Alice Garoute
| Alice Garoute | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Alice Thézan 1874 Cap-Haïtien, Haiti |
| Died | 30 October 1950 Port-au-Prince, Haiti |
| Nationality | Haitian |
| Occupation | social activist, suffragette |
| Years active | 1910–1950 |
Alice Garoute (1874 – 30 October 1950) was a Haitian suffragist and advocate for women's rights in Haiti, including peasant women. On her deathbed in 1950, Alice Garoute asked that flowers be placed on her grave the day Haitian women would finally be able to vote. She may have attended the first meeting of the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) in Havana in February 1930. The IACW was in charge of investigating the legal status of women in Latin-America and is credited for being the first governmental organization in the world to be founded for the express purpose of advocating women's issues.
Alice Thézan was born in 1874 in Cap-Haïtien, in the northern part of Haiti. Her parents were part of the rebellion against president Lysius Salomon and as such, the family was exiled to Kingston, Jamaica. In her teens, when the family returned to Haiti, she was married briefly and had two infants who died. Little is known of the first husband or the courtship of her second husband. What is known is that Thézan was living in Port-au-Prince, attorney Auguste Garoute from the town of Jérémie was a recent widower with young children, and the couple married at the end of the nineteenth century."
During the first decade of the twentieth century, Alice and Thérèse Hudicourt, wife of attorney Pierre Hudicourt, and an intellectual and Marxist, formed a library book club for an elite group of educated women where they read books in both English and French including novels and political materials. They then discussed the topics from feminism to Marxism, leading to a growing awareness of women's lack of civil rights in Haitian society. This heightened awareness and the US military occupation, which had begun in 1915 and by 1920 had been exposed as a reign of sexual assault on Haitian women" caused social divisions to evaporate in an effort to protect themselves. Garoute, Hudicourt, Eugéne Malbranche-Sylvain and other women of the social elite organized the Union Patriotique with the goal of sending a delegation to Washington, D.C. to demand that the US military be controlled. When they had finally collected enough funds to send a delegation in 1921, President Harding and the Congress were unresponsive, but meetings with W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP resulted in a "fact-finding mission" being sent and the development of ties with black women from the US who were involved in clubs and social activism. These US women saw enfranchisement as a means of ending their own sexual exploitation and recognized that sexual violence was an international problem.
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