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Race and American Culture
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
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.
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.
441 pages, Paperback
First published February 19, 2019
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About the author
Saidiya Hartman
30 books756 followersSaidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. She a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 723 reviews
July 6, 2020
Wayward Lives cements Dr. Hartman as one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. It is one of the most compelling feminist studies I have read.
This book is an actualization of Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” a practice of historical speculation that coalesces the magic of literature with the methodology of history in order to respond to deliberate absences in the archive. For Hartman, so much falls through the cracks if we rely on history’s emphasis on events and subjects. Personhood -- rather than being a priori status -- is produced by regimes of power. To grant subjecthood to the dispossessed requires another mode of engagement.
Hartman departs from a reliance on spectacular acts of resistance (marches, policy, etc.) and instead exalts the quotidian: lauding working-class Black women and GNC people in the early twentieth century who experimented with ways of being (“everyday anarchy”) that surpassed the stringent parameters of labor structured by the afterlife of slavery (vagrancy laws, segregation, etc.) Indeed, at this time in Northern cities 9/10 Black women worked as domestic workers and 1/3 of Black people worked as servants. Hartman writes stories detailing how people continued to evade control by taking non-traditional paths, refusing normative scripts, “trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”
Survival is recognized as an experimental practice of revolution, its own type of insurrection. Crime is reframed as a tactic of curtailing and disappearing Black life. Black women and GNC people were criminalized for their creative forms of survival -- practices of community, mutual aid, pleasure-making – because in this living was a more generative, intimate, beautiful existence outside of the grasp of the state.
The genius is not just in what she argues, but in how she argues it. She embodies stylistically the very freedom that she theorizes, in the process catalyzing a new genre. The elegance of her writing is breathtaking: “beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.”
A must read.
This book is an actualization of Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” a practice of historical speculation that coalesces the magic of literature with the methodology of history in order to respond to deliberate absences in the archive. For Hartman, so much falls through the cracks if we rely on history’s emphasis on events and subjects. Personhood -- rather than being a priori status -- is produced by regimes of power. To grant subjecthood to the dispossessed requires another mode of engagement.
Hartman departs from a reliance on spectacular acts of resistance (marches, policy, etc.) and instead exalts the quotidian: lauding working-class Black women and GNC people in the early twentieth century who experimented with ways of being (“everyday anarchy”) that surpassed the stringent parameters of labor structured by the afterlife of slavery (vagrancy laws, segregation, etc.) Indeed, at this time in Northern cities 9/10 Black women worked as domestic workers and 1/3 of Black people worked as servants. Hartman writes stories detailing how people continued to evade control by taking non-traditional paths, refusing normative scripts, “trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”
Survival is recognized as an experimental practice of revolution, its own type of insurrection. Crime is reframed as a tactic of curtailing and disappearing Black life. Black women and GNC people were criminalized for their creative forms of survival -- practices of community, mutual aid, pleasure-making – because in this living was a more generative, intimate, beautiful existence outside of the grasp of the state.
The genius is not just in what she argues, but in how she argues it. She embodies stylistically the very freedom that she theorizes, in the process catalyzing a new genre. The elegance of her writing is breathtaking: “beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.”
A must read.
April 6, 2019
This is a glorious read about Black women whose inner lives and external manifestations of those rich journeys has not been documented with such grace, context and beauty across fluid genders or sexualities. It was a delight, too, to be further educated by the extensive, lovely end notes, written by my Vassar classmate Sarah Haley, a sharp scholar and exquisite writer like Hartman. There is pain here, of course, because the history of Black women and men who did not conform to society's restrictions or twisted visions of us is replete with examples of ways we have been harassed, beaten and raped for resisting any other vision for ourselves. What is most beautiful in this book is that we have always persevered in the direction of our freedom, in ways that are uniquely Black and woman and that's an inheritance that cannot be denied.
May 24, 2021
There’s something near-archaeological in the way Saidiya Hartman’s sifts through shards of evidence to recreate the lives of primarily-urban, black women in early 20th-century America – with a focus on Philadelphia and New York. Hartman’s exceptionally creative non-fiction - intense, episodic, intimate - draws on a range of sources:
”…the journals of rent collectors; surveys and monographs of sociologists; trial transcripts; slum photographs; reports of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers; interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists; and prison case files…”
But Hartman doesn’t simply review or analyse the material she gathers, she strives to look beyond the judgemental conclusions of those documenting black communities to the actual people concealed within their dry studies. Studies that labelled black women and girls as unruly problems, deviants, objects of scrutiny. The women themselves rarely speak, they were often unable to read or write or just not given the space to voice their own ideas but Hartman’s vision transforms these elusive, missing figures into fully-realised subjects refusing to bend to the white world’s expectations, doing their best to pursue their own dreams, plans, and beliefs. She imagines their thoughts and feelings, what their daily experiences might have been as they faced down prejudice, poverty and violence, and she turns her gaze on the ones who studied them too: philanthropic white women with an urge to save the fallen; W.E.B. Dubois in his brief time compiling reports on the black, urban poor of Philadelphia, confused and conflicted by the feelings they, and particularly the women, arouse.
Hartman chronicles the ways in which many black women might have managed to find some element of freedom in their marginality enabling them to subvert mainstream gender conventions, through their rejection of traditional family roles or their insistence on sexual freedom or their embrace of different ways of living: like actress Edna Lewis Thomas whose relationship with photographer Lady Olivia Wyndham lasted for years; or Gladys Bentley who spurned gender boundaries. But Hartman also acknowledges that these tenuous freedoms and rebellion came at a price, becoming the site of a series of moral panics over the so-called ‘licentious’, ‘immoral’ lifestyles of urban black women and subject to numerous attempts by white society to make black women toe the line including rigid forms of policing - simply being out late at night could lead to arrest and imprisonment for assumed solicitation. Harsh policies justified by claims that:
”Black women yielded more easily to the temptations of the city than any other girls,”…because negroes as a group…had not been brought under social control. Policy makers and reformers insisted they were “several generations behind the Anglo-Saxon race in civilising agencies and processes.” For this reason they were in need of greater regulation.”
Hartman’s inventive, impressionistic, fluid approach to interpreting the archive has solid underpinnings drawing on the work of academics like Hazel Carby and frameworks from cultural studies such as Roland Barthes’s ideas about image and meaning. I found Hartman’s book fascinating and powerful although her decision to foreground storytelling over the factual could be a little bewildering at times - I sometimes had to check on the background, timelines and context for the places and people she’s talking about here. Hartman also raises important questions about how we recover lost histories or resurrect voices that were silenced or just never heard, or understand the intricate realities and everyday, social interactions of communities who were continually held to account but rarely allowed to account for themselves.
”…the journals of rent collectors; surveys and monographs of sociologists; trial transcripts; slum photographs; reports of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers; interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists; and prison case files…”
But Hartman doesn’t simply review or analyse the material she gathers, she strives to look beyond the judgemental conclusions of those documenting black communities to the actual people concealed within their dry studies. Studies that labelled black women and girls as unruly problems, deviants, objects of scrutiny. The women themselves rarely speak, they were often unable to read or write or just not given the space to voice their own ideas but Hartman’s vision transforms these elusive, missing figures into fully-realised subjects refusing to bend to the white world’s expectations, doing their best to pursue their own dreams, plans, and beliefs. She imagines their thoughts and feelings, what their daily experiences might have been as they faced down prejudice, poverty and violence, and she turns her gaze on the ones who studied them too: philanthropic white women with an urge to save the fallen; W.E.B. Dubois in his brief time compiling reports on the black, urban poor of Philadelphia, confused and conflicted by the feelings they, and particularly the women, arouse.
