Wells and Eleanora Fagan (later known as Billie Holiday), but celebrities are far outnumbered by unnamed chorus girls, rioters, domestics, factory workers, actresses, inmates, entertainers, and prostitutes. Its cast of young Black women includes well-known figures like Ida B. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is divided into three books. In these places, Hartman finds young Black women experimenting with agency and personhood under impossible circumstances, young Black women determined to “make living an art,” young Black women whose experiments as “sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists” inhabited the tensions between freedom and confinement, between autonomy and forced choice, and between deprivation and beauty. To critique the pathologized and criminalized depictions of these ‘wayward’ young women Hartman takes the reader from the archival opening into the tenement, the ghetto, the streets, the jail cell, the theater, the dancehall, the rented bedroom, the hallway––the places where the Black girls are found. To find these women, Hartman turns to the archive: social-work files, parole officers’ reports, psychiatrist interviews, slum photography, prison case files, and reformers’ notes, all of which become, for Hartman, traces of ‘wayward’ Black women. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers the histories of “ordinary” young Black women trying to “live as if they were free” in Philadelphia and New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
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