literary movement. With the Haitian writer Léo Sajous, she founded the Revue du Monde Noir, which only appeared for 6 issues due to a lack of funds.
In 1937, she visited her friend Léopold Sedar Senghor in Senegal. She entered politics, Paulette Nardal being a parliamentary assistant to Martinique Deputee Joseph Lagrosillière and Senegal Deputee Galandou Diouf. It engages against the invasion by Mussolini in Ethiopia.
In 1939, she narrowly escaped drowning thanks to a lifeboat, the boat that brought her back from Martinique, having been hit by a German submarine off England. However, it will have significant consequences, including serious disabilities. However, she will continue to campaign in particular for the right of women to vote. Her infirmity deprived her of a post at the United Nations in New York, and she returned to Martinique definitively in 1945.
She created the Women's Rally and encouraged women to vote in April 1945 and to get involved in politics.
Passionate about music, she writes a history of the musical tradition of the Martinican countryside (bèlè, béliya, bouwo, ladjia). Paulette Nardal died on February 16, 1985, at 89.
She is the aunt of Christiane Eda-Pierre, a world-famous lyric artist.