Emily Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prison forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. All Our Trials explores the work of these activists who placed criminalized women, and the multiple violences they confronted, at the heart of their organizing. Drawing on extensive archival research, Emily Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of movements for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in a struggle that continues in today's movements against mass incarceration and for transformative justice.

Emily Thuma is an assistant professor of politics and law at the University of Washington, Tacoma. All Our Trials is her first book.

"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