Hartman chronicles the ways in which many black women might have managed to find some element of freedom in their marginality enabling them to subvert mainstream gender conventions, through their rejection of traditional family roles or their insistence on sexual freedom or their embrace of different ways of living: like actress Edna Lewis Thomas whose relationship with photographer Lady Olivia Wyndham lasted for years; or Gladys Bentley who spurned gender boundaries. But Hartman also acknowledges that these tenuous freedoms and rebellion came at a price, becoming the site of a series of moral panics over the so-called ‘licentious’, ‘immoral’ lifestyles of urban black women and subject to numerous attempts by white society to make black women toe the line including rigid forms of policing - simply being out late at night could lead to arrest and imprisonment for assumed solicitation. Harsh policies justified by claims that:
”Black women yielded more easily to the temptations of the city than any other girls,”…because negroes as a group…had not been brought under social control. Policy makers and reformers insisted they were “several generations behind the Anglo-Saxon race in civilising agencies and processes.” For this reason they were in need of greater regulation.”
Hartman’s inventive, impressionistic, fluid approach to interpreting the archive has solid underpinnings drawing on the work of academics like Hazel Carby and frameworks from cultural studies such as Roland Barthes’s ideas about image and meaning. I found Hartman’s book fascinating and powerful although her decision to foreground storytelling over the factual could be a little bewildering at times - I sometimes had to check on the background, timelines and context for the places and people she’s talking about here. Hartman also raises important questions about how we recover lost histories or resurrect voices that were silenced or just never heard, or understand the intricate realities and everyday, social interactions of communities who were continually held to account but rarely allowed to account for themselves.
November 27, 2022
The Great Northern Migration
“Three decades after Emancipation and black folks had nothing. No matter. The flood of migrants did not cease, and the scramble to live did not squelch dreams of the north, the city, and the good life. All they heard back home, in dusty southern towns, were the lies and the assurances—things were easier up there and the white folks ain’t as evil. It took only a week to discover that neither was true.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is American history via Black biography. It’s an examination of ordinary women surviving extraordinary bigotry, brutality and hardship. From the “negro tenements” of Philadelphia to the workhouses and reformatories of New York, black women with no financial resources either improvised or unraveled. There was no third option.
“A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom.”
Through her research, Hartman commits to posterity a few life histories that some people today (see: The 1776 Commission) would rather we all forget. Rest assured, there are no mundane stories here. Although most of these women—housemaids and chorus girls, cooks and prison inmates—you have never heard of, some of these women, thanks to Hartman, you will never forget.
“Three decades after Emancipation and black folks had nothing. No matter. The flood of migrants did not cease, and the scramble to live did not squelch dreams of the north, the city, and the good life. All they heard back home, in dusty southern towns, were the lies and the assurances—things were easier up there and the white folks ain’t as evil. It took only a week to discover that neither was true.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is American history via Black biography. It’s an examination of ordinary women surviving extraordinary bigotry, brutality and hardship. From the “negro tenements” of Philadelphia to the workhouses and reformatories of New York, black women with no financial resources either improvised or unraveled. There was no third option.
“A whole world is jammed into one short block crowded with black folks shut out from almost every opportunity the city affords, but still intoxicated with freedom.”
Through her research, Hartman commits to posterity a few life histories that some people today (see: The 1776 Commission) would rather we all forget. Rest assured, there are no mundane stories here. Although most of these women—housemaids and chorus girls, cooks and prison inmates—you have never heard of, some of these women, thanks to Hartman, you will never forget.
Read
July 7, 2020It took me. a long time to read this book because it is so deep, the intimate tone requires the reader's attention, and its unique accomplishment startles while the writing lingers. Hartman reveals a universe and a community of Black women in states of self-creation, world-making, resistance, definition and expression. A very special work.
March 4, 2022
One of the finest pieces of feminist scholarship to come out of North America in recent years, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments pushes at the edges of dominant historiography and storytelling to bring to us lost voices from a chorus of forgotten, ordinary black women at the dawn of the 20th century. The emphasis, here, is laid on their nature as lost: Hartman uses critical fabulation to locate their lives between the absences and indictments of the archives, where they exist only as the disorderly and criminal 'cases' recorded by the police and by the sociologists aiding them. Her intention is, as she says elsewhere, "both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling."
While the voices themselves are irrecoverable, Hartman's efforts seek to approximate the tenor of these women's lives. Though a self-conscious blending of the speculative and narrative power of literature with archival research, this book attempts to turn these elusive figures, the subjects of numerous moral panics and status crimes, into fully-formed subjects with hopes, dreams, and their own ways of understanding and thriving in the world.
Here, Hartman follows other critical-race scholars (through echoes of Hortense Spillers and a brilliant use of italicisation as citation) in tracing the difficulties and sham of a 'post-Abolition' America that imposed mores of white respectability on coloured folks deliberately excluded and segregated from it. She invites us to see ordinary black women's rejection of 'traditional' family and gender roles, their embracing of free and queer love, their commitment to mutual aid and community, and their refusal of demeaning work—their waywardness—as creative forms of fugitivity and survival.
In fixing scholarly attention on the embodied refusals of ordinary and errant black lives (public intellectuals like W.E.B DuBois, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Mary White Ovington are included only as ways to better illuminate the substance of these lesser-known ones), Hartman highlights their radical potential and position as everyday revolutionaries. She articulates what was commonly seen as a dangerous excess as a commitment to beauty, not as "a luxury" but rather "a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given."
If this last quote is any clue, the brilliance and beauty of this book lies both in the stories it chooses to tell, and in the ways it tells them: the lyrical writing, the juxtaposition of unlabeled images, and the weaving of famous words through stories of quotidian experiences to heighten the everyday as a site of resistance, recorded and otherwise, all make Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments into an unmissable, extraordinary work of historiography. This is a book that wills you to question the conditions of 'freedom' afforded to non-white and non-normative lives today, to question the construction of progressive movements as initiatives of whiteness, to question history and dig into its deep and deliberate recesses for impossible pasts and the possibilities for a future.
This book should be required reading for anyone broadly interested in American history or black feminism (remember: neither exists without the other), or in archival interventions and potentials. It is a generative promise and a meticulously-research affirmation of Otherwise, and I can not recommend it enough.
While the voices themselves are irrecoverable, Hartman's efforts seek to approximate the tenor of these women's lives. Though a self-conscious blending of the speculative and narrative power of literature with archival research, this book attempts to turn these elusive figures, the subjects of numerous moral panics and status crimes, into fully-formed subjects with hopes, dreams, and their own ways of understanding and thriving in the world.
