Making Creole: Women and the Creole Community in Early Jim Crow New Orleans

Between 1880 and 1910, as Jim Crow's legal apparatus transformed Louisiana's complex racial landscape into a stark binary, Creole women fought to preserve their community's distinctive identity through the most ordinary acts of daily life.In their households, they cultivated kinship arrangements that prioritized mutual care over conventional family structures.In workshops and factories, they navigated the degradation of traditional occupations while strategically avoiding associations with Black women's labor.In churches, they deployed Catholic sacraments to formalize social bonds and secure legal protections.In courtrooms, they exploited Louisiana's racial ambiguities to defend their families and assert their claims to elevated status.Through these seemingly mundane spheres of daily existence, Creole women resisted the racial order that sought to collapse all people of African descent into a single category of Blackness. Making Creole: Women and the Creole Community in Early Jim Crow