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Justice, Power, and Politics
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women’s brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners’ acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.
A landmark history of black women’s imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.
A landmark history of black women’s imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.
349 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 28, 2016
37 people are currently reading
1457 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Haley
4 books5 followersSarah Haley is assistant professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
February 19, 2021
Before the word ‘queer’ was used to refer to homosexual desire it was used to describe Black women. In 1897 a Weekly News and Courier article “A Queer Colony of Female Convicts in Georgia” was written about incarcerated Black women. In the South “queer” described “Black bodies, ideas, and behaviors” (40) that challenged racist norms. In medical discourse, Black women’s bodies were demonized as “less sexually differentiated than white women’s” (6) and “outside of the binary categories of woman and man” (9). African American Studies Professor Dr. Sarah Haley argues that “Black women occupied a liminal space of gender ambiguity” as a way to sanction their abuse (92).
Dr. Haley exposes how Black women were denied the protections afforded to white women and were instead villainized by virtue of their Blackness. Under the racial logics of Jim Crow South, womanhood was a racial project. In this racist imagination “woman” signified a “subject who was vulnerable and must be protected from violence” (99) and this subject was already always white. White men would justify lynching innocent Black men under the premise of “protecting white women.” The rhetoric of inherent female vulnerability to the threat of Blackness was a smokescreen: this atrocious violence was about retaliation against Black political empowerment.
In this racist imaginary, “Black woman was an oxymoron because the modifier ‘Black’ rejected everything associated with the universal ‘woman.’ (21). This idea of womanhood as vulnerability and need of protection was never extended to Black women. Institutional violence against Black women was justified because they were depicted as inherently pathological for being. Their actual behavior wasn’t relevant because their personhood was seen as suspect and incapable of being violated.
Dr. Haley argues that “gender is constructed by and through race” (21). Foundational to white supremacy was associating gender normativity with whiteness and antinormativity with Blackness. These cultural ideas were evident in the treatment of female prisoners. Black women were assigned significantly harsher sentences than white women for the same offenses. The courts would continually cast white female offenders as “the victim of bad male influence” (22) and blame Black female criminals as possessing “monstrosity and idiocy” (22). The press presented imprisoned white women as hapless casualties of circumstance in need of rescue, while Black women were treated as inherently criminal.
Incarcerated Black women were required to perform intensive labor that was rarely expected of white women. They were required to work alongside men (forced to wear “men’s” clothes and use the same bathroom in ditches in front of men) in Georgia’s convict labor camps. From 1908 to 1936 only four white women were sentenced to chain gangs, compared to nearly 2000 Black women.
Incarcerated Black women found ways to resist this mistreatment: burning clothes, slowing down, “wearing the mask” of docility. In this way, Black women “stole autonomy over their bodies and emotional lives” (211). Free Black women activists also organized against this abuse. Selena Sloan Butler and Mary Church Terrell organized against convict camps as part of the National Association of Colored Women.
Dr. Haley exposes how Black women were denied the protections afforded to white women and were instead villainized by virtue of their Blackness. Under the racial logics of Jim Crow South, womanhood was a racial project. In this racist imagination “woman” signified a “subject who was vulnerable and must be protected from violence” (99) and this subject was already always white. White men would justify lynching innocent Black men under the premise of “protecting white women.” The rhetoric of inherent female vulnerability to the threat of Blackness was a smokescreen: this atrocious violence was about retaliation against Black political empowerment.
In this racist imaginary, “Black woman was an oxymoron because the modifier ‘Black’ rejected everything associated with the universal ‘woman.’ (21). This idea of womanhood as vulnerability and need of protection was never extended to Black women. Institutional violence against Black women was justified because they were depicted as inherently pathological for being. Their actual behavior wasn’t relevant because their personhood was seen as suspect and incapable of being violated.
Dr. Haley argues that “gender is constructed by and through race” (21). Foundational to white supremacy was associating gender normativity with whiteness and antinormativity with Blackness. These cultural ideas were evident in the treatment of female prisoners. Black women were assigned significantly harsher sentences than white women for the same offenses. The courts would continually cast white female offenders as “the victim of bad male influence” (22) and blame Black female criminals as possessing “monstrosity and idiocy” (22). The press presented imprisoned white women as hapless casualties of circumstance in need of rescue, while Black women were treated as inherently criminal.
Incarcerated Black women were required to perform intensive labor that was rarely expected of white women. They were required to work alongside men (forced to wear “men’s” clothes and use the same bathroom in ditches in front of men) in Georgia’s convict labor camps. From 1908 to 1936 only four white women were sentenced to chain gangs, compared to nearly 2000 Black women.
Incarcerated Black women found ways to resist this mistreatment: burning clothes, slowing down, “wearing the mask” of docility. In this way, Black women “stole autonomy over their bodies and emotional lives” (211). Free Black women activists also organized against this abuse. Selena Sloan Butler and Mary Church Terrell organized against convict camps as part of the National Association of Colored Women.
