Bibliography: Class and Gender

Race is inseparable from hierarchies of gender, class, and sexuality. In New Orleans, gender roles have been defined and enforced according to the standards of a propertied white male elite and a global market in finance, goods, and non-white bodies as forced labor (slavery, sharecropping, segregation). Storyville, New Orleans’ turn-of-the-century red light district, gave the city its reputation as a respite from strict sexual mores, but also contributed to the commodification and traffic in women’s bodies. Class distinctions and alliances have been drawn around and through racial classifications, simultaneously illuminating economic inequities and obscuring the nature of domination. For example, free people of color were economically prosperous when compared to Black Americans elsewhere, yet their wealth and influence rarely rivaled affluent white Louisianians. Research on hierarchies of economic and social power elaborate on their continued entanglement with race.

Arnesen, Eric. Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Blue Book. Seventh. Blue Book. New Orleans, 1906.

Blue Book. Ninth. Blue Book. New Orleans, 1908.

Blue Book. Tenth Edition. Blue Book. New Orleans, 1909.

Blue Book. Blue Book. New Orleans, 1910.

Regarding the Blue Books: The official guide to Storyville, a legalized area for prostitution in New Orleans between 1897 and 1917. The guide lists residents and landladies of all houses of prostitution, with divisions by race, which, over the run of the serial, range from identifications including “white,” “colored,” “octoroon,” “Jewess” and “French.” The guide was published every year; each listing here is a new edition. It is notable as well for its ads, making explicit both the famous local characters of the district, and the specific offerings – of women, art, luxury, and drink – of each house.

Bonner, Fred Arthur II. “Guest Editorial: God’s Gon’ Trouble the Water: An African American Academic’s Retrospective on Hurricane Katrina.” The Journal of Negro Education 75, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 573-578.

Bryan, Violet Harrington. The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender. University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

Clinton, Catherine, and Michele Gillespie, eds. The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South. Oxford University Press, USA, 1997.

[Chapters on black women by Hall, Hanger, Gould and more].

Fandrich, Ina Johanna. The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux : A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-century New Orleans. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Gill, James. Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans. University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Gould, Virginia Meacham. “’A Chaos of Iniquity and Discord’: Slave and Free Women of Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola.” In The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, edited by Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, 232-246. Oxford University Press, USA, 1997.

———. “Henriette Delille, Free Women of Color, and Catholicism in Antebellum New Orleans, 1727-1852.” In Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, edited by David Barry Gaspar, 271-285. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Guillory, Monique. “Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls.” In Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, edited by Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker, 67-92. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Hachard, Marie-Madeleine. Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines. Edited by Emily Clark. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip072/2006031609.html.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. “African Women in French and Spanish Louisiana: Origins, Roles, Family, Work, Treatment.” In The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, edited by Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, 247-261. Oxford University Press, USA, 1997.

Hanger, Kimberly S. “Coping in a Complex World: Free Black Women in Colonial New Orleans.” In The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, edited by Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, 218-246. Oxford University Press, USA, 1997.

Hirsch, Arnold R. “Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923..” Journal of Urban History 21, no. 4 (1995): 511-517.

Mills, Gary B. “Coincoin: An Eighteenth-Century “Liberated” Woman.” Journal of Southern History 42, no. 2 (May 1976): 205-222.

Mitchell, Mary Niall. “”Rosebloom and Pure White,” Or So It Seemed.” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (n.d.): 369-410.

Sisters of the Holy Family. “Prospectus of St. Mary’s Academy for Young Ladies of Color.” Prospectus. [New Orleans], circa 1880s . A. P. Tureaud Papers, Series X, Folder 16. Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.

Spear, Jennifer M. Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Voltz, Noël. “Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships.” Undergraduate thesis, Ohio State University, African American and African Studies, 2008.