During the 1970s, grassroots activists within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Scholar-activist Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, imprisoned and institutionalized people’s rights, and gender and sexual liberation.
All Our Trials chronicles the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. 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 research, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, coalition organizing, and activist publications that cut through prison walls. In the process, All Our Trials reveals a vibrant culture of opposition to interpersonal and state violence that both transforms our understanding of 1970s social movements and illuminates the history of present struggles for transformative justice.
This new edition of an award-winning book features a foreword from acclaimed scholar-activist Sarah Haley and an afterword by Thuma. [Adapted from publishers’ description.]
ISBN: 9798888902639 | Haymarket Books
Download a Reading and Discussion Guide for All Our Trials created by Study & Struggle and the Committee to Free the Mississippi Five. This five-part study guide includes discussion questions as well as links to supplemental primary sources and reading materials from the Campaign to Free the Five.
Praise
A rich, vital, vibrant, and uncompromising history of rebellion. — Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
All Our Trials offers us a robust history of late twentieth-century radical feminist antiviolence organizing. Thuma reminds us that the activism of the present is built upon an important legacy of work that traversed movements and prison walls. If we are to build an abolitionist feminist future, we would be wise to pay attention to the antiracist queer feminist politics of these activists. We owe a debt of gratitude to them for paving the way, and to Thuma for chronicling their struggles. — Angela Y. Davis, author of Abolition: Politics, Practices, and Promises
To understand the history of abolition feminism, read this book. Emily Thuma brilliantly reconstructs the little-known insurgencies of half-a-century ago that rejected carceral feminism and reform in favor of antiracism, class politics, self-determination, abolition and revolution-a revolution that remains unfinished. All Our Trials shows us a way forward. — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
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