June 11, 2025
Formidable, if a bit repetitive through the middle! As with most works by historians, I’m drawn more to the analysis (which is so sharp here) than to loads of case studies, as much as this demonstrates important and keen research. The arguments about gender, race, and the prison system are so smart and I will be citing them in my second dissertation chapter.
June 29, 2016
Haley's research on African American women in Georgia convict camps, chain gangs, and domestic service captivity (paroled women forced into domestic service instead of having their sentences commuted) offers a critical intervention into understandings of gender under Jim Crow. The historic brutality of the carceral state is well-known to many historians but the many techniques of terror and torture inflicted on black women convicts (as opposed to their white female and black male counterparts) is less understood. When we think of violent terror from the late 19th century, we tend to focus our attention on people outside the carceral state (on lynchings, where the vast majority of victims were male). By opening a window onto the violent world of convict leasing, chain gangs, and domestic service Haley joins other scholars like Kali Gross and Talitha LeFlouria in calling for a more comprehensive accounting of American violence.
January 30, 2018
I was surprised by how invested I found myself in this topic. Southern history usually isn’t my focus, but Haley does an excellent job both historically and rhetorically working with her subject. However, there were moments where she played fact and fiction a little too much—mostly in the second chapter with two prisoners whom Haley insinuates their sexuality and does not emphasize the speculative nature of that choice. All in all, this was a very engrossing book!
November 7, 2020
In No Mercy Here, Sarah Haley examines the African American women’s experience in convict leasing and chain gangs of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly in Georgia and Alabama. Haley also discusses the making of the Jim Crow south and how this racial disparity contributed to the extreme brutal conditions that incarcerated people, particularly African American women, endured. This carceral system dehumanized and devalued its prisoners as they weathered conditions far worse than they suffered as enslaved people.
Initially, these women suffered extreme work conditions within the convict leasing system, frequently working alongside their male counterparts. In 1908, the convict leasing system gave way to chain gangs where the incarcerated suffered even more brutal conditions that they often could not survive.
Haley spends a chapter discussing the anti-convict leasing activism of Black and white women, following the work of Mary Church Terrell, Selena Sloan Butler, and the WCTU. Did the work of these activists help or hinder this broken carceral system? Convict leasing was eliminated but merely made way for the use of chain gangs.
Haley also examines records, letters, and pleas for parole and commutations. Many of these pleas fell on deaf ears. Most of these women wanted to live the last few years of their lives in freedom, quietly with their family. In this section, Haley clearly shows the disparity between the incarceration experience of African American women and white women. White women prisoners rarely served much if any of their light sentences, where African American women rarely served less than the extremely long sentence they received for trivial (or not) crimes.
These women suffered brutal abuse and dehumanizing treatment. They resisted but endured. Their plight was documented in their letters and pleas but also poems and songs. Haley looks at the early blues music of notables such as Bessie Smith and Victoria Spivey, who chronicled the African American women’s carceral experience. These songs live on today and are no less potent in their message.
Initially, these women suffered extreme work conditions within the convict leasing system, frequently working alongside their male counterparts. In 1908, the convict leasing system gave way to chain gangs where the incarcerated suffered even more brutal conditions that they often could not survive.
Haley spends a chapter discussing the anti-convict leasing activism of Black and white women, following the work of Mary Church Terrell, Selena Sloan Butler, and the WCTU. Did the work of these activists help or hinder this broken carceral system? Convict leasing was eliminated but merely made way for the use of chain gangs.
Haley also examines records, letters, and pleas for parole and commutations. Many of these pleas fell on deaf ears. Most of these women wanted to live the last few years of their lives in freedom, quietly with their family. In this section, Haley clearly shows the disparity between the incarceration experience of African American women and white women. White women prisoners rarely served much if any of their light sentences, where African American women rarely served less than the extremely long sentence they received for trivial (or not) crimes.
These women suffered brutal abuse and dehumanizing treatment. They resisted but endured. Their plight was documented in their letters and pleas but also poems and songs. Haley looks at the early blues music of notables such as Bessie Smith and Victoria Spivey, who chronicled the African American women’s carceral experience. These songs live on today and are no less potent in their message.
July 2, 2018
I read this for a college class on Car Culture, and found it full of the expected specialty jargon used in college textbooks. It was very disturbing to read of the racial incidents during the rise and growth of the automobile culture that paralleled the Jim Crow era. That black women were arrested for loitering and then assigned to work on the chain gangs alongside men to build roads (while white women weren't incarcerated for loitering or if they were, were assigned easy jobs like mending clothes at the prison) seems so cruel. The author contrasted photographs of white and black women, pointing out the obliviously racially motivated ways in which they were portrayed. The charts also showed how arrests were racially motivated and provided cheap labor for the growing car industry. As a white female, I'm often ignorant of the prejudices black women have endured over the years that come up in so many areas of life that seem unrelated to race (like cars and the building of automobile roads).