Here, Hartman follows other critical-race scholars (through echoes of Hortense Spillers and a brilliant use of italicisation as citation) in tracing the difficulties and sham of a 'post-Abolition' America that imposed mores of white respectability on coloured folks deliberately excluded and segregated from it. She invites us to see ordinary black women's rejection of 'traditional' family and gender roles, their embracing of free and queer love, their commitment to mutual aid and community, and their refusal of demeaning work—their waywardness—as creative forms of fugitivity and survival.
In fixing scholarly attention on the embodied refusals of ordinary and errant black lives (public intellectuals like W.E.B DuBois, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Mary White Ovington are included only as ways to better illuminate the substance of these lesser-known ones), Hartman highlights their radical potential and position as everyday revolutionaries. She articulates what was commonly seen as a dangerous excess as a commitment to beauty, not as "a luxury" but rather "a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given."
If this last quote is any clue, the brilliance and beauty of this book lies both in the stories it chooses to tell, and in the ways it tells them: the lyrical writing, the juxtaposition of unlabeled images, and the weaving of famous words through stories of quotidian experiences to heighten the everyday as a site of resistance, recorded and otherwise, all make Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments into an unmissable, extraordinary work of historiography. This is a book that wills you to question the conditions of 'freedom' afforded to non-white and non-normative lives today, to question the construction of progressive movements as initiatives of whiteness, to question history and dig into its deep and deliberate recesses for impossible pasts and the possibilities for a future.
This book should be required reading for anyone broadly interested in American history or black feminism (remember: neither exists without the other), or in archival interventions and potentials. It is a generative promise and a meticulously-research affirmation of Otherwise, and I can not recommend it enough.
March 30, 2022
what an extraordinary book. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman writes and reimagines the lives of black girls, women, and gender nonconforming. Hartman reconstructs the history of these figures who lived in a period that never wanted them to have agency, desires, sexuality, passions, and freedom. the practices of refusal to live wayward beyond the respectability ideals was palpable.
March 28, 2022
Saidiya Hartman made sure that women who deserved their place in history got it. Can't do anything but commend her for that.
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https://youtu.be/iETGzuxGdCo
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https://open.spotify.com/episode/07lC...
April 1, 2021
This is a difficult book to summarize--it is an often poetic rendering of the horrors of racism, primarily in New York City at around the turn of the last century. I felt particularly saddened and horrified by the viciousness of the racism in my own city, by the gratuitous cruelty and targeted punitive actions taken by both institutions and individuals.
But Hartman relays these horrors in the context of individuals attempting to find a way to live and be true to themselves in an extremely hostile environment. As black women, many of whom are gay, they have few rights or protections but still a powerful longing to be free and live their lives passionately and fully, even when all that is wanted is to be simply left alone to love and live.
The book begins with a chorus describing life in the tenements and slums. The people are interchangeable. As the book goes on the lens focuses in on individuals. I was delayed and often sidetracked as I paused to find out more about the real people who appear--Gladys Bentley, a singer and piano player, a gay woman who dared to perform wearing men's clothes, Moms Mabley (whom I remembered hearing in my childhood) and other actresses, singers, businesswomen and more. And contrasted with the successful women--some of whom, despite their talents and success still died in destitution are the stories of the unfamous. Women who served time in the nightmare of the Bedford Hills reformatory, where they were continuously ill-treated and tortured. Their crime? Wayward behavior--not listening to parents, being seen with men not their husbands, behaviors that indicated to the current powers-that-be that they (a disproportionate share of whom were black) were headed in the direction of criminality. For the possibility of future criminal behavior--and that behavior being prostitution--they were sent away for three years.
These are stories of continual resistance to a world that rejected, subjugated, controlled and in every way worked to prevent black women from simply being themselves.
A beautifully written and passionate work.
But Hartman relays these horrors in the context of individuals attempting to find a way to live and be true to themselves in an extremely hostile environment. As black women, many of whom are gay, they have few rights or protections but still a powerful longing to be free and live their lives passionately and fully, even when all that is wanted is to be simply left alone to love and live.
The book begins with a chorus describing life in the tenements and slums. The people are interchangeable. As the book goes on the lens focuses in on individuals. I was delayed and often sidetracked as I paused to find out more about the real people who appear--Gladys Bentley, a singer and piano player, a gay woman who dared to perform wearing men's clothes, Moms Mabley (whom I remembered hearing in my childhood) and other actresses, singers, businesswomen and more. And contrasted with the successful women--some of whom, despite their talents and success still died in destitution are the stories of the unfamous. Women who served time in the nightmare of the Bedford Hills reformatory, where they were continuously ill-treated and tortured. Their crime? Wayward behavior--not listening to parents, being seen with men not their husbands, behaviors that indicated to the current powers-that-be that they (a disproportionate share of whom were black) were headed in the direction of criminality. For the possibility of future criminal behavior--and that behavior being prostitution--they were sent away for three years.
These are stories of continual resistance to a world that rejected, subjugated, controlled and in every way worked to prevent black women from simply being themselves.
A beautifully written and passionate work.
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January 12, 2023
Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all reads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.
This was just incredible, and how Hartman weaves a narrative of life from Black women erased from history who strove to live their lives, to find joy in a world built to stomp them down, to endure and live and thrive, is a feat of research and writing.
This was just incredible, and how Hartman weaves a narrative of life from Black women erased from history who strove to live their lives, to find joy in a world built to stomp them down, to endure and live and thrive, is a feat of research and writing.
March 13, 2022
Phenomenal. Beautiful and laceratingly powerful. A text which blurs the genre boundaries in wonderfully inspiring and illuminating ways, allowing a glimpse of lives long lost but still whispering, singing from the gaps between the words of their oppressors. Reading sources against the grain, using empathetic imagination to suggest possible truths where no record remains. Highly recommended.
August 7, 2020
I found that I loved the idea of this book more than the actual book itself. I am happy that this book was written, and I am glad that I read it. But the book itself is a bit too repetitive and disorganized to be a totally smooth reading experience.
February 22, 2019
A beautiful portrayal of black women that left me with the profound feeling that there are more stories like these that are left to be told. I loved reading about the lives of the relatively unknown black female rebels from the early 20th century. This book covered quite a lot from race riots, prostitution, and lively dance halls, all with the underlying truth of radical thinking and other ways of living.
Hartman has created a poetic picture of the black woman and her fight for freedom and her steadfast courage; all magnified in the realities of the society. Each chapter is anchored by a photo that was taken between 1890 and 1935, and Hartman does an incredible job imagining the inner lives of her subjects in great detail. Woven together the stories give a clear picture of the struggles and courage of these women and their attempts to carve out a piece of freedom. A must read!
Hartman has created a poetic picture of the black woman and her fight for freedom and her steadfast courage; all magnified in the realities of the society. Each chapter is anchored by a photo that was taken between 1890 and 1935, and Hartman does an incredible job imagining the inner lives of her subjects in great detail. Woven together the stories give a clear picture of the struggles and courage of these women and their attempts to carve out a piece of freedom. A must read!
October 22, 2020
I have both too much and truly not enough to say about this work - this bold, marvelous project - so I'll suffice with what is the easiest: everyone should read Saidiya Hartman.
