Last week, I wrote about the gendered nature of prisoners' resistance against the backdrop of coverage about the Georgia prisoners’ strike. I received a couple of e-mails from readers who wanted to know about some good books that address women in prison. This is an area of particular interest to me so I was happy to share some of the books that I have read and found helpful over the past 15 years.

The questions that I received lead me to believe that others might be interested in a short history of punishing women. I have previously addressed the history of capital punishment for black women here and here.

I taught a class a few years ago where I shared the story of Mary Dyer with my students. None of them had of course heard of her. However she is emblematic of how white women came to the attention of authorities in Colonial America. Most white women of that time who got in trouble with the law were singled out for religious transgressions or “crimes” of some sort. Dyer was a puritan woman who came to sympathize with Quakerism. She was convicted and banished in 1659 and chose to defy her sentence by returning to Boston. For her crime, she was hanged in 1660.

White women in New England were subjected to witchhunts when they challenged the male power structure in any way. Think about the Salem Witch Trials as an example of this. In the 1600s at least 36 New England women were executed for the crime of being a “witch.”

Early in American history, women were not subjected to long term imprisonment. Capital and corporal punishment were more common for women who committed any “crimes.” Most of these crimes revolved around sex (adultery) and religion (witchcraft). I have already addressed the types of crimes that black slave women were accused of and punished for in the colonial era and beyond in the posts that I referenced earlier.

In the 19th century, only a small number of women were imprisoned. As such, they were considered as an after-thought.

Fry Visits Newgate Prison

In 1813, British reformer Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate prison in London. She wrote that the women there had been reduced to ‘riot, licentiousness and filth.’ Fry’s concern as a Quaker woman of her time was to help the “fallen” women prisoners to become domesticated women. Fry provided clothing but also started sewing classes for prisoners (Ash, 2010).

Across the pond, at the Auburn State Prison in New York, at one time there were 70 women prisoners housed in a one-room attic (Shelden, 2010). The prison chaplain, the Reverend B.C. Smith, remarked on the conditions at Auburn after visiting: “To be a male convict would be quite tolerable; but to be a female convict, for any protracted period, would be worse than death” (Rathbone, 2005).

Cristiana Rathbone (2005) in her excellent book “A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars” writes that some women at Auburn spent “as long as fourteen years locked inside (p.68). The conditions for women prisoners at Auburn were harrowing to say the least:

“So many went mad that workers in the prison began to complain about their shrieking. When a group of inspectors were sent to investigate, they found that the women’s room presented ‘a specimen of the most disgusting and appalling features of the old system of prison management at the worst period of its history. We know of no subject of legislation which, in our opinion, calls more loudly for immediate action than this.’ (Rathbone, 2010)”

Randall G. Shelden (2010) writes about how female prisoners were treated in the 19th century:

“The conditions of the confinement of women were horrible — filthy, overcrowded, and at risk of sexual abuse from male guards. Rachel Welch became pregnant at Auburn while serving a punishment in a solitary cell; she died after childbirth as the result of a flogging by a prison official earlier in her pregnancy. Her death prompted New York officials to build the Mount Pleasant Prison Annex for women on the grounds of Sing Sing in Mount Pleasant, New York in 1839. The governor of New York had recommended separate facilities in 1828, but the legislature did not approve the measure because the washing, ironing, and sewing performed by the women saved the Auburn prison system money. A corrupt administration at the Indiana State Prison used the forced labor of female inmates to provide a prostitution service for male guards (p.134).”

The guard who beat Rachel Welch so brutally was named Ebenezer Cobb. He was convicted of assault and battery and fined $25. He was allowed to keep his job.

The Mount Pleasant Prison Annex for Women unfortunately “quickly proved defective (Rathbone, p.69). According to Cristina Rathbone (2006):

“Though under the nominal supervision of a female warden, Mount Pleasant, as it was called, remained under the real control of Sing Sing’s male administrators. Thus windows in the women’s building continued to be sealed for fear of male prisoner’s morals. Punishments were corporal, frequent, and harsh; food was poor; and the lack of adequate hospital and nursery facilities meant mortality rates remained extraordinarily high.

Conditions became so bad so quickly, in fact, that less than five years after it opened — and after a riot during which women threw food at the warden and seemingly worse, ‘made the air ring with ribald songs and lusty yells’ — inspectors recommended that the place be shut down. The problem was that no one wanted the women. If nothing else, Mount Pleasant had at last freed the state’s male prisons from the ordeal of housing what one official called those ‘purveyors of moral pestilence.’ With little alternative, then, administrators were forced to keep Mount Pleasant in operation. Desperate, they hired Eliza Farnham to run it (p.69-70).”

Eliza Farnham was a remarkable woman who fought for changes in how women prisoners were treated. Ultimately, she was forced to resign in 1848 after a concerted effort to discredit her. After Farnham’s Mount Pleasant experiment, it would be years before another women’s facility would open in America. It wasn’t until 1873 when the first prison for women, the Indiana Women's Prison, opened in the U.S.