October 24, 2017
“Cobb’s distance from womanhood was at the heart of her alleged crime, the murder of a child whose sex is never mentioned”
Haley discusses the theme of femininity stripped from black women during the late 1800s. This theme worked with the white supremacist ideology that black women were in no threat and more than often, “perpetrated” a threat to white children, women and men. This was a time when whiteness was close to ladyhood and Blackness would not only strip a woman of any embodied womanhood but place her closer to masculinity.
Haley takes the reader on a unfortunate but necessary journey of what it was like to be a black women in the Jim Crow era and imprisoned in a work labor, or chain gang camp, facing not only racial inequalities but heartily gendered.
An enlightening, impressive, and necessary read.
Haley discusses the theme of femininity stripped from black women during the late 1800s. This theme worked with the white supremacist ideology that black women were in no threat and more than often, “perpetrated” a threat to white children, women and men. This was a time when whiteness was close to ladyhood and Blackness would not only strip a woman of any embodied womanhood but place her closer to masculinity.
Haley takes the reader on a unfortunate but necessary journey of what it was like to be a black women in the Jim Crow era and imprisoned in a work labor, or chain gang camp, facing not only racial inequalities but heartily gendered.
An enlightening, impressive, and necessary read.
October 20, 2017
This book was so, so excellent. Haley takes stories of incarcerated Black women during Jim Crow and puts them into contexts of racialized gendered ideology to show how little change had been materially enacted since the fall of slavery, even as the way for modernity was literally being paved by these incarcerated women. Haley does an amazing job of weaving together historical sources with theoretical concepts done by other scholars--like damn if this is possible for a history book why can't historians write more like this!!!!! (I know why, but like ugh.) It's such a good, important book that any white feminist needs to read.
January 16, 2020
3.5 - I really liked parts of this, including placing black women at the center of the narrative and including “speculative accounting”. This book argues that the judicial and prison system of Georgia in the late 1800s and early 1900s assisted in the social construction of race and gender, specifically that black women were defined as other, ignorant, bestial, and non-human while white women were defined as passive and domestic and needing to be protected. Interesting and convincing. It was a difficult book to read because the subject matter is difficult and the vocabulary is really academic.
September 21, 2022
This book is truly remarkable. Haley's theorization of the black female body is (at least to me) revolutionary. The co-constitution of race and gender within the carceral state create Jim Crow in ways I couldn't have imagined. Especially as someone who grew up in Georgia (in a town mentioned on page 109) I was struck by how this was the world my grandmother and great-grandparents inhabited, but I never heard about. In short, the book is quite readable and imminently theoretical, truly an achievement.
October 30, 2019
I had to read this book for a class I am in.
Usually, I dread reading for class because I feel like I don't get to read what I want.
But this book, this book right here was/is amazing.
Dr. Sarah Haley wrote an important history around gender and punishment in the Jim Crow south.
Basically, white folks really were garbage.
Kind of getting a peak inside what actually started America's modern prison system
Usually, I dread reading for class because I feel like I don't get to read what I want.
But this book, this book right here was/is amazing.
Dr. Sarah Haley wrote an important history around gender and punishment in the Jim Crow south.
Basically, white folks really were garbage.
Kind of getting a peak inside what actually started America's modern prison system
March 28, 2021
This book is DENSE. As much as I enjoyed Haley's writing style, it definitely requires you to use all of your brainpower. Also, I found it to be a bit redundant; as much as I enjoyed it and learned a lot from it, I felt as though Haley was making the same points with different historical examples. While it discusses incredibly important information about gendered racial terror in the Southern carceral system, it is definitely something that I would only pick up for academic purposes.
November 5, 2021
An outstanding combination of analysis of practices and discourses. Haley creates a really entertaining and painful narrative of black women's imprisonment while giving to these women the actual recognition of their sabotage strategies. I can see traditional historians critiquing this book, but I understood her speculative writing as a necessary tool to vindicate the political action of black communities.
May 20, 2020
its a really good book - clear, detailed, consistent, writing is good. also makes a strong and clear conceptual contribution to prison studies.
July 4, 2021
Not a light read, but so well researched and written. Recommend for anyone interested in how slavery is deeply embedded in the history and reality of policing.
May 13, 2021
Haley has written a fantastic and important account of the history of black women's convict labor in Georgia and its relationship to the making of Jim Crow-era racial capitalism. An incredibly rich archive combined with incisive and rigorous interdisciplinary analysis more than does justice to the lives and struggles of the women whose stories Haley recovers, which making clear the stakes of these women's exploitation and oppression and their freedom dreams, acts of sabotage, and cultural practices, embodied in blues feminism, in the history of US white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. This is a text that should have a major impact on prison studies, labor history. African American Studies, Women's , Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies.
February 2, 2017
This was a good, if depressing book, about the incarceration of black (and to some extent white) women in Georgia from 1890-1930 or thereabouts. I think her portrayals are accurate, and the themes of white supremacists trying to "unsex" them as women is, as well. At times, I think she repeated these themes a bit too often, but then again, perhaps it bore being repeated.
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December 4, 2017365.43089 H168 2016
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews