Naomi’s Reviews > No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity > Status Update

⚠️Ch.1”For black women, the construction of their bodies as monstrous meant not only that their political and economic power would be limited, but also that they would be subject to disproportionate arrest and imprisonment.”

⚠️Ch.1”While the Civil War might have produced an opportunity for new definitions of gender and gender roles, the narrative of exceptional white feminine vulnerability became critical to the maintenance of white supremacy through the dissemination of discourses of virtue and domestic order.”

Ch.1”The transition from slavery to a ‘free’ southern economy based upon coerced wage or contract labor was a historical process in which the hierarchy of bodies had to be reconstituted, reconsolidated, and reasserted, and the threat of black political or economic advancement needed to be thwarted.”

⚠️Ch.1”The South's economy was built upon the cultural project of racial differentiation, and Cobb's representation provided the material otherness upon which the iconography of white supremacy and white womanhood rested.”

Ch.1”Eliza Cobb's story is representative of the experience of black women in general, whose sentences to convict labor included gendered forms of racial terror including rape and the attendant violence of compulsory childbirth and familial
estrangement.”

⚠️Ch.1”Eliza Cobb's story is representative of the experience of black women in general, whose sentences to convict labor included gendered forms of racial terror including rape and the attendant violence of compulsory childbirth and familial
estrangement.”

Ch.1”Yet because of these traumas and the prevalence of rape by prison guards whose technologies of force included the lash, the pressure to be an inconspicuous model prisoner in order to receive a pardon, and the gun, it is more likely that she was raped.”

Ch.1”…medical ledgers indicate that she was hospitalized for ‘labor/giving birth’…eleven months after she was convicted of infanticide. It is possible that Eliza Cobb ‘consented’ to have sex with another prisoner only two months after arriving at a predominantly male convict camp, barely a year after being raped and forced to hide her stillborn child from her mother.“

Ch.1”In popular press accounts black women were often referred to as negresses, female but altogether distinct and anathema to the construction of normative womanhood. The terms ‘negro woman’ and ‘negress’ were often used in the same article, sometimes in the same paragraph, and reflect an uneasy, antagonistic relationship between blackness and femininity in the white popular imagination.”