Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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was not formalized within the institution until decades later. Second, it foreclosed on the wide array of work skills that women might have developed to succeed independently in the new republic, promoting instead their financial dependence on men and, as a result, reinscribing a heterosexual political economy.
But even women’s work outside prisons became less visible and less valued as a market-based economy developed in the early republic. As Jeanne Boydston has shown, women, like men, adjusted to the changing market forces that defined this precapitalist moment. While some women’s work might take place in the home, it still involved taking in out-work or increasing domestic production of items for sale or trade at the market. For women, even the visibly productive elements of household labor were becoming increasingly devalued.168 The fact that so many women engaged in so many different forms of public labor became obscured by men’s struggles to secure wage work for themselves. Working poor families long relied on the contribution of women’s wages to meet the basic necessities of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing; those slightly better off may have used the income women earned to cover “the extra expenses of taxes, medical bills, candles, soap.”169 The economy of early America was like a roller coaster. It caused nothing less than a crisis in the heterosexual political economy, breaking up families, forcing men to migrate for work and women into the marketplace. Most jobs were tied to the maritime economy, and both natural and international forces shaped the success of merchants, retailers, shipbuilders, and mariners.170 Even skilled, able-bodied workingmen became less secure in their wage-earning ability—and less able to provide for their dependents. In spite of this—or possibly because of it—men’s work became more valued and visible. Long-standing recognition of the family as an economic unit was gradually replaced by the idea of the male breadwinner. And so women in prison were trained not to take on one of the diverse and profitable jobs that gave women an important place in the colonial economy but rather to assume the position of economic dependent. Women’s labor in prison at the end of the eighteenth century not only forecast but also helped to reassert a heterosexual political economy that erased the value of their work.
Submission
Reports of women’s submission to penal authorities and their embrace of institutional work assignments stood as powerful testimonies for liberal reform, even as women themselves were largely excluded from liberalism’s promises. Women’s work in prison was less monitored than men’s, leaving ample opportunity for women to refuse to work, joke around, or even fight with each other. But misbehavior was rarely documented. Instead, in institutional records from 1794 to 1835, women were nearly always reported to be working hard. In 1801, the Visiting Committee of the Acting Committee of PSAMPP noted great productivity among the women despite the fact that “idleness remains among men.”171 The women vagrants were “generally if not all employed.” As the years went by, the Committee noted that women were either working in similar numbers as before or at an even higher rate. In 1804 it described the women’s wing as “in a better situation generally than sometimes heretofore there being more of them employed.”172 In 1805 the Committee found many prisoners needed clothing and upon purchasing linen reported that one piece of it was “made into 11 shifts and 13 shirts” by female inmates.173 The keeper reported that it took the women “their whole time nearly” to get their work done, a sign they worked steadily and dutifully.174
Though reformers refused to speak of women’s work in anything but the passive voice, they did repeatedly recognize their productivity. The Visiting Committee pointed out “Flannell was made into shirts and shifts by the vagrant female prisoners.”175 Two of the women who received the shifts, Kitty Spencer and Mary Ford, were being held in the dungeon. Kitty, described as “almost naked,” really needed much more than a shift.176 Kitty was a nineteen-year-old African American woman sentenced to nine months at hard labor for stealing, of all things, clothing.177 And so reformers noted that women helped to clothe other women in prison but did so passively.
Reports of female productivity were juxtaposed with those of male idleness. Men were reported positively only in the earliest years.178 But even then, reports of male idleness outnumbered positive accounts. In 1795, the Inspectors noted, “The stone cutters do not cut the quantity of stone they are capable of.”179 The following year, a detailed scheme of punishment through food deprivation was established for those in the nail factory who did not work to their potential. The Inspectors reported that prisoners who failed to complete a “reasonable days work” would be denied breakfast for the first day and both breakfast and dinner should they underproduce for two consecutive days. Continued failure to meet the requirements resulted in solitary confinement.180 In October 1820, the Visiting Committee noted, “About 20 females were spinning and knitting for the convicts, the males have not employment.”181 Constant reporting of male idleness fueled ongoing debates about the role of labor in punishment and the effectiveness of punishment more broadly.
Men’s manufactories were a disaster not just from a labor standpoint but also from a management one. Inspectors struggled to effectively manage the prison manufactories. Unable to sell nails made in the prison, they offered them at a discount to the public; unable to sell linen, they turned to a local warehouse, and then years later to auctions. They expanded store space in the front of the prison to better exhibit the available goods in hopes of increasing sales.182 Sometimes they overestimated the demand or realized that goods produced by prisoners did not have as high a value on the open market as anticipated.183 Some charged that prison manufactories undermined the free market.184 As early as 1798, Inspectors realized the institution was deeply in debt from the “extensive credit” that was extended toward the prison manufactories.185 After years of struggling to make the manufactories profitable, Inspectors decided the prison would stop purchasing raw materials for the prisoners to craft into goods for sale. They closed down the store where goods produced in the prison had been sold for years. Inspectors reported that it was better to have convicts work “for individuals who furnish the materials,” saving them the trouble of purchasing supplies and assuming debt.186 The prison thus resorted to contracting out the prisoners’ labor to the highest bidder.187 As a result, the convicts worked for “customers” who paid a set price to the keeper for labor while providing the convicts with the necessary materials.188
These failing manufactories quickly inspired vocal criticism from those who felt that the primary purpose of the penitentiary—moral reform—was being subjugated to profit. In 1812, Judge Jacob Rush, brother of Dr. Benjamin Rush, claimed that the practice of making “money out of the bodies of convicts” could actually “destroy their souls.”189 Judge Rush condemned the way that labor came to dominate the institution at the expense of other concerns, calling the law a “public fraud” that claimed to reform criminals while instead nurturing them in a “school for vice.” Roberts Vaux later echoed the argument that attention to profit over punishment led to doom. Vaux scoffed, “The grand object was not so much the punishment and reform of the criminals, as a pecuniary balance, at the year’s end” as if financial concerns were beneath moral ones.190 In 1821, even the Inspectors themselves admitted the failure of their prison manufactory because it both lost money and failed to reform inmates.191 The failure of manufacturing was one thing, but the failure of punishment was not an option. During these hard times, reformers and Inspectors looked to the women’s side of the prison for inspiration.
Women served as a crucial site of optimism and hope for Inspectors, reformers, and jailers during a challenging, unstable period for two reasons: they seemed to work more dutifully than the men, and they more easily adopted a submissive disposition. Even when women rebelled against orders, men in charge did not take these challenges to their authority seriously. Rather, when women did not work to their full potential or challenged their authority, keepers responded to them very differently than they did to the men. Reform was nothing if not gendered, and it demanded different things of men and women in prison. For instance, on occasions that women were not working to their potential, reformers generally made excuses for them. In their January 1799 report, Inspectors noted “many idle” women convicts and described women vagrants and prisoners for trial as “many idle some dirty and some ragged.”192