Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Who Were the Casket Girls?
45 Plays21 days ago
This week's episode takes us to colonial Louisiana and Paris during the period 1718 -1721. Grace looks to break down the the true story of who the Casket Girls were, the horrid treatment they faced in the French Prison system and then in the erasure of their story. Hear about just who the founding women of Louisiana really were!
Sources mentioned:
- Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast
- Bienville’s Brides: Virgins or Prostitutes? 1719-1721
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 2 and Spooky Stories
00:00:15
Speaker
Welcome back. This is episode two of a Harlots and Hearses. I am Grace Artis. I am the host of it And this episode is taking us back to Louisiana, my absolute favorite
Origins of Interest in the Casket Girls
00:00:29
Speaker
state. So how I heard about this topic is...
00:00:32
Speaker
kind of back when I am a big spooky gal. I love Halloween. I love the all things ghosties, all things that go bump in the night. So how I found out about this topic was kind of back along when I was doing my ghost tour days back when I lived in Charleston. i always love to do research on when I was going into new cities love to kind of find out a little bit more about it so when I was going to New Orleans for a work trip was doing research and the topic kept coming up of these girls they were called casket girls and was like that is actually really interesting and then I
00:01:10
Speaker
dove deeper and I was like okay there's actually meat and potatoes to this and it's a real shame that all you know about them is their ghost story like a real crying shame so I want to peel back the curtain and kind of demystify them and this this whole topic and subject it all takes place in colonial Louisiana which was colonized by the French I am not French I'm I did not take French in high school or college. My language of choice was Spanish. I am
Exploring Historical Context: 'Mutinous Women'
00:01:40
Speaker
from Texas.
00:01:41
Speaker
I do not know how to pronounce nearly anything. I can barely pronounce things as it is. I tried my hardest to look up the pronunciation of everything. i like have everything spelled out how it's pronounced. So I tried my hardest. I will probably still butcher the crap out of it though. so just want to get that out of the way. um But anyways, so when I was first diving through it, didn't actually see this book. um But then when I was diving through my notes just again, this book came up and I absolutely love it. I have read already 200 pages today. That's why it's like almost 11 o'clock and I'm filming this is because I got distracted reading this book. But it is called Mutenous Women by Dijon.
00:02:26
Speaker
It's how French convicts became founding mothers of the Gulf Coast. This is
Debunking Myths: The Casket Girls' Arrival
00:02:30
Speaker
by far a great book. It was actually written three years ago. It's one of the best books I've read. It really has ties to like really diving deeper, um really just giving women back their voice, which is, you know, all things I love.
00:02:44
Speaker
The article that I'm pulling from today is kind of like what inspired me to even, hear more about it, demystify the whole topic. It is actually quoted in this book. It was from 2018.
00:02:56
Speaker
It Beneville's Brides, Virgins are Prostitutes from the years 1719 through 1721. And this is by virginia gold So these are the two sources I'm really going to be pulling from. The reason I love these is they do a great work in the archive itself, going and really diving deep. And when a little bit later, I'll kind of really dive in into why I love Joan's work and why it actually made me tear up earlier reading through it.
00:03:29
Speaker
And it's kind of like everything I aspire to be as a historian and everything I want to do for future research. But intro set aside, we are going to dive in and kind of can i get into like who these casket girls were.
00:03:45
Speaker
These casket girls, or as they were called, the cassette girls, or Félez à la cassette, Félez de Joie, or the casket girls. So they kind of got this name, as the myth goes, is...
00:03:57
Speaker
because when they first arrived into the city, were so so it goes, it was said that they arrived with this big traveling trunk that was made of wood and nails looking like a casket.
Unveiling the Truth: Research by Virginia Gold
00:04:10
Speaker
And they were said to be really heavy, filled with dirt, kind of dirty.
00:04:14
Speaker
with all of their clothes and coins and stuff to carry. So that's kind of how they got that term. These women were scooped out of orphanages, poor houses, prisons, by either seduction threats or outright force, and deported to Louisiana as potential brides.
