Between the Street and the State

Black Women's Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime

by Caitlin Reed Wiesner

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Series: Politics and Culture in Modern America

Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press

256 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 6 b/w

Hardcover
9781512828269
Published: September 2025

£36.00

Pre-order

Description
Authors
Praise

Deepens our understanding of Black women's anti-rape activism by attending to how their tactics shifted in response to the federal War on Crime
Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal "war on crime" offered financial and ideological support to the fledgling feminist movement against sexual violence. These entities promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable means of controlling rape, and they expected anti-rape organizers to embrace them. Yet Black women anti-rape organizers viewed police as a source of violence within their communities, not a solution to it.
Between the Street and the State examines how Black anti-rape organizers critically engaged both the feminist movement against sexual violence and the federal War on Crime between 1974 and 1994. In Philadelphia, Washington, DC, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Atlanta, activists inflected Black women's longstanding tradition of community-based caring labor with the Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and state violence. Their multifaceted and adaptable brand of anti-rape advocacy was premised on sustaining the survival of Black women and girls individually and Black communities more broadly. In this way, Black anti-rape activists countered the growing emphasis within the feminist movement on controlling rape through carceral collaborations. They acted subversively, redirecting state funds and state-funded research premised on rape control to projects that offered care to Black victims. In public education, social welfare, and public health, they instituted preventative education and emotional healing as modes of justice. At times, they outspokenly resisted carceral legislation that displaced their caring labor with punitive programs of rape control.
Spotlighting Black anti-rape organizers' enduring commitment to care work shows that the cooptation of the feminist movement against sexual violence by law enforcement entities was never total. Between the Street and the State deepens our historical understanding of Black women's tradition of anti-rape activism by attending to how their tactics shifted in response to the political realignments of the post–civil rights era.

"Caitlin Reed Wiesner demonstrates that Black girls and women were not only victims of gender violence within their communities but were also abandoned by the state when they sought justice. In this intersection, Black women anti-rape activists worked to restore the lives and dignity of Black girls and women by enveloping them in care while opposing rape reform's march toward mass incarceration. Insightful and engaging, Between the Street and the State is an impressive achievement that significantly reshapes our understanding of how racism and sexual violence intersect while highlighting the courageous battles fought by Black women activists against these issues." (Kidada E. Williams, author of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction) "In her deeply researched and deftly argued new book, Caitlin Reed Wiesner reveals how Black feminists contested sexual harm and state violence in the final decades of the twentieth century. Through tactics of subversion, diversion, and resistance, these activists privileged care and healing over the punitive, carceral solutions increasingly endorsed by policymakers and other activists during the 'post–civil rights' era. Illuminating and elegantly written, Between the Street and the State makes vital contributions to carceral studies, women's history, and African American studies, and it invites us to envision a world without interpersonal or state violence." (Paul Renfro, author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America) "Between the Street and the State is a compelling analysis of anti-rape activism in the contemporary United States. A wide array of evidence, including interviews with Black feminists in the post–civil rights era, allows Caitlin Reed Wiesner to amplify voices that have otherwise been stifled in the historical record. By centering the ideologies, strategies, and voices of Black women—as victims, feminists, and critics of state interventions—Wiesner provides significant contributions to the fields of women's history and critical legal studies. Now, more than ever, understanding the activism of the past can help sustain the ongoing struggle to care for women and fight against rape." (Dawn Rae Flood, Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts)