Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
About this book
At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free.
These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood - all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.
Subjects
- african american studies
- african american women
- african american young women
- african american youth
- collection:judy_grahn_award=winner
- ethnic studies
- frau
- history
- lgbtq anthropology
- man-woman relationships
- new york times reviewed
- prostitution
- queer
- schwarze
- sex customs
- sexual behavior
- sexualverhalten
- single women
- social conditions
- social science
- sociology
- soziale situation
- united states, history
- united states, social conditions
- urban
- urban women
- women
- women, sexual behavior
- women's studies