Title: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Subtitle: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Description: 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: History, Man-woman relationships, Single women, African American Studies, Social conditions, Sociology, African American young women, Schwarze, Women's Studies, Urban women, Urban, Sexual behavior, SOCIAL SCIENCE, Sexualverhalten, Prostitution, Frau, Soziale Situation, Ethnic Studies, Sex customs, Women, African american women, African american youth, Women, sexual behavior, United states, social conditions, United states, history, New York Times reviewed, collection:judy_grahn_award=winner, Queer, LGBTQ anthropology