Christopher Bradley presents the stories of black women who surmounted the combined barriers of race and gender-and whose legacy inspires our own generation.
For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era's prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%. For those women who lived and died opposing the dehumanization of confinement-physical, social, intellectual-the prospect of being bound was real, continuous, and devastating.
In the book Why Women Deserve More, Christopher Bradley provides bitter, uncompromising history that artfully depicts the characters of these intriguing, shackled yet untamed African-American women. Bradley's passionate odes also praise the modern-day inheritors of their load and light, uniting history, author, and reader in a vital legacy of struggle