00:04:30
Speaker
As Jeanne will go on and discover, most of them were 100% without doubt. It was through force. most had little to no say, especially when it comes to the criminal aspects and the ones who were all taken out of the the prisons.
00:04:46
Speaker
It was all through force. they had They had no say in the matter. They were women who were described as the French officials, sans abou, women without futures. um And because of that, they were easy targets for French officials who were seeking ways to clear out their institution of inmates who were thought to be nothing more than drain on the economy.
00:05:08
Speaker
So between the years 1719 and 1721, five ships cleared 258 women from France's public institutions.
00:05:19
Speaker
Of those women, 29 were more than likely orphans. And this is all coming from Virginia Gold's records, by the way. I want to clarify that. 35 were published women taken from poor houses and 194 criminals from Force which is also went by the prison Salpatriere no Salpatriere Salpatriere we're getting Gold scoured the records of the French archives so she hit the Bibliothèque d'Arsenal the Archives National the Archives Colonial
00:05:56
Speaker
colonial, the local and sometimes published records. She went through the ship's list, the sacramental records, early censuses, the notarial records, and the superior council records as well. So really just diving in trying to find as much as she could about these women. And what she discovered was amazing. So she found it was possible to find literature about these women. And it was even possible to identify most of the women sit to Louisiana, which I'm going to say as a person who has tried to do research on colonial history, did mine over Charleston, like women just in Charleston period.
00:06:40
Speaker
It's very, very, very typical to find records intact from that time. It's very hard. So the fact that she was able to do that is actually, like, mind-blowing. It was—even—she goes further, and by saying it was even possible to identify most of the women sent to Louisiana, even though that most of them were named Marie, and there are gaps in every set of records,
00:07:03
Speaker
But she goes, it was still possible to find enough information on more than 80% of them and draw some general conclusions about their backgrounds, their social economic status, and then what happened. From one from one of the ships, this was the fourth ship, it was called Mutaine or the Mutinous Women.
00:07:25
Speaker
From that ship, 94 of those women were all criminals and that is actually the sole focus of Joan's book.
00:07:36
Speaker
So that second source I was talking about and that it will be kind of like the switch of the second half of this story. So of this 258 woman, we'll kind of get it like like a data breakdown, which was
Colonial Louisiana: Narratives and Realities
00:07:50
Speaker
always kind of like my favorite part.
00:07:52
Speaker
So those sent from the orphanages were usually either orphans, children of the poor, illegitimate, or perhaps even the offstreak offspring of prostitutes, which kind of checks out during time. The women sent for poor houses were more than likely the daughters of poor families,
00:08:07
Speaker
women who have missed the chance to marry or impoverished widows and the majority of women and girls sent from Salpatriere which was two-thirds of the exiles had been in prison for I'm putting this in air quotes because it'll come up later were debauchery and prostitution having affairs with married men listigousness stealing, blasphemy, and attempted murder and murder. And Gold goes on to say what united them all, whether impoverished, orphaned, or imprisoned, was desperation and powerlessness.
00:08:40
Speaker
They were women and girls who had few, if any, choices. They had no safety nets. They struggled simply to stay alive, and instead of family support, they were incarcerated in institutions where their days were strictly divided into highly regulated segments of devotion. They were mostly young.
00:08:57
Speaker
Majority of them were between 18 and 25, so they were in childbearing years, which, if you are thinking about it, the main reason that they were being sent over to these colonies to lo the louisiana colony which i want to clarify louisiana at this time was a majority of several states so it was like louisiana alabama and mississippi the section that i'm really focusing on and that these two sort subjects are focusing on is really the area between new orleans and bilaxi mississippi so that little bay area So if you think about it, it makes sense that all of these women are really in within childbearing years because the whole reason that they are being sent out to um to Louisiana is to be brides.
00:09:46
Speaker
The reason you're a bride is so you can have kids and start a whole new population of new of new french of new French people to boaster a population, to increase the wealth, to make France seem better.
