Epilogue

Abstract

This chapter concludes that it is within the historiographical space of convict labor studies that the women prisoners' contribution to the forging of New South modernity has tended to be measured in terms of productivity and profit alone. While the book has shown that female convicts did in fact supply a rich source of labor and profit to southern industrialists, there are other considerations to be made in the assessment of a woman's worth to the postbellum carceral state. From an institutional perspective, the black female presence helped foster significant changes to the penal system of New South Georgia and was the catalyst for early prison reform movements. Albeit by force, African-American women prisoners also executed new forms of labor that remained untried in the free labor marketplace, broadening the overall scope of black women's work in the postemancipation South.