Editor’s Introduction

The examination of music in prison has a long history in American music scholarship.¹ Yet, there has been very little written on the subject of women’s prison music. This special issue is a first attempt at documenting and understanding the music making that women do while incarcerated. Who makes music? Who is the audience? What bearing does the institution have on that music? For what reasons do women make music? What critical issues about music and incarceration emerge when considering gender? The four essays included here are as eclectic as their authors’ disciplines—ethnomusicology, music education, theater, history, and playwriting. These distinct perspectives offer a broad exploration of a complex subject.

Complicating this topic are three intersecting elements: the way that prisons operate, the nature of music, and gender. At first glance, prison seems a clearly delimited site, bounded by razorwire, thick walls, and surveillance towers. Its mission appears to be clear: to provide custody for criminal offenders. And yet, when examining the music made there, the prison becomes a bewildering place, stretching to accommodate multiple agendas that at times conflict with and at times are complicit with the custodial mission. For example, music fosters unlikely collaborations, offers momentary escape, and has potential for expressive subversion. The role of gender adds another layer of analytic dimensionality in that women’s prisons operate differently than men’s prisons and representations of the female prisoner are equally distinct.

The essays in this issue lay groundwork for the study of women’s prison music. They appear, however, within a pre-existing gaze of the female criminal. Though faint, this image has its roots in the early days of the American prison and at the birth of modern criminology.

References to music in women’s facilities gain consistency in the mid-nineteenth century as prison reformers built new facilities expressly for women.² Many of the new facilities offered a comprehensive differential treatment toward female offenders, including alternate designs of the prison compound. Architects created a simulation of homes with a European cottage–style plan set on a large but secluded expanse of land. These environments addressed a notion of female criminality, seen then (and in part now) as a failure of domestic obligation. Middle-class prison reformers had goals of instilling virtues of “true womanhood,” as opposed to the virtues of work and discipline that inspirited the operation of men’s prisons. The predominant models for men’s prisons of the time enforced regimes of silence, encouraged routines for industrial work, and isolated the individual to do penance with God.

In contrast to the silence at men’s prisons, music was viewed as an appropriate tool for instilling domestic virtues in women’s facilities. Music lessons were a part of many of these reformers’ lives and thus a tool for reforming the female criminal.³ As superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women at Framingham from 1884 to 1899, prison reformer Ellen Cheney Johnson included music, as well as flowers, farm animals, and a nursery, in her facility. Emma Hall, matron of the Detroit House of Shelter from 1869 to 1874, added private rooms with “flowers, pictures, music and home industries” in an attempt to create a model of domestic life.⁴ While much of the music mentioned during this period is sacred, Eliza W. Farnham, matron of the women’s section of Sing Sing Prison from 1844 to 1848, instituted a secular plan of education with literature, music, and poetry. Farnham abolished the rule of silence, believing the women’s heightened sociability put their nervous systems in danger when not able to speak to each other.⁵ Music for the women at Sing Sing was part of an education meant to prevent them from falling back into criminality, a criminality believed to be even more depraved than that of their male counterparts.⁶

This fear of the female criminal is expressed in the writings of Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Italian criminology pioneers from the biological school who wrote their seminal text, The Female Offender, in 1895. Amid phrenological and behavioral musings, they describe “natural” female characteristics in order to...