January 26, 2023
One of the most beautifully written (as in language, way of writing, structure, approach) historical text I’ve read. A speculation and bringing to life of archival and historical sources of black women and girls. A creative approach of a form often academic, sterile, flat, and boring. I especially enjoyed the last 150 pages. It made so clear her statement that “as a historian of slavery” she is also a “historian of the present.” Just showed how much what these women face black women and black queer people are still facing today, but how it’s different and not different? Moved by how she refused to caption the images but still breathed life into possible stories. I’ll be thinking about the idea of captioning/capturing, taking an image as violence for some time. The difference between institutional erasure and black Women’s anti-repression strategies not to be recorded. This text is one of Hartman’s more accessible for folks looking for a place to start.
July 3, 2020
3.5 stars
"The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise."
what a beautiful book. you can really tell that hartman has poured her heart and soul into telling these women's stories.
RTC
"The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise."
what a beautiful book. you can really tell that hartman has poured her heart and soul into telling these women's stories.
RTC
June 30, 2021
I loved this though I found the audio a bit hard to get into. I would prefer the book, but it cost a bit more than I was willing to pay. My library had the audio so I got this. I thought the themes that Hartman gets into definitely resonate.
I can't say anything better than my buddy reader friend here though, check out Christine's review.
I can't say anything better than my buddy reader friend here though, check out Christine's review.
January 13, 2019
After reading Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, a sensation that I couldn't quite name resonated in me. I was moved, I was amazed. The lines were savored by me, so curious and yet so profound. Some things I learned anew, some things did not surprise me. But something more was there, and I couldn't quite say what it was.
So I put off writing this review to think about it a bit more. I wanted to clean my palate and explore why I had felt this way. Read a sociology book that I hadn't touched in a while ( A Colony in a Nation ) to get some new insight. Where the "color lines" are drawn, what constitutes a criminal offense, how American society ended up this way. And within the first twenty pages, it hit me why Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments got to me. The answer is so obvious, I feel foolish for not knowing it before.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments brings women into the equation. The women who are often painted as the victims. The women who are often condemned for being different. The women who are often ignored as a person and labeled a statistic.
And rather than demanding that women be seen as "the saviors of us all", or some other idol with the tone of raging vengeance, Hartman accentuates how women who had scant opportunities could survive. How indignant it is for society to celebrate the abolishment of slavery without considering the realities for those living in the aftermath, attempting to sweep them under the rug like some hidden shame or regard them as an ungrateful lot. How the women had to be the sole provider of her children and her husband, if he hadn't abandoned her at that point. How women could love other women or how a woman could thrive as a man in a society that would deem them less than human. How nothing came easy to them, not even the simplest of joys, just because of the color of their skin and gender. This and more, all told by Hartman with respect, sincerity, empathy, and mindfulness.
Being angry about the injustices dealt to the women in this book would have been easier. Hartman chose the harder path: encouraging us to ponder with her on treatment that can now be seen as inhuman and immoral. She doesn't shy away from the realities of their fates, but she doesn't allow that to be their only note of relevance in her narrative. To let them be seen as people. And somehow through it all, these women's souls shine in all of their natural brilliance and beauty. It's a strange magic cemented into reality with the black-and-white photos and the list of references noted at the end.
Yes, you can accuse Hartman of cherry-picking and being biased. You can say that she doesn't provide "any solutions" to the race issue. You can certainly complain about the plethora of sexual exploitation within the book. But I would argue that those are observations that skim the surface of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.
Hartman's writings may be a challenge to intuit (especially when the opening story is about the unsettling evidence of childhood rape and pornography), but please try to finish reading this book. My hope is that it will remind us of the histories that were buried and to view popular rhetoric in a different light.
I received the book for free through Goodreads Giveaways.
So I put off writing this review to think about it a bit more. I wanted to clean my palate and explore why I had felt this way. Read a sociology book that I hadn't touched in a while ( A Colony in a Nation ) to get some new insight. Where the "color lines" are drawn, what constitutes a criminal offense, how American society ended up this way. And within the first twenty pages, it hit me why Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments got to me. The answer is so obvious, I feel foolish for not knowing it before.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments brings women into the equation. The women who are often painted as the victims. The women who are often condemned for being different. The women who are often ignored as a person and labeled a statistic.
And rather than demanding that women be seen as "the saviors of us all", or some other idol with the tone of raging vengeance, Hartman accentuates how women who had scant opportunities could survive. How indignant it is for society to celebrate the abolishment of slavery without considering the realities for those living in the aftermath, attempting to sweep them under the rug like some hidden shame or regard them as an ungrateful lot. How the women had to be the sole provider of her children and her husband, if he hadn't abandoned her at that point. How women could love other women or how a woman could thrive as a man in a society that would deem them less than human. How nothing came easy to them, not even the simplest of joys, just because of the color of their skin and gender. This and more, all told by Hartman with respect, sincerity, empathy, and mindfulness.
Being angry about the injustices dealt to the women in this book would have been easier. Hartman chose the harder path: encouraging us to ponder with her on treatment that can now be seen as inhuman and immoral. She doesn't shy away from the realities of their fates, but she doesn't allow that to be their only note of relevance in her narrative. To let them be seen as people. And somehow through it all, these women's souls shine in all of their natural brilliance and beauty. It's a strange magic cemented into reality with the black-and-white photos and the list of references noted at the end.
Yes, you can accuse Hartman of cherry-picking and being biased. You can say that she doesn't provide "any solutions" to the race issue. You can certainly complain about the plethora of sexual exploitation within the book. But I would argue that those are observations that skim the surface of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.
Hartman's writings may be a challenge to intuit (especially when the opening story is about the unsettling evidence of childhood rape and pornography), but please try to finish reading this book. My hope is that it will remind us of the histories that were buried and to view popular rhetoric in a different light.
I received the book for free through Goodreads Giveaways.
May 9, 2022
Sometimes Hartman is so poetic about something so simple, that I find myself wary, wondering if she's conflating what's actually there. For example, in the chapter titled "An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom," I think: Mattie is simply a young black woman who is being courted, and she gives in to her desires, has sex with Herman Hawkins, an older black man. Is it really as Hartman says: a revolution? A sexual revolution that predated the age of the Gatsbys? Hasn't there always been this rebellion, this desire and want and self discovery even during slavery? Is it a sign of a bigger societal movement?
Later, I'm convinced; she's convinced me. The limits placed on black women at the time meant any small act of self-assertion needs to be celebrated as potentially radical. And it's beautiful the way Hartman writes about it. She doesn't write like a historian even though she is writing history. She writes like a poet or a novelist.
It's powerful how even in the budding discovery of her wants and desires, Mattie, who is not allowed to have agency in any other part of her life, who is conscripted to the servant and whore roles, is finding out who she is through her sexuality.
But I love how Hartman reminds us that it's never really as simple as that. Even in this personal realm of desire, it's not a complete liberation and empowerment. The man has nudged her into her desires. Not that she didn't have desires, but he talks dirty to her despite her telling him not to. We're perpetually wading into those shades of gray, where consent is not clear. Even here with a black man in the privacy of love, she is being dominated, she is not the one with power. Perhaps the man "trained her to want what she didn't," Hartman wonders. But within that less than ideal dynamic, or despite it, there is for her still a discovery, rebellion, liberation. Complicated, but true.
