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Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910

Amazon.com Price:  $24.04 (as of 12/04/2019 07:09 PST- Details)

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Description

Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia on the turn of the 20th century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women’s crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and inside the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified in regards to the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to score personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority.

Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the ladies’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position on the subject of the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the ladies’s criminal acts, interpretations in large part according to notions of hereditary criminality. In the long run, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.

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