Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Politics, History, and Culture) - Hardcover

Gross, Kali N.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822337614 ISBN 13: 9780822337614

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2006

Synopsis

Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women’s crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about 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 attain 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 women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to 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 women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Through an examination of black women engaged in both property and violent crime in the context of political, social, and economic disfranchisement, Kali N. Gross has produced a riveting narrative that reveals the ways in which criminal acts and courtroom and prison behavior were also expressive acts. She not only contributes profoundly to our understanding of black working-class and poor women in and around turn-of-the century Philadelphia, but she resists the tendency to romanticize these women as ‘primitive rebels.’ The work is truly pathbreaking. Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Heartfelt and bold, Colored Amazons stands confidently at the intersection of several kinds of history. Kali N. Gross has used statistics, scandal rags, and sophisticated modern studies to produce a genuinely innovative study of race and power, crime and sex, stereotypes and gender roles. Roger Lane, author of Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900

About the Author:

Kali N. Gross is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies at Drexel University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0822337614
• ISBN 13: 9780822337614
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280