Description
This chapter analyzes forms of resistance to convict leasing of women. The chapter explores the ways incarcerated women, their families, and communities pursued formal complaints by petitioning for clemency, demanding coroner reports in wrongful deaths, or participating in state investigations. Female prisoners engaged in informal resistance by escaping or using defiant language during a beating. The chapter reveals how convict contracts enforced racialized and gendered power structures that emerged in the criminal justice institutions of southern states. Through escapes, protests, and pardon petitions, incarcerated women shed light on the pervasive violence, corruption, and abuse of punishment practices that preceded state prisons. I draw on lawsuits, state archives, and historical newspapers. Convict leasing and chain gangs influenced the development of state prisons for women in the first half of the twentieth century, which I analyze in subsequent chapters.
About the Speaker
Bonnie Ernst is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Indiana University. She is a historian of gender, race, and punishment in America. Her first book, Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women’s Prisons (NYU Press, 2023), analyzes how twentieth-century women’s movements sparked protest, organizing, and reform led by incarcerated women and coalitions of attorneys and activists. She is currently working on a second book that examines the history of Black women forced into hard labor through convict leasing, chain gangs, and state prisons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Respondent
Alex Lichtenstein
About the Labor History Seminar Series
The Labor History Seminar provides a forum for works in progress that explore the history of working class people, communities, and culture; class and state policy; unions and popular political movements; and other related topics.
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