00:10:00
Speaker
Now, like Like any range, there are our outliers. The oldest was Marianne Fontaine, who we will discover that was actually not her real name.
00:10:12
Speaker
Police and arrest records were wrong. Her real name, what she went by with her family and friends, was actually Manon Fontaine. She was 38, and the oldest, which I think was actually the saddest. So...
00:10:28
Speaker
You can imagine the kind of life that Mary Dowers had. She was 12 when she was exiled. She was said to be a prostitute, which I want to very much clarify.
00:10:40
Speaker
i know things were different at the time, but if you are 12, you're not really old enough to consent to sex. You are a child, so you're not. It's rape. And it's said that...
00:10:51
Speaker
She had reputively been in the trade since she was in the age of six. She was six when she entered the trade, and she was 12 when she was stripped off to a strange place that she had no choice in. One of the whole men behind it, the governors, the reigning people of the Louisiana colony, his name was Bienville. One of the ways that he garners support was saying that, you know, these women for were from a good stock.
00:11:16
Speaker
The official report was saying that, you know, these women were all hand-selected. They were there for a reason.
00:11:23
Speaker
all came to the colony voluntarily. I will say it, Joan says it in her book, and Gold says it. It's kind of hard to to be there voluntarily if you're being exiled out.
00:11:35
Speaker
You can make an argument that maybe for the women working in the poorhouses that maybe they did chose
Vampire Myths and Historical Legacy
00:11:41
Speaker
chose to go voluntarily in the hopes of making wealth. The orphans and the women from the orphanages is maybe yes as well.
00:11:49
Speaker
But it becomes very clear from Joan's work that the women taken from the prison, it was not voluntarily. It was very much by force.
00:12:00
Speaker
And it was all very much due to woman one woman whose corruption i will say kind of deserves her a place in the burning pits of hell but yeah it was not voluntarily it was not voluntarily you can't voluntarily want to do this but we'll get into that later and this is kind of where joan dijon's work is so important and why gold's work is too because they really work to demystify this whole myth surrounding these girls and putting a voice back to
00:12:31
Speaker
them like i said these women were described by french officials as sans avu women without features they they were seen as like leeches of the society joan goes on in The whole point of the book is to tell the story of the women of who they really were. Like, they were not prostitutes.
00:12:52
Speaker
They were very, they were in various ways, like, victims of the epidemic of the poverty that gripped France and the victims to the prison system itself, which we still see today, especially in America, and and victims of corruption. Also, they are victims to the archive itself.
00:13:14
Speaker
not so much the ar- I will say the victims to the archive and to society today is still trying to like squash their story because if you do any search of the casket girls all that comes up is ghost stories of and I'll tell you what I knew of the casket girls they're on every major ghost tour you go on in Louisiana I mean that's how I knew of them and the whole story surrounding them is that like these girls because keep in mind The myth is that they arrived with these caskets.
00:13:44
Speaker
They didn't. These girls came from poor houses and orphanages and prisons. They didn't have space for a trunk to carry with them, much less anything to put in that trunk. So it is said that when these girls stepped off the ships,
00:14:03
Speaker
their skin was very pale, their teeth were bloody and sharp, which
Manon Fontaine: A Central Figure
00:14:10
Speaker
mythical creature has pale skin and bloody sharp teeth, it's a vampire, and then as soon as they appeared on the island, people started dying.
00:14:22
Speaker
So then a man called out le vampire, And then that's how it all started. The casket girls were vampires. That's the reason they brought over these caskets, is that's where they lie.
00:14:35
Speaker
What was in the caskets wasn't actually clothes, it was dirt from their home country. That's the story. And as much as I love New Orleans and the originals and Vampire Diaries, like,
00:14:49
Speaker
I am an Elijah and Klaus Michelson girl like till I die. i love Interview with a Vampire. I love Lestat. I love Louis. Like I just don't love what's done with these girls.