I loved the way Hartman teases out these shades and subtleties of right and wrong. Of right within wrong. Of joy within poverty and servility. Of love within the hallways and doorways. Moments of life glimpsed outside of tragedy. Hartman is careful not to write a narrative that pornographies black suffering. She wants to acknowledge suffering but also acknowledge the joy, the life and human spirit that rises up despite it. That black lives were here despite being dismissed as a footnote, as minor nameless figures in photographs.
It becomes more complicated: Mattie gives birth to a stillborn girl. She was a minor when they had sex, and now a social worker wants her to charge Hawkins with statutory rape. Consent "was the way to shift the burden of criminality from her shoulders to his." It made me think. On the one hand I agree that this WAS statutory rape. On the other hand, it wrenches the power from Mattie. Before, she had agency, she desired something, even if it lived in the gray regions... now in the light of the law, she never even had the right to consent to desire it. Her power had been taken from her in both situations.
I focused this review on only one small chapter of this book, but it's representative of the types of quiet revolutions and acts of bold living from otherwise unheard of black women throughout this book. Impressively, Hartman teases these stories out of dry police reports and biased accounts of crime written by white people long long ago, and re-infuses them with life and the living.
Later, I'm convinced; she's convinced me. The limits placed on black women at the time meant any small act of self-assertion needs to be celebrated as potentially radical. And it's beautiful the way Hartman writes about it. She doesn't write like a historian even though she is writing history. She writes like a poet or a novelist.
It's powerful how even in the budding discovery of her wants and desires, Mattie, who is not allowed to have agency in any other part of her life, who is conscripted to the servant and whore roles, is finding out who she is through her sexuality.
But I love how Hartman reminds us that it's never really as simple as that. Even in this personal realm of desire, it's not a complete liberation and empowerment. The man has nudged her into her desires. Not that she didn't have desires, but he talks dirty to her despite her telling him not to. We're perpetually wading into those shades of gray, where consent is not clear. Even here with a black man in the privacy of love, she is being dominated, she is not the one with power. Perhaps the man "trained her to want what she didn't," Hartman wonders. But within that less than ideal dynamic, or despite it, there is for her still a discovery, rebellion, liberation. Complicated, but true.
I loved the way Hartman teases out these shades and subtleties of right and wrong. Of right within wrong. Of joy within poverty and servility. Of love within the hallways and doorways. Moments of life glimpsed outside of tragedy. Hartman is careful not to write a narrative that pornographies black suffering. She wants to acknowledge suffering but also acknowledge the joy, the life and human spirit that rises up despite it. That black lives were here despite being dismissed as a footnote, as minor nameless figures in photographs.
It becomes more complicated: Mattie gives birth to a stillborn girl. She was a minor when they had sex, and now a social worker wants her to charge Hawkins with statutory rape. Consent "was the way to shift the burden of criminality from her shoulders to his." It made me think. On the one hand I agree that this WAS statutory rape. On the other hand, it wrenches the power from Mattie. Before, she had agency, she desired something, even if it lived in the gray regions... now in the light of the law, she never even had the right to consent to desire it. Her power had been taken from her in both situations.
I focused this review on only one small chapter of this book, but it's representative of the types of quiet revolutions and acts of bold living from otherwise unheard of black women throughout this book. Impressively, Hartman teases these stories out of dry police reports and biased accounts of crime written by white people long long ago, and re-infuses them with life and the living.
April 27, 2024
I don’t have enough superlatives for this book—it took my breath away from the first few sentences. This book sets a new standard for filling silences in the archives, breathing life into every shadowy photograph, every newspaper clipping, every police record. It redefines rebellion and finds revolutionary potential in even the smallest of acts done by black girls who dared dream beyond the limits set for them by the city. This has fundamentally changed the way I understand 20th-century black history and Saidiya Hartman deserves every dollar of her MacArthur Genius Grant.
June 27, 2021
Currently there is a bunch of idiots who are protesting the teaching of Critical Race Theory in k-12 schools, where, in fact, it is not being taught at all. What these idiots who are mostly likely really racists are protesting is the teaching of American history in all its highs and lows and the inclusion of people who are not white as well as the fact that racism was and still is.
Hartman’s book is part of this needed correction to how history was taught in many years. It is important to know and to understand how certain segments of our population were/are treated by society at large. This includes people of color, women, and the LQBITQ+ groups as well as others. It includes acknowledging that say the Kennedy experience of America is vastly different than that of say Ida B. Wells.
Hartman’s recent book might not be a history book in the traditional sense of the term. Given her subject matter complete historical records are not something that would be available. In the book, Hartman reconstructs, as much as she can, the lives of Black Women, lower class black women, in NYC and Philadelphia during the early 1900s.
Hartman’s focus is primarily on those women who lived outside the constricting lines that society (largely white) drew to contain them. Yet these women, in a variety of ways, rebelled against those constrictions. These are the women who because they were black, female, and poor did not make it into the history books.
Yet to not the history that their lives representations is to have an incomplete picture of not only the history of Black women in America in particular, the history of women in American in general but also of racism.
In her beautiful prose, Hartman chronicles the lives of women who had multiple relationships but who were not prostitutes, of women who lived as men, lesbians, those who found themselves confined to reformatory centers because of behavior deemed “immoral”.
While not a history in a traditional sense, particularly in the detailing of the individual stories – take for instance the story of the naked Black girl in a Eakins photo. There is no hard proof for what Hartman speculates, though her speculation is backed by the fact of Eakins abuse of women. Her placement of women in the larger historic and social tapestry, in particular in regards to the actual numbers of women w ho were sent to reformatories or who where charged is strong enough support that her freely acknowledged suppositions most likely are correct.
This book is an engrossing look at those women history wants to disregard and forget.
Hartman’s book is part of this needed correction to how history was taught in many years. It is important to know and to understand how certain segments of our population were/are treated by society at large. This includes people of color, women, and the LQBITQ+ groups as well as others. It includes acknowledging that say the Kennedy experience of America is vastly different than that of say Ida B. Wells.
Hartman’s recent book might not be a history book in the traditional sense of the term. Given her subject matter complete historical records are not something that would be available. In the book, Hartman reconstructs, as much as she can, the lives of Black Women, lower class black women, in NYC and Philadelphia during the early 1900s.
Hartman’s focus is primarily on those women who lived outside the constricting lines that society (largely white) drew to contain them. Yet these women, in a variety of ways, rebelled against those constrictions. These are the women who because they were black, female, and poor did not make it into the history books.
Yet to not the history that their lives representations is to have an incomplete picture of not only the history of Black women in America in particular, the history of women in American in general but also of racism.
In her beautiful prose, Hartman chronicles the lives of women who had multiple relationships but who were not prostitutes, of women who lived as men, lesbians, those who found themselves confined to reformatory centers because of behavior deemed “immoral”.
While not a history in a traditional sense, particularly in the detailing of the individual stories – take for instance the story of the naked Black girl in a Eakins photo. There is no hard proof for what Hartman speculates, though her speculation is backed by the fact of Eakins abuse of women. Her placement of women in the larger historic and social tapestry, in particular in regards to the actual numbers of women w ho were sent to reformatories or who where charged is strong enough support that her freely acknowledged suppositions most likely are correct.
