Casquette girl


A casquette girl but also known historically as a casket girl or a Pelican girl, was a woman brought from France to the French colonies of Louisiana to marry. The name derives from the small chests, known as casquettes, in which they carried their clothes.

History

The French policy of sending young women orphans known as King's Daughters to their colonies for marriage custom goes back to the 17th-century. Young women were sent to Canada, Louisiana and the French West Indies.
Normally women 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.". 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.
The casquette girls, however, were conspicuous by reason of their virtue. They were recruited from church charitable institutions and although poor, were guaranteed to be virgins. It later became a matter of pride in Louisiana to show descent from them. The first casquette girls reached Mobile, Alabama in 1704, Biloxi, Mississippi in 1719, and New Orleans in 1728.
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. 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.

Cultural impact

Fiction