In Chained in Silence, Talitha LeFlouria offers a rich and vibrant study of women ensnared in Georgia's convict labor system from the end of the Civil War through WWI. She seeks to address two weaknesses in the historiography of southern prison, labor, and gender studies. First, she chides historians of convict labor for paying scant attention to woman prisoners, though she warmly praises and builds on Mary Ellen Curtin for her work on the role that black women played in Alabama's penal regime. Second, she urges scholars of black working class women to expand their canvas. While acknowledging that “wage-earning poor black women” found work primarily in domestic and agricultural labor, she underscores the significance of “unwaged, bound black female labor” (pp. 5–6, 64). In Georgia, unlike Alabama where the State's prison officials and convict lessees observed “gender norms,” convict lessees employed these women in industrial labor, often working them alongside male prisoners. Women prisoners in Georgia could be found laboring in logging, brickyards, saw mills, along railroad tracks, in broom manufactories, and in the coal mines (though the evidence for this industry is less clear) (p.76). Convict lessees, LeFlouria notes, hired prisoners out of economic expediency and had no qualms about exploiting these women as “non-gender exclusive” labor. In one Georgia camp, black women prisoners “plowed fields, sowed crops, paddled through rivers of cotton, felled trees, sawed lumber, ran gristmills, ginned cotton, forged iron, cooked meals, cleaned camp quarters, and washed their faded strips” (p. 12).
By locating women in these wide-ranging forms of labor, LeFlouria comes to her central argument—these women were at the center of the modernizing postbellum New South. She describes these women as “modernizing instruments” and underscores the New South's march towards “modernity.” In making this argument, LeFlouria is at pains to distinguish Georgia's management of its prisoners from the exigencies of slavery. Unlike slave owners, neither Georgia's postbellum governments nor its various convict lessees had any interest in having the prison labor force grow in number through childbirth. Some women gave birth while in prison, but that rationale of convict labor meant that lessees provided scant accommodations to pregnant women. They were treated mercilessly and exploited horribly. The convict lessees “reviled” maternity. Pregnancy diminished the value of these women as workers, rather than enhance their value (p. 190).
If LeFlouria is on firm ground making this argument, she is not entirely compelling on the impact of these women on the New South economy. While convict labor helped bridge the gap between the agrarian slave-based economy to the industrializing world of the New South, the number of women leased to industrialists between 1873 and 1899 never exceeded more than 3.6 percent of the convict labor force. Nor are we told the degree to which convict labor contributed to Georgia's GDP during the years in which the lease operated (pp. 11, 66, footnote 16). The vast majority of freedwomen remained in rural areas in the postbellum South and those that migrated to cities like Atlanta by and large entered domestic service (pp. 24, 31). LeFlouria did not need to underscore the significance of black women convict laborers as modernizing agents of the New South to analyze the anomalous position of these women in the Georgia's New South economy. She is at her best when she describes the lives of these women. They emerge as far more than statistics, but skilled workers with complex positions in the convict lease system. Mattie Crawford, with whom LeFlouria opens her text, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. She initially worked in a brickyard, became a highly skilled blacksmith, then later worked at the state prison farm where she became a “trusty” and the farm's sole blacksmith, all the while circumventing gender specific work and finding herself in liminal positions in the prison labor pecking order.
LeFlouria also shines in her analysis of the brutal sexualized forms of punishment that convict lessees and their hirelings inflicted on women prisoners and their gender specific forms of protest and resistance. Overseers subjected the women working on railroads to naked or seminude public floggings. With their buttocks, bosoms, and vaginas exposed, the whipping bosses beat the women ruthlessly and publicly. Other convict lessee employees, as well as their jailed counterparts, would have witnessed these floggings. Hearkening back to antebellum norms, some overseers forced prison women to lay across a log and, with a woman prisoner's head between his knees, he would flog her on her naked buttocks (pp. 71–72).
Prison women resisted conditions imposed upon them by the prison authorities and convict lessees. Adopting forms of resistance reminiscent of subordinate classes in diverse times and places, they shirked work, destroyed property, feigned illness, ran away, ignored and cursed their guards, and “stole”/”took” goods that would ameliorate the condition of their lives. LeFlouria provides a particularly forceful analysis of one particular form of resistance—the decision of women working in the brickyards to burn their uniforms. Not wanting to be “defeminized” and forced to wear pants instead of skirts, they both objected to the masculinization of their outward appearance and simultaneously made their work in the brickyards more difficult since long skirts were not propitious sartorial gear near the brick ovens (pp. 85–94).
Based on wide-ranging sources, Chained in Silence provides a powerful and necessary addition to convict labor studies. It's particularly superb in its complex portrayal of the work and social experiences of Georgia's prison women. It also, however, provides a compelling overview of structural transformations in the convict lease system, tracing the fiscal and ideological origins of convict labor. Georgia's convict labor system began with the outsourcing and sub-contracting of laborers to work in a range of industries and farms, but moved towards single-sex farms, with government officials viewing the latter as reformist. In reality, awful conditions still pertained. Georgia also established a state prison farm, which presaged industrial agriculture (pp. 156–57), and ultimately placed women prisoners in chain gangs to work on roads, bridges, and public works. As the contemporary carceral state gains evermore and necessary attention, LeFlouria's well-written and accessible study should be read by scholars and the general public alike.
