Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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could be transformed by imprisonment and “gradually reconciled to labour and industry.” The key to this process was a careful balance between discipline and encouragement, delivered through a “strict but not cruel superintendence.”137 The American Museum was a popular publication that enjoyed a diverse readership, including some of the most powerful men in the country.138 Failure to address the gendered dimensions of penal reform, then, was intentional—and not because people did not realize that women were imprisoned.
Women’s productive labor was in fact vital to the maintenance of the institution.139 By the 1790s, women made the clothing for both themselves and male prisoners. Inspector Lownes reported, “Most of the clothing, at present, is spun, wove, and made up in the house, and is designed to be so altogether in future.”140 This was modeled after the system used in the House of Employment, where women were reportedly employed at “carding, spinning, knitting, sewing, & c.” for decades.141 Spinning was a common task for women and a staple of institutional work regimes.142 Women produced coarse linen for other convicts to wear and fine linen for sale to the public.143 Women worked at “washing and cleaning their apartments.”144 Vagrant women were left with the more repulsive task of “picking Hair.”145 Inmates picked a variety of materials for various uses: hair for bedding, okum for building, and wool for clothing. Picking hair was a “disgusting” assignment that reportedly could “create distemper.” A former inmate complained that the smell was so awful as “to cause many of them to vomit, and set all hands to coughing.”146
The number of references to naked prisoners or those “said to have no cloathing” highlights the urgency of the task at hand for women charged with making clothes. The Visiting Committee of PSAMPP reported in 1804 one “young woman of the name of Sarah Keys who is said to have no cloathing but a shift, Sarah Hopple in near the same situation.”147 The material used to make the clothing was “tow-linen,” the grade of material often used for “wagon-covers and house-cloths, not even bleached.”148 This was the same grade of cloth specially imported to clothe slaves in Caribbean and southern colonies. Men assisted women with clothing production, as they wove the fabric while women “made up” the article itself.149 This was consistent with artisan work practices also going out of fashion during the period. Women and children spun, men wove, and women sewed the clothing. Women’s labor in prison was both indispensable and hidden, much as the work of enslaved and indentured servants was for centuries. The system of sex-segregated labor in which women produced much of the clothing and bedding used by prisoners cultivated a culture of men’s domestic dependence on women and women’s economic dependence on men in return. The prison-based economic system exploited women’s labor for the gain of the institution. As a prisoner, a woman sustained male prisoners for nothing in return.150
African American and first generation immigrant women faced greater limitations and were disproportionately restricted to domestic work as servants, seamstresses, and laundresses. It was generally impossible for women to earn enough money to cover their expenses, pay off fines or fees, and have anything to keep for themselves. The only existing record of a financial account for a woman in the penitentiary’s early years reveals that the low pay rate scarcely came close. The account of Elizabeth Clinton from York County covers the period from December 31, 1803, to April 15, 1804. In that time, she received provisions worth $13.60 along with shoes $.93, blankets $2.50, and clothes $5.98, costing a total of $23.01. Her total earnings paled in comparison. She was “compensated” $5.00 for her washing and $7.60 for her sewing, a total of $12.60, leaving her indebted to the institution for $10.41.151 Records such as these were more commonly kept for prisoners from counties outside Philadelphia because city commissioners sought reimbursement from surrounding counties.
The fulfillment of the domestic tasks of the penitentiary necessitated a steady flow of women into the prison. This remarkable dimension of the relationship between gender and punishment has scarcely been acknowledged by either reformers or historians. This correlation is only noted in a reprinted account from a British prison that PSAMPP circulated in 1790. The passage argued that a larger prison could hold more women who could do more work—and even be offered more diverse duties.152 The system required the imprisonment of enough women to get the work of the prison done. Inspectors may have welcomed the imprisonment of skilled spinster Mary Davis and others like her who could train women and oversee the production of clothing.153 A consistent population of women in prison enabled the management to ensure sufficient coverage of certain tasks, such as cleaning, spinning, making clothing, and caretaking. This is verified by the fact that women’s prison activity was always productive and never punitive. While a treadmill was authorized to be built in the city’s prisons, it was directed at men “to be used as a species of hard labour for such male prisoners as are liable to be placed to such punishment.”154 Popular opinion was against having women on the treadmill because there were other forms of employment more “congenial to the habits of their sex.”155 This remark refers not only to labor that was not physical but more importantly for work that was domestically productive.
Institutional work regimes narrowly defined and undervalued the productive labor of women, but beyond the walls of the prison, women’s work took many different forms and played a crucial role in early American economies.156 Women worked in public markets, both formal and illicit, selling and bartering goods. They kept shops, taverns, and inns. Servants and slaves would handle whatever tasks they were assigned in homes, shops, and markets before picking up side jobs to earn extra money in their free time. For poor women, work always expanded far beyond the four walls of home. Economic pressures as early as the 1760s forced even middling women to take on some paid work.157 In the 1790s, one-third of female heads of household worked as retail dealers or hucksters while another one-quarter worked as innkeepers and boardinghouse managers.158 Others worked as schoolmistresses, midwives, nurses, cooks, seamstresses, mantua makers, and milliners.159 Working women filled the streets of Philadelphia every day, selling their wares, shopping at markets, and running errands for themselves, their families, and their employers.160 But even these efforts were challenged by crackdowns on tippling houses, hucksters, disorderly houses, prostitutes, and fences—all important sites of work for women.
Accurate accounting of women’s wealth can be difficult to find because of highly gendered assessment practices by constables.161 But there is no mistaking how quickly a woman could go from being productively selfsufficient to unemployed and destitute. Almshouse records show the economic vulnerability of women despite the range of jobs they held. Ann Robeson kept a store with her husband on Second Street near the corner of Black House Alley, but he had deserted her many years ago.162 Mary Conkline was a chambermaid at the city tavern, with a “bad sore leg” that eventually made it impossible for her to do her job.163 Both women turned to the almshouse for support. Mr. Martin’s indentured servant Ann Dames was subject to fits that made her “incapable of being serviceable to him” and leading him to take her to the almshouse himself.164 Women who long worked in the service of others at the city hospital were especially vulnerable to illness themselves. Jenny Byrnes worked as a nurse in one of the hospital wards but became too sick to continue.165 Mary Hall served as the longtime cook at the city hospital before succumbing to illness and old age, making her a “very old helpless woman.”166 Both women were admitted to the almshouse. Women who worked hard to piece together a living in health and youth could easily become sidelined by illness, injury, abandonment, or age. The line between dutiful worker and dependent was both thin and blurry.
While penal reformers had grand visions for turning male criminals into skilled and productive shoemakers, carpenters, nailers, and weavers, they did not train women in midwifery, mantua making, nursing, bartending, or bookkeeping.167 Women’s work in prison was restricted to laundry, cleaning, spinning, and sewing—jobs leftover for the unskilled and poor and yet necessary for the maintenance of all prisons. The relegation of women’s work to distinctly domestic, unskilled, undervalued labor had several consequences. It aligned the disproportionately African American and immigrant inmates with forced domestic work, reasserting their proper place as servants in the homes of others despite the abolition of slavery