This book is an engrossing look at those women history wants to disregard and forget.
May 16, 2019
A few short passages from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:
In a novel, he possessed the ability to transform a ruined girl who grew up in a brothel into a heroine, but achieving the same in a sociological study proved nearly impossible. Literature was better able to grapple with the role of chance in human action and to illuminate the possibility and the promise of the errant path.
The scene pivots around the breach and the wound and endeavors the impossible – to redress it. The beauty resides as much in the attempt as in its failure. What it envisions: life reconstructed along radically different lines.
The people ambling through the block and passing time on corners and hanging out on front steps were an assembly of the wretched and the visionary, the indolent and the dangerous. All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, and the refrains were of infinite variety. The rhythm and stride announced the possibilities, even if most were fleeting and too often unrealized. The map of what might be was not restricted to the literal trail of Ester’s footsteps or anyone else’s, and this unregulated movement encouraged the belief that something great could happen despite everything you knew, despite the ruin and the obstacles. What might be was unforeseen, and improvisation was the art of reckoning with chance and accident.
Wandering and drifting was how she engaged the world and how she understood it; this repertoire of practices composed her knowledge.
In a novel, he possessed the ability to transform a ruined girl who grew up in a brothel into a heroine, but achieving the same in a sociological study proved nearly impossible. Literature was better able to grapple with the role of chance in human action and to illuminate the possibility and the promise of the errant path.
The scene pivots around the breach and the wound and endeavors the impossible – to redress it. The beauty resides as much in the attempt as in its failure. What it envisions: life reconstructed along radically different lines.
The people ambling through the block and passing time on corners and hanging out on front steps were an assembly of the wretched and the visionary, the indolent and the dangerous. All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, and the refrains were of infinite variety. The rhythm and stride announced the possibilities, even if most were fleeting and too often unrealized. The map of what might be was not restricted to the literal trail of Ester’s footsteps or anyone else’s, and this unregulated movement encouraged the belief that something great could happen despite everything you knew, despite the ruin and the obstacles. What might be was unforeseen, and improvisation was the art of reckoning with chance and accident.
Wandering and drifting was how she engaged the world and how she understood it; this repertoire of practices composed her knowledge.
March 3, 2019
I loved the first few sections of Wayward Lives and the way Hartman describes her project. I soon found the repetition and lack of citations for easily sourced stats frustrating. The terms wayward and beautiful were used consistently throughout the beginning of the text then they disappear for more than a hundred pages only to return almost out of context. The book became disjointed and was more list-like than analysis or narrative. I also found it frustrating that the photographs sometimes had nothing to do with the person being described. I will say that I thought using a photo as watermark, covered in text, was an excellent and respectful approach to the subject of studying voyeurism without perpetuating its harm.
Hartman is at her best in the first pages of this book. I wish what followed had matched the early lines.
Hartman is at her best in the first pages of this book. I wish what followed had matched the early lines.
July 1, 2020
A book that I feel like more people should read because of the unique historical context to archival records that it provides, while also remaining extremely culturally relevant in terms of police violence, racial and gender discrimination, and how hard Black women work to make their own spaces and be heard. Definitely points out important gaps in the archival record and the way we talk about American history.
April 24, 2023
A gorgeous book of speculative history, especially the final third or so (second read)
September 17, 2025
This book has probably been on my TBR for many years, so I’m glad a buddy read finally made me read it!! Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments has a bit of a learning curve, as you get comfortable with Saidiya Hartman’s approach to “filling in the gaps” left by historical records. The first section of the book, which covers the most underreported histories, is written in a particularly musing fashion. Hartman describes a photo, poses a series of questions about the circumstances behind the photo, and then works to fill in the questions with what she does know based on what happened to others. Her work to “rescue” people deemed wayward by the unforgiving historical record is beautiful to behold, but it does require patience with all the theoretical and artistic experimentation.
As my friend and buddy reader Adriana noted, the book really picks up in the second and third sections, as Hartman finds her footing, and the stories we follow become a bit more fleshed out. Hartman is an incredibly moving writer, especially for an academic (though she’s admittedly stretching the bounds of that field of writing.) Like THIS is how you theorize about historical moments in a way that befits the excitement and terror of these moments. In Wayward Lives, the mob scenes and reformatory riots burst off the page. Hartman allows us to hear the intimate conversations floating down the tenement air shafts, and see the residents peeking out their boarding rooms. This visceral narration also helps to convey the true brutality of domestic work during this period. Black women at the turn of the century were laboring under torturous, carceral conditions—even up north, even in so-called reformatories, and even in “stately” white homes.
People making a living of studying, not helping, the wayward
In addition to showing the brutality of domestic work, Hartman also explores the cruelty of her profession’s forebears: researchers, reformers, and other people who made a living of examining wayward lives. As someone whose field of work (city and regional planning) shares many of the same forefathers, it struck me how many of these reformers-turned-landlords or researchers-turned-voyeurs were often doing more harm than good.
While many planners and sociologists continue to revere DuBois’ work in the Seventh Ward, Hartman is thoughtful in identifying its biases. There were flaws in his interactions with his research subjects that wouldn’t be corrected for decades to come, which would be too late for many of the people he further condemned in his work (in one place noting that they’d failed to surmount the “debauchery of slavery.”) Hartman also notes the general detachment of the sociologist from true work to fix the problems he profited from studying—that work, it seems, was always framed as someone else’s responsibility. Hartman also criticizes the work of “housing reformers” Helen Parrish and Hannah Fox, who seemed to use the slum to find a sense of meaning and detour from their own societal state as spinsters:
This concept of “landlords for good” is unfortunately alive and well in today’s affordable housing world, where there is not enough concern about the overreaches of property owners who express altruistic aims. Hartman’s criticisms of the 1901 Tenement House Act also felt relevant to my work today: this act didn’t actually help improve housing conditions, but instead introduced policing into private settings. Many commonly touted “solutions” to hazardous housing conditions in modern apartment complexes make a similar trade-off, requiring any investment in deferred maintenance or property repairs to also come with more exposure to policing. On the single-family level, code enforcement often results in displacement of families in need of affordable housing, instead of simply resolving the housing conditions these families are living under. This punitive approach to housing continues to fail too many people.
Desire and its discontents
I’m sure what many people will remember about this book is all the sex!!! Many of the “wayward lives” Hartman explores were deemed wayward because of their perceived promiscuity. Hartman wryly notes that many of the researchers criticizing these people for their sexual behavior (DuBois and Mary White Ovington, looking at y’all) were themselves having extramarital affairs and less-than-savory sexual relations!!! The problem, it seemed, was not sexual desire itself, but rather the people acting on that desire. Political figures like Hubert Harrison weren’t arrested for sleeping with everyone in Harlem, because they had the money and gender to do so without punishment. Another regretful element of this time period was that many people framed sexual violence against Black women and girls as these women and girls “yielding to the temptations of the city.” I kept wanting to smack my head against a wall when this happened: children were being framed as godless hedonists, when really they were being trafficked and abused by random adults creeping around their neighborhoods!!! Just awful stuff, and unfortunately not completely detached from what we see today.