00:15:03
Speaker
And there's... I almost forgot. There's floats. There's fucking floats that celebrate these girls not as like Founding Fathers but as the vampires.
00:15:14
Speaker
So. That's why I think these two works are so important because it's putting them back in history and giving their words and their truths back to them. Let's get into and what we're kind of going to do is we're kind of going to follow Joan's book, which will follow the story of Manon, the one I talked about earlier. Kind of follow her rest, what it looked like, how much the records were tilted, not even
00:15:47
Speaker
followed correctly, how much the police reports and the prison reports and accounts were tampered with, and then kind of followed their journey to Louisiana and then what that looked like. And I think that's the best way to see and kind of follow like what the journey would have looked like for these women is following through the eyes of Manon. If we can go back, the year 1701, there was rumors going around that in Paris that there was a French serial killer by the name of Bouquet-Thierre.
00:16:21
Speaker
who had been known saying that she was an accessory to one murder and that she had killed a man who was a very beloved man in the community. She had killed a Swiss guard. So she was said to have been on the run, killed multiple, multiple people.
00:16:37
Speaker
And if she hadn't killed people, she'd been accessory or called for the murder of other people. Now, at the same time, there was also Manon Fontaine, who was 20, and she was a flower girl. She sold flowers in the streets of Paris.
00:16:55
Speaker
She lived with her mother in a one-bedroom apartment where they actually shared a bed together. That is really important to the story. Now, during one night, a man was killed, and it was said that someone saw Manon running away from the scene of the crime. However, this would not be brought up until months later.
00:17:19
Speaker
Manon was taken in for questioning. She denied it. She had said, there's no way that I had could have done that because i was asleep with my mom. I was asleep in bed at the time and if I had done that would have woken my mom up The police didn't question her mother and the police ah also at the time didn't question her neighbors or about her character or even try to verify her alibi.
00:17:46
Speaker
So we got that going. She also, Manon, denied even knowing any of the people She denied knowing the man who was murdered. She denied knowing the man one of the accomplices to that knew the man. And she also denied knowing that serial killer.
00:18:04
Speaker
She's like, i I know none of this. I don't even know like how my name got involved with this. Furthermore, they're going deeper and deeper and deeper into this. And keep in mind, Manon's in there. She's imprisoned. And she's like, guys, like, I don't know why I'm here.
00:18:19
Speaker
Don't know. Also,
Life and Struggles at Salpêtrière Prison
00:18:20
Speaker
something else that should have given them pause and that got brought up to the police was like, hey, by the way, The night that you're saying that this all happened and that the night someone reported seeing man in there, you shouldn't have been able to see anything because it was apparently at 5 a.m. on December 28th.
00:18:42
Speaker
It would have been pitch black, so you couldn't have seen anything. When Manon apparently reported and confronted one of her accusers, she said, I've never seen that woman before in her life. And as other witnesses were brought in, this same thing was said. None of them have ever actually seen Manon before. So it was all pretty much just brought up on hearsay.
00:19:04
Speaker
And it looked like everything was going great. That Manon was going to be let off. how yeah However, this is where things started to get tricky. because the prosecutor asked Manon this. Was she a loose woman?
00:19:20
Speaker
Had she insulted Toole by calling him a fucking pip, a fucking pimp who put on airs? Had Deo Toole replied, get out here, bitch, or I'll beat you with my cane?
00:19:32
Speaker
Had she grabbed Deo Toole's tie and cried out, help me, Chouinard? Had Chouinard then drawed a sword and killed Deo Toole? mannan was crying hysterically characteristically brief replying that was all false so the prosecutor was asking mannan all of these questions saying well you witnessed all this didn't you you saw all this and man was like i didn't see any of that the next day the verdict was pronounced so chenard This other man was convicted of murder, was sentenced to hanging. Manon was accused of being an accessory to a crime. Manon tried and successfully appealed it.
00:20:09
Speaker
However, Manon argued that the prosecution had produced no evidence to support any other claims. So they did agree, and in Manon's case, she was now sentenced to be stripped naked in the public, enforced to watch the execution with a noose around her necks, and then banished from Paris. And so she was exiled. However, there was a catch.
