Daniel Patrick Moynihan would later reflect on this in “The Moynihan Report” (1960), using statistics to demonstrate how Black women were outpacing their counterparts. The challenges of poverty and the demand for domestic work also created many households where women were the main breadwinners. Saidiya Hartman’s gorgeously written new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, accomplishes what too few academic books manage to do: it provides incisive information about African American women in the early twentieth century whose lives were bold experiments in living while also being moving, haunting, and provocative. Such a choice could offer her social legitimacy. A Black woman might, for instance, live with a man and identify herself by his last name although they were not legally married. Such sexual freedom was also linked to nonmainstream interpretations of marriage and the gender roles assumed in such a union. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black.

However, they also raised panic among law enforcement and white residents who feared that such sexual freedom would damage the morality of the cities they inhabited. 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. These popular practices of intimacy were opportunities for people otherwise limited by racism and poverty to assert autonomy. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.

She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. Hartman writes, “A small rented room was a laboratory for trying to live free in a world where freedom was thwarted, elusive, deferred, anticipated rather than actualized” (59). Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother, Scenes of Subjection. As opposed to the expectation of formal, long-term, monogamous, and heterosexual relationships, Black people at the turn of the century were increasingly engaged in casual sex with multiple lovers of varying genders.

Hartman wayward lives