Crescent City Girls

View Inside

282 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 21 halftones, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-2280-4
Published: July 2015
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-2281-1
Published: May 2015
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-4259-6
Published: May 2015

Gender and American Culture

Buy this Book

Paperback $37.50
E-Book $19.99

Apple iBookstore Barnes and Noble Ebooks Amazon Kindle

For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies

To purchase online via an independent bookstore, visit Bookshop.org

Follow the Author on Twitter

Awards & distinctions

2016 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians

Honorable Mention, 2016 Letitia Woods Brown Prize, Association for Black Women Historians

What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, LaKisha Simmons blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children’s streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls’ personal lives. Simmons argues that these children faced the difficult task of adhering to middle-class expectations of purity and respectability even as they encountered the daily realities of Jim Crow violence, which included interracial sexual aggression, street harassment, and presumptions of black girls' impurity.

Simmons makes use of oral histories, the black and white press, social workers' reports, police reports, girls' fiction writing, and photography to tell the stories of individual girls: some from poor, working-class families; some from middle-class, "respectable" families; and some caught in the Jim Crow judicial system. These voices come together to create a group biography of ordinary girls living in an extraordinary time, girls who did not intend to make history but whose stories transform our understanding of both segregation and childhood.

About the Author

LaKisha Michelle Simmons is assistant professor of history and women's studies at the University of Michigan.
For more information about LaKisha Michelle Simmons, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“Breaks meaningful new ground and serves as a model for future studies in African American and gender history.”—Journal of American History

“Highly recommended, as it intelligently includes voices entirely lost in most academic literature and . . . will be vital to those studying gender, youth, and urban histories.”—American Historical Review

“Gives its readers the opportunity to explore New Orleans as black girls may have experienced it. . . . Demonstrate[s] the ways that consideration of black girls’ experience provides richer and more nuanced historical narratives. . . . Provide[s] important context and foundation for the conceptions of black girlhood that we have inherited.”—Public Books

"An excellent contribution to the study of children's geographies. The author explores the racial, sexual, violent, affective, classed, gendered and imagined geographies of New Orleans from the vantage point of black girls. As such it will be of interest not only to historians, but also to scholars interested in past and present spatializations of sexual and racial violence."—"Childrens Geographies"

“Readers are introduced to the interior lives of black girls in a city shaped by complex color lines, racial identities, and demands on what girlhood was supposed to mean.”—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

“A significant new contribution to southern history, African American history, and gender studies that belongs in every academic library and should receive serious consideration by public libraries.”—CHOICE