Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

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This work offers a breathtaking exploration of young black women's lives in the early twentieth century. Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life in Philadelphia and New York, highlighting the emergence of free love, cohabitation, queer relationships, and single motherhood. These changes transformed everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship and marriage. Hartman narrates this radical social transformation in contrast to the long-standing narrative of a crisis in the black family. Many young black women sought to define freedom by creating forms of intimacy and kinship that defied societal norms and legal constraints. They navigated relationships, exchanged sex for survival, and redefined marriage, driven by longing and desire. Rejecting oppressive labor conditions, they aspired to lives beyond the confines of domestic service and second-class citizenship. Beautifully written and deeply researched, this exploration recreates the experiences of young urban black women who sought a qualitatively different existence and whose intimate revolutions were often misinterpreted as crime. For the first time, their contributions to a cultural movement that reshaped the urban landscape are acknowledged, revealing their radical aspirations and desires through a blend of history and literary imagination.