00:20:26
Speaker
She was summoned back to Paris. by a French official, a high-ranking French official, and then as soon as she was back in Paris, she was arrested and asked and questioned, why are you back here? And when she said, because I was summoned by a French official, she was sentenced to jail, saying because she did not follow the rules of her banishment. But even so, they didn't follow up, they didn't care.
00:20:55
Speaker
And so she was confined back to the Salpatrier, which we'll learn is horrible and a nightmare. The Salpatrier now is very integrated with society.
00:21:06
Speaker
Back in the seventeen hundreds
00:21:11
Speaker
It was not. It was a no man's land. oh it was surrounded by 30 foot high walls, was situated across the scene from nothing. There was no bustling streets, no residential neighborhoods nearby. The prison was bordered by a cemetery on one side and a huge garbage dump on another. And on the third side was a fettered pool, which tanneries have discarded their chemical waste.
00:21:37
Speaker
And the chemical waste discarded by tanneries, it's kind of a leftover so a lot of what the term piss poor and this is like one of my favorite fun facts is tanneries a lot of what they use to tan hides is actually urine and ammonia so if you were piss poor you would sell your own pee to tanneries the waste from tanneries it's like worse than your own feces and waste so that was the pool that surrounded salp salpitre so but three air so it was not good so the water was polluted so it was a breeding ground for rats and infections disease so imagine imagine it was like essentially walled
00:22:22
Speaker
of a building where you get a dump on one side, an infectious waste pool on the other, and then inside there is no ventilation.
00:22:35
Speaker
cell had a single window only two feet wide with bars. The windows were high up on the ceiling so no prisoners might well have a glimpse at the sky. In the rooms itself were made to sleep up to Six women were sharing a bed that were meant to sleep for, so two at the head and two at the feet.
00:22:54
Speaker
Inmates who had been and incarcerated the longest automatically claimed a spot on the bed, and those who found their room slept on the stone floor. I'm kind of going into the day-to-day routine of things. So the wake-up bell sounded at 5.
00:23:10
Speaker
Prayers were held in the dormitory. And after that, the prisoners had half an hour to deal with their personal hygiene. From 6 to 7, they attended Mass.
00:23:20
Speaker
Work began immediately after. Most inmates spent their days doing needlework. So sewing, embroidery, lace making. At 8 a.m., m they were authorized some wine and bit of bread.
00:23:34
Speaker
Then they went back to work until 11. They were given watery soup when after that work continued non-stop until 7 p.m. Then and they were given their only water of the day to drink and a second bit of bread.
00:23:47
Speaker
After prayers in the dormitory at 9.30 they went to bed. Sundays were special because at Sundays they were waking at 6. It was said discipline was severe and that was coming from a lieutenant of the Parisian police.
00:24:01
Speaker
So if it's coming from the police of Paris as severe and where the worst of it of all was reserved for women incarcerated for prostitution. And who is controlling all of this?
00:24:13
Speaker
And who is making all of this kind of running it? It's this woman who is called Margaret... fan fancatelon we're gonna call her margaret she had established her half century of uncontested rule over women detained in the prison and i don't really like calling women this word but she is a bitch and honestly i really hope that because what she did to these women and what she set up to do to these women i really i really hope she is
00:24:45
Speaker
I really hope she's just rotting in hell. Because she she she's horrible. She's horrible. So, she's horrible. So, we're going to go back to Manon for a second. It was now 1718.
00:24:56
Speaker
She had been in prison for 18 years. And her record was clean. She had no problems. But somehow she had caught the eye and she had caught the wrath of Margaret.
00:25:08
Speaker
Which is something you do not want. And because of this, Margaret... had made up kind of this lie. And we don't really know the true story because all we know is Margaret's version of events.
