Talk with You like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York (review)

In her book Talk with You like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, Cheryl Hicks presents a complex portrait of working-class black female criminality in early twentieth-century New York City. She succeeds particularly in describing the social relations that contribute to the labeling of women as criminals, including the politics of respectability and working-class activism. This intervention is in a similar vein as other feminist historiographies, including work by the scholar Gunja SenGupta (From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-19181 [New York: New York University Press, 2009]). Talk with You like A Woman looks beyond the framework of institutions to create a more complete picture of how and why black women came into contact with probation and prison. Students and scholars of feminist history and criminology will find this work provocative for its depiction of working-class black women's struggles inside and out of the criminal justice system. By placing her subjects' race, class, and sexuality, in addition to gender, as fundamental influences in their experiences, Hicks creates a black feminist intervention that diverges from mainstream, white feminist theory on criminality.

Talk with You like a Woman is divided into three sections, the first of which addresses the "protection" of black women in New York City. During and after Reconstruction, black migrants headed north seeking opportunities not present in the Jim Crow South. A significant number of unmarried black women were part of this migration. Hicks quotes a reference to W. E. B. DuBois about the "excess" of black women in the city and the dangers this population posed to the patriarchal black family. Hicks shows that these women, rather than posing an inherent danger to the social fabric, were in fact often physically at risk to the dangers of police brutality. As they tried to make new lives for themselves, using work and the politics of respectability to gain standing in their new communities, these women faced representations that characterized them as masculine and, thus, inherently incapable of earning social respect. Additionally, this masculinization led to brutal treatment at the hands of police, who saw all unmarried black women as potential criminals.

Hicks uses extensive archival research to demonstrate the ways in which black women's criminal behavior was largely constructed in response to social relations. Using hundreds of interviews conducted by prison officials at Auburn and Bedford, the main penal institutions for women in New York City, she shows that black women's social standing could greatly impact their treatment in court and at the hand of prison administrators. For example, two women who killed (or cremated ex post facto) their unmarried sister's infant were acting to preserve a claim to respectability, one that they thought tenuous even after several decades of living and working in the area. Hicks writes, "The Smith sisters' lives were shaped—and threatened—by their ability to present themselves as moral black women" (140). That is, their will to conform to an external code of morality, dictated by black and white middle-class women reformers of the time, compelled them to commit a criminal act. This contextual description of the social pressures incumbent on working-class black women complicates the dominant representations of black women as criminals who actively disregarded moral order.

This approach is a black feminist project because it places black women's experiences at the center of analysis. Rather than asking where black women fit into the reform movement in New York in the early twentieth-century, Hicks asks how race, class, and gender influenced the labeling of these women as criminals during that time. In so doing, she continues the project set forth by other feminist criminological historiographers. She privileges the experiences of young black women who struggled to balance family, inadequate wages, back-breaking work, and leisure time in the context of the larger black struggle...