Engendering captivity: Black women and convict labor in Georgia, 1865-1938

Engendering Captivity: Black Women and Convict Labor in Georgia, 1865-1938 is an interdisciplinary history of race, gender, and punishment in the U.S. South following the Civil War. This study incorporates theories of race, gender, and punishment along with historical methodology and examines Georgia's convict labor system as a site through which to better understand the racial construction of gendered subject positions.;Engendering Captivity compares black and white women's cultural representations, patterns of arrests and prosecutions, material and social conditions of imprisonment, and strategies of resistance to captivity. In the face of extreme violence black women were forced to build roads and brick, to labor on plantations, in lime quarries, and in mines, while white women received both informal and legislative protections from the systems harshest features. The contrast between the representations and experiences of black and white women in the punishment regime exposes the development of gender ideology during the emergence of Jim Crow.;A broad range of sources including annual prison reports, city court dockets, trial transcripts, records of illness and corporal punishment, executive clemency records, blues recordings, and reformers' papers, enable new dimensions of southern punishment and gender history to come into view. Systems of domestic parole, the link between the experience of domestic violence and criminalization, black and white clubwomen's sexual and gender politics, the gendered nature of racial terror, and the significance of the trope of punishment in black women's blues all receive significant attention in this text. Examining black women's imprisonment also raises larger questions about the archive as a methodological tool for investigating black women's history, and the significance of the black female subject in the development of the modern Jim Crow South.