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Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910
Duke University Press
June 2006
260 pages
ISBN: 0822337991
EAN: 9780822337997
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Non-Fiction | Historical
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.
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