00:25:23
Speaker
And from Margaret, All we know is that sometime on November 1718, riot occurred between three inmates, with Manon being one of them. Somehow a knife broke out. Manon and these these three inmates started attacking others. And these three women, essentially after that, they were put in solitary confinement. They were limited to almost no food um and only water, so they didn't get wine anymore. um They were beaten and Margaret wanted to get rid of them.
00:26:00
Speaker
She did not want them in her prison anymore. And at the same time, so 17, 18, she also knew that John Wall, who is kind of gearing up everything in the Louisiana colonies, also looking for women. so she gets the idea to get a lot of like higher-ups involved and to say like hey like i can't have these women here anymore they need to be gone they're not safe for the prison they're not safe for ourselves and she succeeded
00:26:39
Speaker
and
Manipulation and Economic Motivations
00:26:40
Speaker
manan was the first woman
00:26:44
Speaker
to be shipped over to Louisiana. And once Margaret had managed to rid herself of three prisoners, her ambitions grew. And then once she realized she could do that, she started submitting more and more women.
00:27:00
Speaker
And She realized, and at the time, what she did was she made a list of candidates to exile to the islands, which was essentially the French list of colonies.
00:27:13
Speaker
The islands would eventually change to be Louisiana, but she thought felt there it would be appropriate to detain them for the rest of their lives. What we know as well, Marguerite's ultimate list. So she would go on to make these lists.
00:27:29
Speaker
contain the names for two hundred and eight prisoners which she pronounced bon bonnie's porr e isles fit for the islands whereas the warden at the time piled on charges against manon and the other sedacious women almost every inmate on this list was described above all with one word prostitute and then on june 27 1719 the region the region officially approved the permanent exile from france for all 208 women on the grounds of their extraordinary moral depravity but if we look
00:28:07
Speaker
deeper and what joan did is she did look deeper because she noticed she's like why is this woman on all these cases why is she writing prostitute because at the time it was very odd to not that there weren't prostitutes but it was very odd to have prostitute written because at the time and I discovered this as well a lot of the times you wouldn't have been arrested for quote-unquote prostitution you would have been arrested for disorderly conduct um order or arresting a disorderly house so having prostitution ah being put as your crime it's very odd so and she goes on to describe this
00:28:53
Speaker
three major obsessions. She had an obsession and she goes on in detail and this is a part that I love about her book. She goes on to list several and most of the women in her book.
00:29:04
Speaker
The crime that they were accused of and then actually comparing it to the the official record itself. She had a fixation on seditious knife welding women. So you would often see in a lot of these that Marguerite would always say they were knife welding, which is a bit odd. She had a dread of women being perceived as friendly with soldiers, and she had a preoccupation on a category with the attention with the prostitutes.
00:29:30
Speaker
So prior to John Law, who was huge at the time, he was a major contender in the colonization of Louisiana, the economics surrounding it, and the trading companies surrounding that.
00:29:44
Speaker
Prostitution seldom figured into the records of the per paris Parisian police. She says relatively few women were prosecuted for sex crime, and even in those cases, they were charged with vaguer offenses, notably debauchery, malicious commerce, or bad business. Until 1719,
00:30:04
Speaker
seventeen nineteen For the first time ever, the incarceration of women accused of prostitution becoming frequent as Marguerite knew. She kind of begins to dive deeper of why. Why was she doing this? And that all ties back to John Law.
00:30:22
Speaker
Because John Law needed women. And John Law himself, he paid a visit to Sao Paulo Trier. And he requested more women for his colony.
00:30:38
Speaker
And he pled a donation.
00:30:42
Speaker
One million libraries. A sum worthy of the age of Mississippi millionaires and windfall that came with no streams attached for the women there. And who would benefit?
00:30:55
Speaker
Marguerite.
00:30:58
Speaker
And how do you get women to be shipped off easily is if you make a list and have the reason be that the women are ill-respond despotute prostitutes.
00:31:09
Speaker
That's how. And how do you get more women to fill up the prisons? So glad you asked. That actually goes back to the police. And Joan found all of this out in the records, which is so crazy.
