Printing Abolition

Abstract

Chapter 3 analyzes women’s prison newsletters as a feminist counterpublic that enabled incarcerated women to communicate with one another and with anticarceral feminist activists in the “free world.” Two newsletters, Through the Looking Glass and No More Cages, which were produced by lesbian feminist collectives from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, document prisoners’ resistance and collective action against gendered and racialized violence. Addressing the chasm between a prisoners’ rights movement focused on men’s institutions and a feminist antiviolence movement increasingly enmeshed with the carceral state, these newsletters created solidarity between criminalized women and those outside the walls.