I found this a challenging read for many of the same reasons I admired it. I also loved how poetic her tone was, capturing the feeling of each scene. Overall though, I ended up loving the way the author used the basic framework of the facts to talk about why these women’s lives mattered and what their choices meant in their social context. I’m guessing that the philosophical bits were all the author’s voice. It was still difficult to know if the women she wrote about had talked about the philosophy guiding their lives. After checking enough endnotes though, I began to trust that the author had confirmed the facts of each story she was telling. I was nervous about distinguishing facts from the author’s speculations. At first, its mix of history, speculation, philosophy, and poetry felt a little too artsy to me. The structure of this book was something truly unique. This books shows the bravery and beauty of those revolutionary choices, driven by a desire to live freely and expansively despite social constraints that made mere survival a challenge. The lives these women shaped for themselves included “free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood.” At the time, these choices were seen as a threat to social order that needed to be controlled or eliminated.
When the stories of black women were recorded at this time, it was typically by people who saw them as a social problem. I was immediately drawn to the concept of this book, which tells the stories of people whose lives weren’t considered worth recording in their own time. Summary: A lovely, unique history that highlights the radical, innovative social lives that black women shaped for themselves during the Jim Crow era.
★★★★★ Title: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval A Unique History in Review: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
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