More Details

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.

Table of Contents:

• A note on method
• Cast of characters
• Book One. 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
• Book Two. 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
• Book Three. 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.

View 2 more lines View less

Author/Creator:

Hartman, Saidiya V. , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals [by Hartman, S.V.]

Subjects:

African American young women — Social conditions — 19th century

African American young women — Social conditions — 20th century

African American young women — Sexual behavior — History — 19th century

African American young women — Sexual behavior — History — 20th century

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 — 19th century

Sex customs — United States — History — 20th century

Prostitution — United States — History

Man-woman relationships — United States

African American young women — Sexual behavior — History

Sex customs — United States — History

Man-woman relationships

Sex work

Sexology

Sexual practices

1800-1999

Social conditions

Sex customs

Single women — Social conditions

Single women

Urban women — Social conditions

Urban women

Prostitution

African American young women

United States

Genres:

History

General Notes:

"First published as a Norton paperback 2020"--Title page verso.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 355-418) and index.
American Historical Association Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, 2020
National Book Critics Circle Award, 2019
PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, 2021

Physical Description:

xxi, 441 pages : illustrations, facsimiles, portraits ; 21 cm

Physical Characteristics:

facsimile; illustration; portrait

Call Numbers:

E185.86 .H379 2020

ISBNs:

0393357627 (paperback)
9780393357622 (paperback)

OCLC Numbers:

1138680547