00:31:27
Speaker
Crazy. It's crazy to me. Because when she was doing all of this, she found out that the number of days that these women were actually, like the trial period, had drastically shortened.
00:31:43
Speaker
drastically shortened. So comparing like August 1717, 1719, the number of days between a woman's arrest and the date where she was transferred to Saint-Petriere was drastically reduced.
00:31:59
Speaker
So During the crucial interval, officers typically interviewed witnesses, neighbors, checked out alibis, prepared all the files. In 1717, in every case, it was typically a month.
00:32:14
Speaker
Sounds about right. seventeen ninety 1719? Four days. Four days. You can't do proper investigation in four days to figure out if these women are innocent or guilty. So with that being the case, if they're not doing proper investigation,
00:32:31
Speaker
The side going to go with air with their being guilty, which will end with them being in prison, which will end with their records being wrong and tampered with, which we find out is true. Because if we go back to Manon Gold's article, she says herself, and it's by the wrong name, it's by the name that the records have her listed as,
00:32:57
Speaker
Mary Fontaine was listed to have committed 15 murders. And if you look Joan, who actually went through Manon Fontaine, which was the name she actually went by to her family and friends her whole case file, Manon never committed any murders. So if that can just happen with one person in the system,
Resilience and Community Building in Louisiana
00:33:20
Speaker
who keep in mind, this was in 1700s.
00:33:24
Speaker
when they actually did take the time to go through everything. She had a month. What was happening to the girls who only had four days? A lot can go wrong. But it was not only the prison who were getting rid of the women they deemed undesirable.
00:33:41
Speaker
Joan also figured out that another dangerous thing for women at this time, where women all over Paris were exceedingly seeing a very a high rise in violence towards women, where there were gangs at the time seeking out women, going to churches, going to school, going to work.
00:34:02
Speaker
There is a story of She described, officers describe a gang of young men roaming Paris, insulting and mistreating women. The parents of a 17-year-old sent a complaint to the police detailing the manner in which a gang threatened their daughter and her friends.
00:34:20
Speaker
They attacked the daughter while she was praying in a church um across the street from the Louvre after calling her a whore and a slut who would fuck anyone. They struck her with canes.
00:34:31
Speaker
So they were... not only in danger of being in a church, they were not only in the danger at their workplaces, they were in the danger in public settings, they were in the danger of their own police who were a being encouraged to arrest them. Joan goes on to say they were in danger most of all by their families because seeking to rid themselves permanently of unwanted daughter or sister, some families willingly put young women in the law and in Marguerite's hands.
00:35:05
Speaker
because either they didn't have enough money to care for the daughter. There was one story of a poor tailor who insisted that they had done everything possible to correct their behavior of their 21-year-old daughter. The couple accused their daughter of living in debauchery.
00:35:24
Speaker
Gold also describes three more daughters. that were sent from their parents for their behavior, not living up to their parents' standards. And then sadly, parents' charges against their daughters, no matter how wild, they were never closely scrutinized. Not once did a minister, police commissioner, anyone ever question the motives that might have inspired parents' questions to exile.
00:35:50
Speaker
their daughters. And then once they were exiled, they were exiled. You can't get them back. And I think this is what Gold does so well, is that she shows that even though that while they were exiled and while they were sent away, they left evidence of themselves.
00:36:09
Speaker
They didn't just wither. that they were people, that they were fighters, and they did something. And that's what Joan points out too, is that these women, when they fell into the clutches of the Parisian police, they talked back to the corrupt officials of the law. Deportion was the price they paid for defiance.
00:36:28
Speaker
They were not ones to sit. So of the 258 women, We know that 204 survived. 180, so 89%, left evidence of their marriages. Genevieve Desrote is a woman. She married a German laborer less than a month after arriving in Biloxi.
00:36:47
Speaker
Marth Buhl followed her a later Most of the women there took more time, three to six months. Some women married three months after disembarking, some four. Not every woman found their husband so quickly.
