Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching Book

This newly updated edition connects the past with the present, using the Clarence Thomas hearings -and their characterization by Thomas as a "high-tech lynching"- to examine the links between white supremacy and the sexual abuse of black women, and the difficulty of forging an antiracist movement against sexual violence.
Revolt Against Chivalry is the account of how Jesse Daniel Ames -and the antilynching campaign she led- fused the causes of social feminism and racial justice in the South during the 1920s and 1930s.
The book traces Ames's political path from suffragism to militant antiracism and provides a detailed description of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which served through the 1930s as the chief expression of antilynching sentiment in the white South.
Revolt Against Chivalry is also a biography of Ames herself: it shows how Ames connected women's opposition to violence with their search for influence and self-definition, thereby leading a revolt against chivalry which was part of both sexual and racial emancipation.

A superb book, a beautifully crafted biography, and one that tells a highly important story about race, sex and gender, violence, and the law in the twentieth-century South. (Suzanne Lebsock, Rutgers University)