Contemporary engraving depicting the departure of "comfort girls" to the New World.

A casquette girl (French: fille à la cassette) but also known historically as a casket girl or a Pelican girl,[1] was a woman brought from France to the French colonies of Louisiana to marry.[2][3] The name derives from the small chests, known as casquettes, in which they carried their clothes.[3][4]

History

The French policy of sending young women known as King's Daughters (French: filles du roi) to their colonies for marriage goes back to the 17th-century. Young women were sent to Canada, Louisiana and the French West Indies.

Contrary to the 'filles du roi' program in New France, many of these young women were sex workers in France, and admitted to a mental health hospital there because of their occupation.[5] Women were then sent directly to New Orleans. During the journey, they were not well taken care of, and upon their arrival in Louisiana, many appeared to have bloodshot eyes, leading to the term 'vampire girls' in addition to casquette girls.[6]

Later women, called correction girls, were supplied to the colonists by raking the streets of Paris for undesirables, or by emptying the houses of correction. France also sent women convicted along with their debtor husbands, and in 1719, deported 209 women felons "who were of a character to be sent to the French settlement in Louisiana.".[7] The women sent to the West Indies were often from poor houses in France, but reputed to be former prostitutes from La Salpêtrière. In 1713 and again in 1743, the authorities in Saint-Domingue complained that Paris sent the settlers unsuitable former prostitutes as wives, and the practice was discontinued in the mid 18th-century.[8]

The casquette girls, however, were conspicuous by reason of their virtue. They were recruited from church charitable institutions (usually orphanages and convents) and although poor, were guaranteed to be virgins.[9] It later became a matter of pride on the Gulf Coast to show descent from them.[3] The first casquette girls reached Mobile, Alabama, in 1704, Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1719, and New Orleans in 1728.[3][10]

The 23 Pelican Girls arrived first on Massacre Island in late July then took shallow-draft boats up Mobile Bay to 27 Mile Bluff weighing anchor on August 1, 1704.[1][4] They had sailed from France in April of that year on the ship Le Pélican.[4][11] A stop in Cuba had resulted in many of the crew and young women receiving mosquito bites and thus becoming infected with Yellow Fever.[4][11] Two of the young women died soon upon arrival and the epidemic spread throughout the fort even taking the life of adventurer Henri de Tonti.[11] Disease notwithstanding, most of the young women were married to men of their choosing within a month.[4][11] All of the girls were between 14 and 19 years old.[4][12]

Unhappy with new husbands that spent much of their time in the woods, not building new homes or planting them gardens, the girls staged what became known as the “Petticoat Rebellion.”[12] Until they were provided a roof and food they refused “bed and board.”[12] The men eventually came around.

Historian Joan Martin maintains that there is little documentation that casket girls, considered among the ancestors of white French Creoles, were sent to Louisiana. Dr. Marcia Zug argues that there was, in fact, no evidence to support the fact that these women existed as such.[13] The Ursuline order of nuns supposedly chaperoned the casket girls until they married, but the order has denied this. Martin suggests this was a myth, and that interracial relationships occurred from the beginning of the encounter among Europeans, Native Americans and Africans. She also writes that some Creole families who today identify as white had ancestors during the colonial period who were African or multiracial, and whose descendants married white over generations.[14]

Cultural impact

Fiction

  • They inspired Victor Herbert to write Naughty Marietta which was turned into a musical in 1935.
  • In the 1947 movie, The Foxes of Harrow, Maureen Sullivan is costumed as a Casquette Girl during a ball.
  • The French, a novel by W. Maureen Miller, is about Madeline, a young French girl who is sponsored by a convent and sent to Louisiana to become the bride of a pioneering colonist.
  • In the spin off show from Vampire Diaries, “The Originals”, in episode 10 season 1 casquette girls were mentioned to be meeting “New Orleans gentlemen” and spoke only French.

Music

  • Musicians Phaedra Greene, Elsa Greene, and Ryan Graveface formed the Savannah, Georgia-based band Casket Girls.[15][16]
  • In 2018, Gregory Hancock Dance Theatre performed the ballet "The Casket Girls" in Carmel, Indiana. With music composed by Cory Gabel and choreography by Gregory Hancock. It was inspired by the original casquette girls, telling the origin of vampires in New Orleans.[17][18]

Mardi Gras

On New Year's Day 2021 a group of women in Mobile, Alabama, formed the “Pelican Girls” as an homage to the first casquette girls to arrive on the Gulf Coast on Le Pelican in the summer 1704. The ladies are a masked marching society donning 18th century dress and distributing trinkets made and personalized by the members themselves. Their membership is limited to 23 and each adopt the name of one of the original 23 girls. They currently participate in the Massacre Island Secret Society parade on Dauphin Island, Alabama, and the Joe Cain Procession in Mobile.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Kazek, Kelly (14 September 2015). "When French orphans called Casket Girls came to Alabama as wives for colonists". Al.com. Retrieved 29 November 2016.
  2. ↑ See Dureau, Lorena. The Last Casquette Girl, 1981, Pinnacle Books ISBN 0523412665
  3. 1 2 3 4 Lee Smith (January 21, 2011). "Women in Colonial Louisiana". Encyclopedia of Louisiana. Louisiana Endowment foir the Humanities. Archived from the original on June 12, 2011. Retrieved May 21, 2011.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711, pp.106–07. Museum of the City of Mobile, 1977. ISBN 0-914334-03-4.
  5. ↑ "The Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 2023-11-17.
  6. ↑ Scott, Mike (2022-10-11). "A lot to unpack: How 1720s French 'casket girls' brought vampires to the Ursuline Convent". NOLA.com. Retrieved 2023-11-17.
  7. ↑ Katy F. Morlas, "La Madame et la Mademoiselle," graduate thesis in history, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2003
  8. ↑ Trevor Burnard, John Garrigus: The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue
  9. ↑ Clark, Emily. Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834, pp. 12–23. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8078-5822-6.
  10. ↑ Thomason, Michael. Mobile : the new history of Alabama's first city, pages 20-21. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8173-1065-7
  11. 1 2 3 4 Hamilton, P. J. (1910). Colonial Mobile: An Historical Study Largely from Original Sources, of the Alabama-Tombigbee Basin and the Old South West, from the Discovery of the Spiritu Santo in 1519 Until the Demolition of Fort Charlotte in 1821. Hougthon Mifflin Company.
  12. 1 2 3 Jones, Terry (16 August 2017). "A Shortage of Women". countryroadsmagazine.com. Retrieved 16 August 2017.
  13. ↑ Zug, Marcia A. (2016). Buying a Bride. NYU Press. ISBN 9780814771815. JSTOR j.ctt1804024.
  14. ↑ Joan M. Martin, Placage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre, in Creole, edited by Sybil Kein, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2000.
  15. ↑ Waterman, Cole (7 June 2016). "The Casket Girls: The Night Machines". PopMatters has. Retrieved 11 December 2018.
  16. ↑ Boilen, Bob. "First Watch: Casket Girls, 'Tears Of A Clown'". NPR Music. Retrieved 11 December 2018.
  17. ↑ ""The Casket Girls" at Gregory Hancock". Arts Channel Indy. 13 September 2018. Retrieved 11 December 2018.
  18. ↑ Ambrogi, Mark (10 September 2018). "Hancock Dance Theatre presents 'The Casket Girls'". Current Publishing. Retrieved 11 December 2018.
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