Final Thoughts
In closing, I would recommend this book to anyone who can stomach the many content warnings: sexual abuse (including against minors), domestic violence, racial hate crimes/mob attacks, psychiatric abuse, and carceral torture. Hartman’s work is unforgettable, partially because it’s easy to connect to the challenges we see today. Punishment of Black women based on predictions of their future crimes is alive and well in the family policing system (more on this in Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts), and it’s being made more profitable each day thanks to tech products focused on “detection”. Even with these upsetting trends, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is still something of a celebration. The veneration and care with which Hartman seeks to fill in the gaps of her characters’ worlds is something worth reading, studying, and returning to over time. I look forward to doing the same myself!
As my friend and buddy reader Adriana noted, the book really picks up in the second and third sections, as Hartman finds her footing, and the stories we follow become a bit more fleshed out. Hartman is an incredibly moving writer, especially for an academic (though she’s admittedly stretching the bounds of that field of writing.) Like THIS is how you theorize about historical moments in a way that befits the excitement and terror of these moments. In Wayward Lives, the mob scenes and reformatory riots burst off the page. Hartman allows us to hear the intimate conversations floating down the tenement air shafts, and see the residents peeking out their boarding rooms. This visceral narration also helps to convey the true brutality of domestic work during this period. Black women at the turn of the century were laboring under torturous, carceral conditions—even up north, even in so-called reformatories, and even in “stately” white homes.
People making a living of studying, not helping, the wayward
In addition to showing the brutality of domestic work, Hartman also explores the cruelty of her profession’s forebears: researchers, reformers, and other people who made a living of examining wayward lives. As someone whose field of work (city and regional planning) shares many of the same forefathers, it struck me how many of these reformers-turned-landlords or researchers-turned-voyeurs were often doing more harm than good.
While many planners and sociologists continue to revere DuBois’ work in the Seventh Ward, Hartman is thoughtful in identifying its biases. There were flaws in his interactions with his research subjects that wouldn’t be corrected for decades to come, which would be too late for many of the people he further condemned in his work (in one place noting that they’d failed to surmount the “debauchery of slavery.”) Hartman also notes the general detachment of the sociologist from true work to fix the problems he profited from studying—that work, it seems, was always framed as someone else’s responsibility. Hartman also criticizes the work of “housing reformers” Helen Parrish and Hannah Fox, who seemed to use the slum to find a sense of meaning and detour from their own societal state as spinsters:
“Subjective need—their desire to live a purposeful and meaningful life—explained the presence of two wealthy white women in the heart of the Negro quarter. For Helen and Hannah, slum reform provided a remedy for the idleness of the privileged, a channel for the intelligence and ambition of college-educated women, and an exit from the marriage plot and the father’s house…In the slum, they avoided the indictment: spinster, surplus woman, invert, and listened for the sounds of their name—Miss Parrish and Miss Fox—linked in good deeds rather than malicious gossip.” (127)
This concept of “landlords for good” is unfortunately alive and well in today’s affordable housing world, where there is not enough concern about the overreaches of property owners who express altruistic aims. Hartman’s criticisms of the 1901 Tenement House Act also felt relevant to my work today: this act didn’t actually help improve housing conditions, but instead introduced policing into private settings. Many commonly touted “solutions” to hazardous housing conditions in modern apartment complexes make a similar trade-off, requiring any investment in deferred maintenance or property repairs to also come with more exposure to policing. On the single-family level, code enforcement often results in displacement of families in need of affordable housing, instead of simply resolving the housing conditions these families are living under. This punitive approach to housing continues to fail too many people.
Desire and its discontents
I’m sure what many people will remember about this book is all the sex!!! Many of the “wayward lives” Hartman explores were deemed wayward because of their perceived promiscuity. Hartman wryly notes that many of the researchers criticizing these people for their sexual behavior (DuBois and Mary White Ovington, looking at y’all) were themselves having extramarital affairs and less-than-savory sexual relations!!! The problem, it seemed, was not sexual desire itself, but rather the people acting on that desire. Political figures like Hubert Harrison weren’t arrested for sleeping with everyone in Harlem, because they had the money and gender to do so without punishment. Another regretful element of this time period was that many people framed sexual violence against Black women and girls as these women and girls “yielding to the temptations of the city.” I kept wanting to smack my head against a wall when this happened: children were being framed as godless hedonists, when really they were being trafficked and abused by random adults creeping around their neighborhoods!!! Just awful stuff, and unfortunately not completely detached from what we see today.
Final Thoughts
In closing, I would recommend this book to anyone who can stomach the many content warnings: sexual abuse (including against minors), domestic violence, racial hate crimes/mob attacks, psychiatric abuse, and carceral torture. Hartman’s work is unforgettable, partially because it’s easy to connect to the challenges we see today. Punishment of Black women based on predictions of their future crimes is alive and well in the family policing system (more on this in Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts), and it’s being made more profitable each day thanks to tech products focused on “detection”. Even with these upsetting trends, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is still something of a celebration. The veneration and care with which Hartman seeks to fill in the gaps of her characters’ worlds is something worth reading, studying, and returning to over time. I look forward to doing the same myself!
January 13, 2020
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments which is subtitled Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, examines the lives of various oppressed black women in Harlem and Philadelphia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these women were part of a fugitive movement of descendants of former slaves fleeing from the plantations of the south to the city in their quest for freedom.
Hartman is a thorough researcher and she culls stories of the lives of these women from rent collectors, surveys and monographs of sociologists, trial transcripts, slum photographs, reports of vice investigators, social workers and parole officers, all presenting, as the author rightly points out, as ‘problems’. She is not happy with the archives which she delves into because in the main they deal with one-sided accounts of the dominant over the dominated. Blacks were bartered as fungible commodities and treated hardly as human, and the self-righteous moralising of white people, which often condemned black people as licentious, ring hollow when you consider the poverty and hardship of their lives. Many of them were married but had no documents to prove it as they struggled in tenement dwellings with congestion, ‘the flesh-to-flesh intimacy that would make most white folks recoil’.
While many of Hartman’s insights are illuminating, the constant drumming of the same points time and time again in a repetitive and circumlocutory style of writing sometimes has the opposite of its intended effect and deadens the natural empathy of the reader, and is somewhat like watching endless reruns of the assassination of JFK or the 9/11 disaster. Also Hartman, no matter how well meaning she may be, makes many suppositions by attempting to enter the minds of these oppressed women in presuming to see what they see, or know what they think, as if she has a monopoly of their imaginations. Sometimes one wonders if the black women themselves had been allowed to tell their harrowing stories without the constant authorial interjections or at least with more understatement, would they have had greater impact, and it would have made for a tidier book.
But despite the tautology, there is no denying the harsh and unjust treatment of many of the black women of the time. ‘They were treated less kindly than a stray dog, handled less gently than a mule.’ They were brutalized and abandoned by the law who could arrest a black person for even walking the streets or for what policemen deemed ‘taking up public space’. And ‘jump raids’ were a commonplace where plainclothes officers without a warrant broke into the homes of black people whom they considered suspiciously.
