A City’s History through Their Eyes:
How Women of New Orleans Defined Gender and Politics as Makers of History
An Overview of the Series
With A City’s History through Their Eyes, The Life of a Historian explores how women have understood and defined gender as political actors and makers of New Orleans history.
A City’s History through Their Eyes is an ongoing series that shares the histories and lived experiences of women throughout the 300-year history of New Orleans. With each new post, The Life of a Historian will transport our readers to a new or familiar location during a specific time. For example, readers will experience Congo Square during the late-18th century as well as witness the founding of Pontchartrain Parkin in the 1950s.
With this series, The Life of a Historian hopes to challenge our readers to re-evaluate our understanding of what it means to be a political actor and maker of history.
As entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders, and community activists, the women of this series took control of their lives and shaped the history of New Orleans.
In short, A City’s History through Their Eyes attempts to amplify their voices so that our readers can hear and know their stories.
Joining an Existing Conservation:
A Note on Historiography
Following in the footsteps of historians Sophie White, Stephanie Camp, Marisa Fuentes, Jennifer Morgan, Rashauna Johnson, Christine DeLucia, and Jessica Marie Johnson the blog series relies on an interdisciplinary approach to bring women to the forefront.[1] As a result, in addition to telling the story of a respective woman or group of women, each chapter will also introduce readers to prominent works of scholarship from the fields of history, gender studies, anthropology, and geography.
As some readers may already know, as historians our ideas and interpretations of the past, to put it simply, are just us adding on to an existing conversation. Or, to put it another way, what our profession refers to as historiography. In other words, for us to give our two cents, The Life of a Historian listened to what other historians have previously said about the history of women, race, class, gender, and politics within the city of New Orleans.
For example, Johnson’s Wicked Flesh inspired the title of this blog series. In Wicked Flesh, Johnson uses “the history of black women in New Orleans as a lens for exploring black women’s experiences across the Atlantic world” from the late 16th-century to the 19th-century. Relying on Fuentes’s concept of reading archival sources—primarily written by white men—along the bias grain, Johnson tells their stories “through the eyes of the women themselves.”[2]
Likewise, Camp’s adaptation of Edward Said’s “rival geography” informs much of the analytical framing of A City’s History through Their Eyes. In Closer to Freedom, Camp argues that enslaved men and women “created…alternative ways of knowing and using plantation and southern space that conflicted with planters’ ideals and demands.”[3]
In other words, spaces can hold different meanings to those entering and functioning within a specific space like churches, schools, and marketplaces. As they move in and out and within, individuals create, challenge, and re-define those meanings as needed. Subsequently, spaces can and did emerge as contested, but malleable, arenas for power, freedom, and autonomy.
Thus, with each chapter, The Life of a Historian will introduce the research of other scholars and discuss how their work shapes and influences A City’s History through Their Eyes.
The women of this blog series—as you will come to see—entered spaces and developed alternative ways of understanding and using those spaces. How women perceived these spaces and appropriated them as political actors and history makers is the story A City’s History through Their Eyes looks to tell.
The Chapters of the Series
Although an ongoing series, A City’s History through Their Eyes tells one story.[4]
It is a collective history of how women of New Orleans expressed gender and political agency within certain spaces.
Individually, however, each chapter will share the stories of unique individuals or groups of women. As such, each post may serve as its own history.
With each chapter, then, The Life of a Historian explores how gender and politics intersected with race, space, and class across time. In other words, the women of A City’s History through Their Eyes come from all backgrounds. As free or enslaved, white or black, rich or poor, the actors of this series shared the commonality of being women of New Orleans.
As political actors, the women of this blog series—as a group and as individuals—defined and redefined ideas of gender and politics within specific spaces of New Orleans.
Each chapter argues that space matters but, more importantly, so does the agency of women.
Published Chapters
Chapter One:
Women in the Marketplace of Congo Square: Challenging the Racial and Gender Power Dynamics of French and Spanish New Orleans
In chapter one of the A City Through Their Eyes series, The Life of a Historian explores how free and enslaved women used the colonial marketplace to their advantage. Starting from a familiar space, Congo Square (Place des Nègres), this post reveals that as entrepreneurs African women and women of African descent redefined the racial and gendered power dynamics of French and Spanish New Orleans.
Chapter Two:
“I walk in two worlds”: Rosa Keller, Pontchartrain Park, and Moving beyond Race and Class
In chapter two of the A City Through Their Eyes series, The Life of a Historian tells the story of Pontchartrain Park through the eyes of Rosa Keller. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Keller helped fund and initiate the construction of one of the first middle-class African American neighborhoods in the South.
Cited Sources
[1] Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019); Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archives (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Christine M. Delucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
[2] Johnson, Wicked Flesh, 1, 13.
[3] Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7.
[4] In many ways, The Life of a Historian models A City’s History through Their Eyes on the theoretical and conceptual framework Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder put forth in their edited work As If She Were Free. However, The Life of a Historian does not—nor could we—intellectually apply their ideas and definitions faithfully. Nonetheless, we hope A City’s History through Their Eyes meaningfully contributes to a “new feminist history of freedom.” See Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, “Introduction,” in As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, ed. by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1-24.