As I continue to work on my Laura Scott project, I am currently steeped in reading about the history of women prisoners. As such, I am running across a number of mentions about interracial same-sex relationships between working class and poor women who were incarcerated in late 19th century and early 20th century reformatories. What I want to particularly focus on in this post is the way that race and racism were coded and influenced the consideration of these relationships.

Women’s sexuality was heavily policed in the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries. Many women found themselves locked up in places like the Bedford Reformatory for Women in New York for sex-related “crimes” (including prostitution, out-of-wedlock sex, and lesbian relationships). Sarah Potter (2004) explains:

For example, in 1915, Bedford had a total of 184 new commitments, 102 of whom were imprisoned for sex-related crimes. Some were there on explictly sexual charges, such as common prostitution, violation of the 1901 Tenement House Law, or soliciting. Others were charged with crimes that implicitly assumed sexual promiscuity, such as vagrancy with no known occupation or place to live, frequenting disorderly houses, or running away from home as an “incorrigible daughter,” who presumably offered men sex in exchange for shelter (p.396).

Cheryl D. Hicks (2009) and Sarah Potter (2004), both writing about the Bedford Women’s Reformatory, suggest that prison administrators often documented “harmful intimacy” and “undesirable relations” between black and white women prisoners. Hicks, for example, finds several references in the files of white female prisoners that she studied to women being “fond of colored girls” or “seen passing notes to black inmates.” She adds: “Administrators [sic] portrayed ‘harmful intimacy’ as white women’s heterosexual attraction to black women, whose dark skin color supposedly represented virility (p.435).”

It is unsurprising that black women were the ones painted as the aggressors in these relationships even when the evidence contradicted this portrayal. Additionally, black skin was equated with sexual promiscuity and aggressiveness. Hicks points out that the prison administrators sought to explain white women’s same sex desires “as a longing for masculinity (p.447).” In this way, they cast black women in the role of men. In contrast, “white women’s attraction to one another were categorized as nothing more than crushes…with no serious connection to homosexuality (p.448).” Hicks adds: “Thus, white inmates, whether aggressors in the affairs or not, maintained a normative and heterosexual status (p.448).”

The idea that young white women (even if they were poor and of immigrant origin) would eschew the conventions of heterosexuality and embrace interracial same sex relationships was intolerable to the prison administrators. After all, one of the promises of reformatories was that they would work to properly domesticate wayward young women so that they could become good wives and mothers. Here again Potter is enlightening:

Reformers understood inmates’ sexual passion toward other women much as they understood their heterosexual transgressions—as threats to the existing gender and sexual order because it led them to ignore middle-class conventions of courtship, racial endogamy, and sexuality confined within marriage (p.398).

Reformers believed that working-class white women were particularly prone to deviant sexual behaviors in general and therefore transferred that behavior to other women once they were incarcerated. According to reformers and prison staff, these young women just could not control their sexual acting out with men or with women. They were over-sexed, period.

Potter features the example of a prisoner named Lebofsky to illuminate how some young working-class women negotiated their same-sex desires within the Bedford Reformatory. Far from being ashamed of her sexuality, Lebofsky seems determined to establish intimate and sexual relationships with other women and in particular black women at any cost:

The most striking expression of an inmate’s sexual desire appears in the letter of Lebofsky, a white woman who frequently became involved with black women. Convicted because she left “home, associate[d] with vicious and disorderly persons, and was in danger of becoming morally depraved,” the orthodox Jewish Lebofsky was eighteen-years-old when she arrived at Bedford in 1918. She faced repeated punishments when caught writing notes to her romantic interests. Her disciplinary report for her first few months in the institution noted her general behavior was “silly, foolish, more or less trouble about colored girls all the time,” and that she had received five punishments for “notes, colored girls, screaming.” Her interest in black women continued in the following months: “Truthful, willing, is interested in some colored girl every few weeks.” Six months into her stay at Bedford, she was still punished for passing notes to black women and still had a “colored girl for friend.” Finally, in mid-1919, it appeared the reformatory’s efforts had been successful, with her disciplinary record commenting that she “has been a model girl these 3 months. Has given up colored girls…. No punishment.'””

Apparently, officials misjudged Lebofsky’s conversion. On November 11, 1920, a love note from Lebofsky was taken from an African American inmate. Freeman. The note articulates Lebofsky’s passionate sexual desire. For example, Lebofsky repeatedly described explicit sexual fantasies throughout the note. She wrote that “some fine day I’m going to grab you and make you warm me up and fuck me and I’ll be willing to get punished every day in the week for you and you only. . . . I cant not get enough jazz—but youd have to look out for I bite awful when I am cumming You don’t blame me do you sweetheart I’ll be getting some sweet when I take a bite on you.” (p.401-402)”

As is evident in the excerpts from Lebofsky’s notes, some working-class young women were unwilling to cloak the sexual desire that they felt with the flowery and chaste language that characterized some of the letters from middle-class and upper-class women of the era who had intimate same-sex relationships or “Boston marriages”. During a certain period in the 19th century, such intimate female friendship relationships were more tolerated among higher income white women. But these relationships were never considered to be sexual in nature. These working-class women prisoners turned this genteel understanding on its head and as such were severely punished for their transgressions.

I am still trying to understand how these same-sex relationships between women prisoners might play out within custodial facilities like San Quentin prison where Laura Scott spent so many years. There is very little written about women who were incarcerated in such facilities because they tended to be of color and poor. When women prisoners are studied, the reformatories rather than the penitentiaries tend to be the focus. Very little information is readily available about how women prisoners at facilities like San Quentin fared. I am unfortunately learning this in my research.

For those who might be interested in reading more about same-sex relationships and desire among women in reformatories, I have attached Sarah Potter’s article HERE (PDF).