Wayward lives, beautiful experiments : intimate histories of social upheaval

Author:

Hartman, Saidiya V.

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Imprint:

New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, [2019] and ©2019

Subject:

African American young women - Social conditions - 19th century
African American young women - Social conditions - 20th century
African American young women - Sexual behavior - History
Single women - United States - Social conditions - 19th century
Single women - United States - Social conditions - 20th century
Urban women - United States - Social conditions - 19th century
Urban women - United States - Social conditions - 20th century
Sex customs - United States - History
Prostitution - United States - History
Man-woman relationships

ISBN:

9780393285673 and 0393285677

Description:

xxi, 441 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm

Bibliographic Note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 355-418) and index

Contents:

A note on method -- Cast of characters -- She makes an errant path through the city. The terrible beauty of the slum ; A minor figure ; An unloved woman ; An intimate history of slavery and freedom ; Manual for general housework ; An atlas of the wayward ; A chronicle of need and want ; In a moment of tenderness the future seems possible -- The sexual geography of the Black Belt. 1900. The tenderloin. 241 West 41st Street ; 1909. 601 West 61st Street. A new colony of colored people, or Malindy in Little Africa ; Mistah beauty, the autobiography of an ex-colored woman, select scenes from a film never cast by Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, 1920s ; Family albums, aborted futures : a disillusioned wife becomes an artist, 1890 Seventh Avenue -- Beautiful experiments. Revolution in a minor key ; Wayward : a short entry on the possible ; The anarchy of colored girls assembled in a riotous manner ; The arrested life of Eva Perkins ; Riot and refrain ; The socialist delivers a lecture on free love ; The beauty of the chorus ; The chorus opens the way

Summary:

"A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them--domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty--and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires."--Publisher's description

Collection:

BGC Monograph Stacks

Call Number:

E185.86 .H379 2019

Available

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