Abstract
Activist efforts were underway on behalf of incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident women prisoners in the 1970s and early 1980s. Author Emily Thuma chronicles the collective actions of grassroots women activists in All Our Trials. The cases of Joan Little, Inez Garcia, Dessie Woods, and Yvonne Wanrow mobilized powerful grassroots campaigns to uncover violence and racialized criminalization.
Chapter 1 examines the celebrated Free Joan Little campaign as a space for black liberation, feminist, and prison movements. The Free Joan Little campaign calls attention to the anticarceral feminist agenda that was in place in the 1970s. Thuma utilizes an intersectional lens to analyze women who were identified as political prisoners. The chapter examines the role of gender and power over the issue of rape. The chapter points to the debates involving feminist antiviolence activists and the availability of criminal justice funding and prioritizing of criminal legal reform.
Chapter 2 discusses the impact of freedom campaigns on new organizations working on issues involving incarcerated women in North Carolina, New York City, and San Francisco. Thuma examines the use of medicalized forms of behavior in federal and state prisons in the 1970s. The chapter focuses on the efforts of a feminist-led group, the Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence that was formed to prevent the construction of a locked treatment center for “violent women” prisoners at a mental state hospital in Greater Boston. Chapter 2 highlights how activists theorized of the gendered, racial, and economic dimensions in U.S. prisons to discuss the existing controversies in the prison and the state. Alternatives to incarceration including community-based efforts were advocated to contribute to a fledgling movement for prison abolition.
Chapter 3 advances the efforts of feminist prison activists to utilize media in their organizing to forge lines of communication with incarcerated communities and institutions, to make visible the prevailing forms of violence in women’s prisons, prisoners in mainstream, and leftist political milieus. The chapter examines conversations in two key newsletters, Through the Looking Glass and No More Cages, to advance a discussion of prisoners’ resistance to the violence of incarceration and role of social control in institutions across the country.
Chapter 4 focuses on street-level organizing by activists. The chapter examines how activists tackled the police in sanctioning and perpetuating violence against women of color. The chapter addresses the varied nonstatist strategies of emergency response and prevention that were put in place to combat gender, racial, and economic violence. Black feminist organizations were at the forefront of this movement to abolish prisons. The chapter contributes to the understanding of “antirape work” to inform the debates about criminal justice funding and reform. The chapter traces the origins of the Coalition for Women’s Safety in the murder crisis of 1979 and explores its purpose and mission. Next, the chapter turns to the organizational leadership of the Combahee River Collective in the coalition, to study its influence on a group of Black women including lesbian socialists and their contributions to an intersectional analysis of power and violence. In addition, the chapter analyzes the development of black feminist leadership at the Rape Crisis Center (RCC) in Washington, DC to investigate state violence. Finally, the chapter discusses the alliance between the Coalition for Women’s Safety and the Willie Sanders Defense Committee, and the alliance between the DC RCC and Prisoners Against Rape to reflect on the black feminist politics to analyze race and gender, rape and racism, and state violence.
The culminating chapter presents Thuma’s narrative of her role in feminist social movements and the carceral state with an emphasis on activism. The book covers an interesting time line from the 1970s to early 1980s to bridge together a discussion of anticarceral feminism and feminist prison abolitionism to create an awareness of the interdependence of struggles, multiple feminisms, and coalition building. This book will serve as a resource to graduate students interested in research on the history of anticarceral feminism, social movements, and prison uprisings and contribute to their understanding of gender violence.
