UCLA Center for the Study of Women

On May 11, 1850, two years after slavery was abolished in the French empire, a 36-year old woman on the French Caribbean island of Martinique walked to her local municipal office with five children in tow to have all of their names moved from the list of legal human property to the official government list of French citizens. Less than a century later, this woman’s great granddaughter, Paulette Nardal, served as a representative at the United Nations for France’s overseas territories. I first went to Martinique in 2002 to research the role Paulette Nardal had played in the negritude movement, a cultural and literary movement of the 1930s to affirm Black cultural identity.