"There Was a Tradition Among the Women": New Orleans's Colored Creole Women and the Making of a Community in the Tremé and Seventh Ward, 1791-1930 Open Access
McPherson, Natasha Latrice (2011)
Abstract
Abstract
"There Was a Tradition Among the Women":
New Orleans's Colored Creole Women and the Making of a Community in the Tremé and Seventh Ward, 1791-1930
By Natasha L. McPherson
This dissertation examines how colored Creole women shaped family and community formation and influenced the development of a Creole ethnic identity in New Orleans between the late-eighteenth century and 1930. First, I explore women's role in the growth and expansion of a visible colored Creole community in the antebellum era. I look closely at the way Creole women responded to the loss of their privileged intermediate legal status after the Civil War, and detail their efforts to preserve the Creoles' antebellum social privilege for two generations after the fall of slavery. Although the establishment of Jim Crow segregation finally eliminates the remaining legal distinctions between colored Creoles and non-Creole African Americans, colored Creoles continued to enforce strict cultural boundaries to preserve a separate and distinct Creole community. I examine the ways in which colored Creole women adapted old ways and developed new methods to preserve colored Creole social privilege in the face of Jim Crow.
This project makes three original contributions to the existing scholarship. First, using census records, I construct a thorough demographic profile of colored Creole women from the late-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Next, I explore the ways ordinary women made meaningful contributions to the Creole community. By paying particular attention to women's roles in marriage and family; paid and unpaid labor; and their participation in the sacraments of the Catholic Church, I show that women were remarkably influential in the preservation of Creole status. Finally, I argue that Creole women did not conform to African American middle-class notions of respectability as a means of preserving status, but rather they adopted a practical morality that placed the obligations of the family and the improvement of the larger Creole community above aspirations for individual morality or respectability. By placing women at the center of this narrative, I contend that women were central to the establishment and development of a colored Creole community in New Orleans.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One:
Roots Women: Laying the Foundation
for a Colored Creole Community 1
Chapter Two:
Holding on to the Past:
Colored Creole Women in a Post-Reconstruction Society 58
Chapter Three:
Women and
"The Golden Door of Opportunity" 100
Chapter Four:
Preserving Privilege Through Practicality 137
Chapter Five:
Living in "Splendid Isolation":
Women, Community, and Identity
in the Early Twentieth Century 166
Appendix A: Map of Tremé and Seventh Ward 223
Appendix B: Color, Sex, and Age Distribution, 1880-1930 224
Appendix C: Description of Household Types, 1880-1930 225
Appendix D: Seventh Ward Household Compostion, 1880-1930 226
Appendix E: Marital Status of Seventh Ward Residents,
1880-1930 229
Bibliography 231
About this Dissertation
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