Mutinous Women

I appreciated this examination of an area about which I know too little. The research here is astounding. She tells the stories with such detail of women who were banished from Paris – for “crimes” they did not commit (really, they were mostly guilty of being very poor) – and how they built lives eventually when they got to Louisiana around 1720.

My big takeaways are that the difficult origins in this area strongly resemble how I think about Jamestown – a mess of disease, violence, and poor support from England/France. I didn't realize how terrible the French colonies were here for their first couple of decades. Law was the Frenchman credited with/blamed for with directing the bleak settlement, but he was focused on growing tobacco, which never took off. Men in France wanted to sell French goods to the inhabitants, but they were too poor and desperate to buy the imports and they had little to export. The women – whom she restores to our narrative with such detail and surprising breadth and depth – usually married, had children, and (many) survived to old age, much longer than they probably would have in France.

I was curious about the history of Ship Island, where they had to stay for a while at the beginning. Sounds like a bad episode of “Naked and Afraid.” (p. 193 ish)

The main settlements she describes include Biloxi (grim!), Mobile (better – many resourceful women did well there, but a hurricane shifted the focus to New Orleans in 1722 (p. 242 ish), New Orleans (did better; I skimmed), and then parts further north to Illinois (where they grew wheat and benefited from bear oil!) Toward the end here she gets into more conflict and contact with the indigenous people, and I did find myself wondering why they weren't more present and important in the early parts of the book. She indicates that they were already largely diminished by disease. In this later section, I appreciated her discussion of the fate of the Natchez people in a French land grab and the conflict among indigenous people exacerbated by French-English conflicts (something I discuss in class & an AP theme).

By the end of the century, Napoleon was ready to let go of the colony, she says BEFORE the revolution in (today's) Haiti. (I teach that Haiti made him realize he couldn't maintain the region, but perhaps I should look into that.) After a century of difficulties – tobacco's flop there, slave uprisings, conflict with Native Americans, etc. – Napoleon made the LP sale.

I did wish for a bit more on the history of slavery in the region, as well as the indigenous people, but that wasn't the main point of the story. Overall, I learned a lot, and was struck by the level of detail and extensive research required to write this important and impressive book. I'm eager to read something else by her – perhaps her study of the ideas about Sappho.

(This is long because I wrote for my own teaching & lecture notes)