00:37:03
Speaker
a lot of these women ended up marrying soldiers. Sailors were also popular. And some of these women also went with their family members. So four had support of a family. So there were two sets of sisters.
00:37:18
Speaker
So Jean and Catherine Hubert had both been incarcerated for prostitution, which we know most likely was not the case. They both married shortly after arriving in the colony, and then they could both be found living next to each other on St. Anne Street in New Orleans. Then there were set of twins, Francois Nicole and Mary Ann Din.
00:37:38
Speaker
ten They both Both were deported for prostitution, debauchery, and scandalous behavior. They both could be found living with their husbands and near one another in New Orleans also. Some other deportees without family ties, they formed um they form found family, as we call them, you know.
00:37:55
Speaker
with one another this can be seen in rec the sacramental records of the cathedral the immaculate conception immobile and the saint louis basilica in new orleans um this is where we see like you know the god family records of baptisms and there's a lot of records of those of who witnessed the marriages of other uh exile ah deportees and the godmothers to their infants so these women They found themselves in prison, like Jones says, because they refused to practice intra-AIDS that didn't suit their talents or because they didn't want to keep working in abusive environments.
00:38:30
Speaker
They wanted to live and work on their own terms. They challenged their family members with authority and a lot of them were denounced because of it. Gold goes on to say that these women were marked as being lissons avenue women without futures but they actually ended up becoming in louisiana viewed as a vec avenue the future of the colony And going back to Manon, I think she kind of shows up that best in that Manon was the first woman. Manon kicked this whole thing off.
00:39:06
Speaker
Her whole story, this whole thing wouldn't have been possible without her. And it is very sad. Her whole story kind of shows and mirrors this whole process that all of these women go through. The allegations, the...
00:39:18
Speaker
the forging, the lying of the records, the overzealous of records, the treatment of Marguerite, the fabrication. But it also shows, I believe, the spirit of these women. So Manon ended up dying in 1734. So she was only in Louisiana for a short amount of time. Of the uprisers, revolters,
00:39:44
Speaker
and so, so Petrie. She was the only one to actually make it to and make it and survive the voyage. She was the only one to have witnessed every step in the deportation scheme.
00:39:57
Speaker
She, yeah she ended up getting married.
Conclusion and Call to Listen
00:40:01
Speaker
met a man, they cleared land with their bare hands, they had a plot half lot on Bourbon Street at the corner of this St. Anne. She died in a modest dwelling with a picket fence around her small domain. Her story resembles so many women that get lost to the archives.
00:40:29
Speaker
that don't get told and the only reason we even know about this about the erasure of this story is because it was stumbled upon because one day joan was looking through the archives of some for someone else who was arrested whose name began with f and she stumbled across fontaine's file And she saw the name Salpitrier, Louisiana.
00:41:01
Speaker
And Joan has ties to Louisiana. And she decided to open it. And that's what made her discover this whole thing. If Joan had never stumbled upon it, if there was never this happy little accident, none of this would have been found out. None of these 258 women, their stories may have gotten told.
00:41:23
Speaker
It would have gotten told with golds. of how they got to Louisiana. But the hundred who were upon the mutinous women and how their background was lied about, of how they were falsely mislabeled, that wouldn't have gotten told.
00:41:40
Speaker
And I'm glad I get to share it with you today to shine a light and be like, another resounding voice because to me that's that's what all this is about and that's what i hope to get to do with each and every episode whether it be about more women whether it be about more death or whether it be about silly topics that i hope to get to Because especially you see the ties with everything and that's just what I hope to get to do. So I love, I've loved getting to learn more about all of these women and hear more about the history of New Orleans. And it just, I can't wait to read more about this book and dive even further deeper into it.
00:42:20
Speaker
But that is all the time I have for today and all the notes that I have. But if you guys are wanting to dive more, I will list the books and the show notes. And if you like the episode and want to hear more or if you have any ideas, please let me know. If you like the episode, like and subscribe, share, repost. And I hope to talk to you next week.
00:42:43
Speaker
bye