Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia & New York at the beginning of the 20th century. 

Free love, common-law & transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, & single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life & challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, & 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 & kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability & outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to & cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, & revised the meaning of marriage. Longing & desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.

Beautifully written & 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, & respectable poverty—& whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime & 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 & literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations & insurgent desires.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother & Scenes of Subjection. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, & Fulbright Scholar. She is a University Professor at Columbia University.