Colored Amazons
Subtitle: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Politics, History, and Culture)
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: June 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780822337614
Subjects: American studies; Crime & criminology; Women's studies; Women's Studies - General; Pennsylvania; Female offenders; History; Sociology; United States - State & Local - Middle Atlantic; History: American; USA; Philadelphia; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - Histor; Women's Studies - History; African American Studies; Gender Studies/Feminist Theory; History, U.S; United States - 20th Century; African American criminals; Crime and race
Description: "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."--Jacket.