cover image

No Mercy Here

Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

Sarah Haley

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 02/2016
Pages: 360
Subject: Social Science, History | University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9780000000000
eBook ISBN: 9781469627618

DESCRIPTION

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women's brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners' acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.

A landmark history of black women's imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.

RELATED TITLES