A grassroots history of resistance to gender violence and the carceral state
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation.
All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalised and marginalised women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilisations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women's movement's strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggleone that continues in today's movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1
1. Lessons in Self-Defense: From “Free Joan Little” to “Free Them All” 15
2. Diagnosing Institutional Violence: Forging Alliances against the “Prison/Psychiatric State” 55
3. Printing Abolition: The Transformative Power of Women’s Prison Newsletters 88
4. Intersecting Indictments: Coalitions for Women’s Safety, Racial Justice, and the Right to the City 123
Epilogue 159
Notes 165
Bibliography 199
Index 219
"All Our Trials transforms our understanding of both the history of feminism and of the carceral state. In her deeply compelling account, Thuma documents the work of activists who centered the lives of the most marginalized in their social justice imaginary and their political agenda, producing an anticarceral feminist politics and an expansive analysis of the interconnections between interpersonal and state violence. A crucial and timely read as we wrestle with gender, race, and violence today."--Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality