Mutinous Women
How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
The secret history of the rebellious Frenchwomen who were exiled to colonial Louisiana and found power in the Mississippi Valley
In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women.
Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.
Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women introduces us to the Gulf South’s Founding Mothers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Pennsylvania historian DeJean (How Paris Became Paris) paints an intriguing portrait of the early 18th-century French women who overcame "false arrests and trumped-up charges," forced deportation, hurricanes, and other hardships to help shape life in the fledgling colony of Louisiana. According to DeJean, corrupt police and prison officials working with the Indies Company conspired to deport more than 130 female inmates as part of a scheme to help populate the colony. Many of the deportees had been arrested on dubious charges of prostitution and begging; in one unfortunate case, a woman was detained "by accident, when a murder took place just outside the cabaret where she had stopped for a beer at the end of a hot day." DeJean skillfully reads between the lines of the existing police and prison documentation to bring context and nuance to these women's stories. She also draws on soldier and historian Jean Dumont's contemporaneous accounts of life in Louisiana, where he met his wife, deportee Marie Baron. Though the deportees arrived in America destitute, some went on to build the first houses on Royal Street in Mobile, Ala., and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and became matriarchs of prominent regional families. This scrupulous account restores a group of remarkable women to their rightful place in French and American history.
