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Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast
Maybe someday
38
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
9/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Joan DeJean
Publisher:
Basic Books
Date:
April 19, 2022
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 shipâs 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.
What The Reviewers Say
Gripping from its opening scene.
Working with a chaotic and often confusing historical record, DeJean traces the constellation of forces — including avarice, corruption and misogyny — that permitted the rapid roundup of another 96 or so female prisoners to be transported in the dank hold of La Mutine. The horrific conditions of the women’s journey, and the will to survive that must have sustained them when they were set down, largely without resources, in a barren, swampy, inhospitable land, are evoked in vivid detail.
DeJean does a wonderful job of tracing the lives of these women through government and parish records, plotting their marriages, deaths, births and financial fortunes through succeeding decades.
With rich writing, author and University of Pennsylvania professor DeJean gives the women who settled Louisiana, and their lost stories, a long-overdue historical reckoning..
