Lise-Marie Dejean is widely renowned in Haiti as a defender of women’s rights. Dejean, was born not long after the 1934 founding of the country’s first feminist organization, which fought for women’s rights to education and political participation, including to vote. Dejean remembers going to women’s meetings with her mother, but it was not until she became a doctor and started looking at the extremely high maternal mortality rates in Haiti that she fully grasped the magnitude of gender discrimination and the lack of reproductive rights. Dejean decided to take her medical skills to some of the poorest and most remote regions of Haiti, seeing individual patients and educating midwives to extend available medical services. Later, as the head of a major Haitian women’s organization - Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen or SOFA- she helped open women’s clinics in crowded urban slums.