Breaking histories of silence and invisibility, Wall Tappings presents an international collection of women's writings, from prisons around the world and across centuries. “These are the marginal texts in a tradition of marginal texts,” writes Judith A. Scheffler in introducing her groundbreaking anthology of writing by women prisoners. Unique in its geographic and historical ranges, this rich collection gives voice to women whose stories have been long neglected. Speaking from settings as diverse as a Roman prison cell in 203 AD, the labor camps of Siberia in the 1930s, and a Philippines prison in the 1980s, these writers explore the ways in which actual incarceration rests in the shadow of imprisonment within larger society.

Contributors include Saint Perpetua, Madame Roland, Vera Figner, Lady Constance Lytton, Agnes Smedley, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Ethel Rosenberg, Lolita Lebrón, Ericka Huggins, Carolyn Baxter, Assata Shakur, Beatrice Saubin, and Nawal El Sadaawi, as well as many unknown women.

In memoir, letters, diaries, essays, fiction, and poetry, these writers affirm the power of expression. They write to vindicate themselves, to strengthen their beliefs, to call out against prison deprivations, to celebrate relationships and solidarity with other women, and to comfort themselves and their children under the duress of separation. Their motivations provide the organizing themes of the book. However diverse their purposes may be, the writers “unite,” as Scheffler says, “in condemning an institution that labels them worthless and attempts to destroy their humanity in the name of justice.”

The first edition of Wall Tappings, published in 1986, received the Susan Koppelman Award from the Women’s Caucus of the Popular Culture Association. The new edition has been substantially expanded and updated. Biographical introductions give context for each contribution, and an updated, annotated bibliography offers a unique resource for teachers, researchers, and activists.

For course use in: criminology, world history, literature of social movements, political science, sociology, women’s studies, world literature.