Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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they were “unable to procure a sufficient number of spinning wheels to employ all the women,” particularly since many of the wheels were destroyed in a fire started by the men. When women did not work efficiently or dutifully, the Inspectors generally had an excuse for it.
Women who resisted the orders were easily handled by skilled guards who knew how to manipulate and cultivate submission from them. One woman, “an old offender” who tried to burn the prison down in the early 1790s, was described as “ungovernable” and “of an extreme bad character.” But she was no match for a keeper who knew how to handle her emotions and cultivate her submission. Inspector Caleb Lownes recalled that once she realized the keeper “was easy” and did not provoke her “to keep up her passions” she was left with no reason to resent him and thereby “at length submitted.”193 Submission was the necessary state for this particular woman—or any woman—to achieve. This woman not only obeyed all the rules of the house after this incident, but promised that she would “perform two days work, each day” for the duration of her stay. Hard work and appropriate submissiveness were expected from women in prison.
There are several explanations for such dramatically different responses to men and women’s idleness. Women were viewed as easily reformable because they worked hard and demonstrated the expected deference to male authority figures most of the time.194 By demanding deference and submission of the female convicts—two traits central to women’s proper role in society—reformers ensured women would have a greater likelihood of reformation than the men. Inspectors had less to prove in overseeing the women. Female prisoners were trained to assume their proper roles in the heterosexual political economy: as domestic caretakers, economic dependents, and subordinate followers of men. Inspectors did not aspire to make independent, self-sustaining productive citizens of women in prison. There was no path to citizenship for women inside the prison—and few options for them once outside it.
Enslaved and bound women of African descent who challenged the authority of white men and women who claimed possession of them were also no match for the disciplinary regime of the prison. While many references to women in prison avoid mention of race or ethnicity, one visitor made special note of how easily black women received and submitted to the authority of the white keepers. Robert Turnbull, a young lawyer visiting from South Carolina, toured the prison and wrote extensively of his experience. His essay was widely read both domestically and in Europe and powerfully demonstrates the insidious correlation between enslavement and imprisonment in dictating the power relationship between white men and black women.195 Representations of black women having positive experiences in prison advanced liberal ideals of individual advancement in the face of massive structural obstacles. When visiting the women’s ward, Turnbull was most fascinated by “a young negress” who requested a discharge, though having served less than half her two-year sentence. He reported that her conduct “had been regularly pleasing” and her work ethic admirable. Although her request was rejected, Turnbull was impressed with how she received the bad news, writing, “She declared herself satisfied with his reasoning, and resumed her employment at the spinning-wheel with cheerfulness and activity.”196 Thus black women prisoners served a critical political and discursive function as emblems of model inmates. Turnbull characterized imprisonment as a positive force in the lives of black women that strengthened the ideological legitimacy of institutional punishment.197 Black women in particular were used to advance the idea that punishment promised to be a positive force in their lives, just as racist justifications of slavery portrayed the enslaved as happy and taking pleasure in their work in service to their master. Each time a reformer highlighted the successful reform of a black woman in prison, he or she justified the expansion of incarceration.
Accounts of female prisoners—African American, European immigrants, and a few Anglo- and Irish Americans—embracing their captors were vital in reassuring reformers and Inspectors of their own benevolence. Turnbull described a vivid scene of heartfelt reunion between women prisoners and a keeper who had been away. He wrote, “With the most heartfelt expressions of joy, they hastened from their seats to welcome him on his return, and on his part, he received them with a mixed sense of tenderness and satisfaction.”198 This was celebrated as evidence that characteristics of sentimentality were adopted in the prison itself, enabling the keeper to serve as “a protector—an instructor—not an ironhearted overseer!” This language of benevolent paternalism aimed to obscure the violence of punishment and distinguish it from slavery. These expansive feelings shared by inmates and keepers characterized a soft, warm, and comfortable paternalism expected of the family, not the state. Women prisoners were to be reformed through their relationships within the prison family, which further bolstered the heterosexual political economy.
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Women’s labor was deemed a great success because women dutifully complied with their work orders, thereby demonstrating both the viability and the effectiveness of institutional punishment. This seemed to be the right remedy for those rebellious runaways and others who refused to work and resisted the authority of those who claimed a right to their labor. Forced labor under the watchful eye of a jailer was hardly a change from the conditions under which many women regularly labored, in either slavery or freedom. Men who proved resistant to authority under the wheelbarrow law continued to undermine efforts of the state to discipline them into a productive labor force.
The privilege of presiding over the domestic sphere was increasingly held up as the proper place for women, even as some middling and elite Anglo-American women agitated for women’s education, equality, and political power. While some men might tolerate or even embrace changes demanded by their own wives and daughters, they did not extend this view to the masses, the poor, or the organization of the prison. Rather, penal authority pushed back against all sorts of challenges to the social order. Enslaved, bound, or hired working women would have squeezed domestic work in between other wage-earning duties, but this was not an option in prison. The predominantly Irish and African American women who filled the prison were marked as capable of only the most undervalued forms of work.
The prison was at the forefront of a movement that narrowed the possibilities for women’s work and lives in the American city. Much of the ideological work of labor was unspoken. The sexual division of labor was hardly explained or celebrated, but it was more highly prized than profit. The strict adherence to this principle reveals how invested the state was in naturalizing differences and establishing the social category of gender. The great accomplishment of this period was the largely invisible way in which the sexual division of labor became formalized. Only where women were concerned was the totalizing effect of penal labor realized. Women’s labor was not profitable per se, but it was indispensable. This process served to naturalize a feminine gender that was both incapable of skilled work and fundamentally submissive. There was no way out for women. Those who refused to work, spoke out against visitors, or generally misbehaved were deemed incorrigible, fallen, and worse than male criminals. Those who worked quietly, submitting to penal authority and serving as model inmates to observers, were credited with nothing more than being women—if more properly so than when they first arrived.
CHAPTER 2
Sentimental Families
WHILE THE WAR for Independence from Britain looms large in its impact on late eighteenth-century American politics and culture, older forces, including the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening, inspired a great deal of social transformation as well. The Enlightenment was characterized as “the age of reason,” in which human progress would be measured through advances in science, medicine, technology, culture, and politics. Enlightenment writers from Cesare Beccaria to Montesquieu produced progressive theories of criminal justice that rejected the legacy of European brutality and aimed to put logic, predictability, and fairness at the heart of punishment. In part because of the tremendous importance of these writings, the revolutionary generation relished the opportunity to craft laws fit for democracy. While these ideas inspired many people to question longstanding practices of violent, corporal, and excessive punishment, the Great Awakening compelled large numbers of Protestants to take action to alleviate the suffering of the masses and pursue