Review Wayward Lives

 Currently there is a bunch of idiots who are protesting the teaching of Critical Race Theory in k-12 schools, where, in fact, it is not being taught at all. What these idiots who are mostly likely really racists are protesting is the teaching of American history in all its highs and lows and the inclusion of people who are not white as well as the fact that racism was and still is.

Hartman’s book is part of this needed correction to how history was taught in many years. It is important to know and to understand how certain segments of our population were/are treated by society at large. This includes people of color, women, and the LQBITQ+ groups as well as others. It includes acknowledging that say the Kennedy experience of America is vastly different than that of say Ida B. Wells.

Hartman’s recent book might not be a history book in the traditional sense of the term. Given her subject matter complete historical records are not something that would be available. In the book, Hartman reconstructs, as much as she can, the lives of Black Women, lower class black women, in NYC and Philadelphia during the early 1900s.

Hartman’s focus is primarily on those women who lived outside the constricting lines that society (largely white) drew to contain them. Yet these women, in a variety of ways, rebelled against those constrictions. These are the women who because they were black, female, and poor did not make it into the history books.

Yet to not the history that their lives representations is to have an incomplete picture of not only the history of Black women in America in particular, the history of women in American in general but also of racism.

In her beautiful prose, Hartman chronicles the lives of women who had multiple relationships but who were not prostitutes, of women who lived as men, lesbians, those who found themselves confined to reformatory centers because of behavior deemed “immoral”.
While not a history in a traditional sense, particularly in the detailing of the individual stories – take for instance the story of the naked Black girl in a Eakins photo. There is no hard proof for what Hartman speculates, though her speculation is backed by the fact of Eakins abuse of women. Her placement of women in the larger historic and social tapestry, in particular in regards to the actual numbers of women w ho were sent to reformatories or who where charged is strong enough support that her freely acknowledged suppositions most likely are correct.

This book is an engrossing look at those women history wants to disregard and forget.