There is too much guessing however. For example a young woman Mattie’s migration from Virginia to New York prompts the author to suppose all the things she ‘would’ have done. And a whole chapter dedicated to the explanation of the word manual is insulting to a reader’s intelligence as if he or she could not figure out the nuances of meaning in the word. Cinema offered an opportunity to imagine a better world, and indeed some of the women did in fact make it as actors. There were some offers of work in the Lafayette Theatre but only if you were a h.y. —a high yellow as the degrees of blackness were coded. And some made it as dancers or singers such as Billie Holiday who with natural talent were able to free themselves from the ghetto where music and jazz in particular articulated the pain and pathos of their lives.
Blues, please tell me do I have to die a slave?
Do you hear me pleading, you going to take me to my grave.
https://jameslawless.net
Hartman is a thorough researcher and she culls stories of the lives of these women from rent collectors, surveys and monographs of sociologists, trial transcripts, slum photographs, reports of vice investigators, social workers and parole officers, all presenting, as the author rightly points out, as ‘problems’. She is not happy with the archives which she delves into because in the main they deal with one-sided accounts of the dominant over the dominated. Blacks were bartered as fungible commodities and treated hardly as human, and the self-righteous moralising of white people, which often condemned black people as licentious, ring hollow when you consider the poverty and hardship of their lives. Many of them were married but had no documents to prove it as they struggled in tenement dwellings with congestion, ‘the flesh-to-flesh intimacy that would make most white folks recoil’.
While many of Hartman’s insights are illuminating, the constant drumming of the same points time and time again in a repetitive and circumlocutory style of writing sometimes has the opposite of its intended effect and deadens the natural empathy of the reader, and is somewhat like watching endless reruns of the assassination of JFK or the 9/11 disaster. Also Hartman, no matter how well meaning she may be, makes many suppositions by attempting to enter the minds of these oppressed women in presuming to see what they see, or know what they think, as if she has a monopoly of their imaginations. Sometimes one wonders if the black women themselves had been allowed to tell their harrowing stories without the constant authorial interjections or at least with more understatement, would they have had greater impact, and it would have made for a tidier book.
But despite the tautology, there is no denying the harsh and unjust treatment of many of the black women of the time. ‘They were treated less kindly than a stray dog, handled less gently than a mule.’ They were brutalized and abandoned by the law who could arrest a black person for even walking the streets or for what policemen deemed ‘taking up public space’. And ‘jump raids’ were a commonplace where plainclothes officers without a warrant broke into the homes of black people whom they considered suspiciously.
There is too much guessing however. For example a young woman Mattie’s migration from Virginia to New York prompts the author to suppose all the things she ‘would’ have done. And a whole chapter dedicated to the explanation of the word manual is insulting to a reader’s intelligence as if he or she could not figure out the nuances of meaning in the word. Cinema offered an opportunity to imagine a better world, and indeed some of the women did in fact make it as actors. There were some offers of work in the Lafayette Theatre but only if you were a h.y. —a high yellow as the degrees of blackness were coded. And some made it as dancers or singers such as Billie Holiday who with natural talent were able to free themselves from the ghetto where music and jazz in particular articulated the pain and pathos of their lives.
Blues, please tell me do I have to die a slave?
Do you hear me pleading, you going to take me to my grave.
https://jameslawless.net
February 19, 2021
Trigger warning: rape, racism, abuse, sexual assault, child pornography, prostitution, mentions of lynching,
I really wanted to like this book, and there were sections in it that were awesome. The chapter on La Bentley sticks out to me.
However, the book itself was very difficult to read for me personally. The sentences were often long and full of different clauses. Several sections seem to be more like poetry than historical writing, which makes it challenging to understand the story of what’s going on. An example of this is on page 117, where the author says, “The arousal of the senses unrestrained by the faculty of judgement created an “aesthetic insensibility” which yielded a destructive sensuality and encouraged the appetite for greater and more intense sensory experiences, guided only by “dumb and powerful instinct” and “without awakening the imagination or the heart”.” That kind of sentence really limited my understanding of the author’s point in the book and the book is filled with them. If you can understand that kind of writing, more power to you and this is the book for you.
Each chapter focuses on a different black woman from the early twentieth century, which is fascinating, but the chapters often jump around, so that the story is told out of order, which is confusing. A woman is a teenager, then an adult, then a child, then a teenager, then a slightly older adult all in the span of a single chapter.
Overall, I’m not sure I would recommend this book unless you can handle academic and poetic writing.
I really wanted to like this book, and there were sections in it that were awesome. The chapter on La Bentley sticks out to me.
However, the book itself was very difficult to read for me personally. The sentences were often long and full of different clauses. Several sections seem to be more like poetry than historical writing, which makes it challenging to understand the story of what’s going on. An example of this is on page 117, where the author says, “The arousal of the senses unrestrained by the faculty of judgement created an “aesthetic insensibility” which yielded a destructive sensuality and encouraged the appetite for greater and more intense sensory experiences, guided only by “dumb and powerful instinct” and “without awakening the imagination or the heart”.” That kind of sentence really limited my understanding of the author’s point in the book and the book is filled with them. If you can understand that kind of writing, more power to you and this is the book for you.
Each chapter focuses on a different black woman from the early twentieth century, which is fascinating, but the chapters often jump around, so that the story is told out of order, which is confusing. A woman is a teenager, then an adult, then a child, then a teenager, then a slightly older adult all in the span of a single chapter.
Overall, I’m not sure I would recommend this book unless you can handle academic and poetic writing.
December 27, 2019
I learned about Saidiya Hartman when she won a MacArthur Fellowship (“genius” grant) this year. This book is fascinating, focusing on young black women moving to Northern cities in the early 20th century and trying to find some freedom in their intimate lives, even as they were relentlessly policed—arrested and confined on the mere suspicion that they might be, or might become, sex workers, for instance—and the “color line” of segregation closed them in.
Hartman’s methods make the book very readable. She finds many of her subjects in photographs and in the archives of reformatories and social workers, as they are defined by a censorious white gaze. Hartman fills in the gaps of these lives with speculative narratives—what might these women have dreamed of? What space could they make for their hopes in the narrow confines of their lives?
This is history I knew almost nothing about, beautifully written and engrossing.
Hartman’s methods make the book very readable. She finds many of her subjects in photographs and in the archives of reformatories and social workers, as they are defined by a censorious white gaze. Hartman fills in the gaps of these lives with speculative narratives—what might these women have dreamed of? What space could they make for their hopes in the narrow confines of their lives?
This is history I knew almost nothing about, beautifully written and engrossing.
October 7, 2021
Sadiya Hartman’s writing is next level! I enjoyed everything about this book: how Hartman beautifully renders and ponders the lives of every day Black people determined to create more for themselves in the early 20th century, the focus on art and queer entertainment as an escape, a means of resistance and freedom, and the examination of state surveillance as a means of social control in the “Black Belt” during this time.
Hartman really brought people’s histories to life for me, and she made some critical points about how women resisted sexual, personal, and physical exploitation when everything was designed to violate and destroy them.
This book is definitely one of the best non-fic I’ve read this year. I cherish it.
Hartman really brought people’s histories to life for me, and she made some critical points about how women resisted sexual, personal, and physical exploitation when everything was designed to violate and destroy them.
This book is definitely one of the best non-fic I’ve read this year. I cherish it.
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