Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is that rare kind of book that at once troubles multiple paradigms for thinking about history while fashioning several possible new ones. A gorgeously written work of sociology in the tradition of Du Bois, Wayward Lives explores the revolution of intimate life among young black women in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In her thick, narrative descriptions of the new forms of queer black kinship and sociality practiced by sex workers, maids, “delinquents” and the unemployed – the title’s “wayward” women – Hartman offers, as she puts it, “a very unexpected history of the twentieth century” and makes the case for “the wild idea… that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise.”
— Ryan