| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.1 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEWS

Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910. By Kali N. Gross. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xii, 260 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $21.95.)

Kali N. Gross's Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 is a well-documented study that provides demographic data on the crimes, class, and geographic origins of Philadelphia's black female population. But this study is also much more. It offers the reader a glimpse into the social milieu of the world in which these women lived, worked, and committed crimes, and it contextualizes it within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Gross contends that "black women's criminal experiences elucidate the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality are mediated and how black womanhood is negotiated within the criminal justice system" (2). Moreover, she explores the meaning of democracy and argues persuasively that the actions of the courts and the penal institutions, reform advocates, and the press were designed to preserve white supremacy at the expense of justice for black womanhood. Colored Amazons is significant because it also sheds light on the lives of a segment of working-class and poor black women whose experiences largely had been ignored by feminist historians and African Americanists whose studies focused on the black middle and upper classes.

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