Reforming Women

Reforming Women Claudia L. Bushman. ''.AGood Poor Man's Wife": Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and He1Family in Nineteenth-Century New England. Hanover: UniversityPress of New England, 1981. 276 +xvipp. ~fork ThomasConnelly. The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill:The University of North Carolina Press, !980. 261+ X pp. Barbara LeslieEpstein. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth Centw:v Ame,ica. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. 188+xi pp. Estelle B.Freedman. Their Sisters' Keepers: WomensPrison Reform in America, 1830-1930 . .\nnArbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1981. 248 pp. P.G. Skidmore Thesefour volumes present useful new material on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American reform crusaders and their reforms concerning women. Connelly's book describes a general social movement, antiprostitution; theother three authors explore women's part in reform movements and begin twocenturies earlier. Included are prisons for women, religion and temperance asvehiclesfor protofeminism, and the activism of a pioneer suffragist and club woman.All the books describe issues which concerned the "middling" classes. The most successful of these volumes is Freedman's Their Sisters' Keepers. Hereis original research illuminating a narrative built upon a thesis. It is fortifiedwith extensive notes, a lengthy bibliography, and an index. There arefourteen illustrations and two useful appendices. One of these, "Personal Backgrounds of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Prison Reformers," profilesfifty involved women, summarizing for each her family and personal data,education, work and activity record. Excellent work is characteristic of Freedman, whose articles have contributed substantially to women's history. For this book she tapped several kindsof prison and government records, annual reports of groups ranging fromcharity boards and prison commissions to the W.C.T.U., personal papers, dissertations, newspapers and a plethora of modern books and articles .This book will stand as the definitive study of women's involvement inwomen's prison reform. Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 1983, 437-46 438 P. G.Skidmore Their Sisters' Keepers argues that the few middle-class women who became "angels of mercy" for female prisoners did so because for them class andthe boundary between "pure" and "fallen" women meant less than the tiesofsex. They came to define women as a sexual class. They believed their workcould enable criminal females to throw off environmental disadvantages and emerge pure, reformed. Such reformation could occur only if women prisoners were under the care of exemplary women keepers and were taught traditional women's attitudes and skills while imprisoned with other women only. A formidable task faced the early reformers. Before 1840,women wererarelv incarcerated. Those who were, landed in the same prisons as men, sometime·s in separate quarters, to await trial or to serve sentences. Their crimes were typically against public order (not persons or property) and were usuallyof a type which led to detention in local jails rather than state prisons. Allthis changed dramatically between 1840and 1860. Poor, urbanized and without traditional controls, women increasingly joined men in all types of crime.But women were still housed in male prisons and supervised by male officials. Conditions in women's quarters were wretched- overcrowded, filthy, chaotic. Abuses caused isolated scandals, but male prison reformers, concerned with rehabilitation of male criminals, seldom mentioned females. Apparently a female who failed to be virtuous and inspiring was an object of deep-seated hostility. She was beyond redeeming and deserved her fate. She neither wanted nor could benefit from constructive charity, for she obviously was of a depraved, unnatural character. Freedman quotes an Ohio State Penitentiary chaplain to illustrate the dominant attitude: "No one, without experience, can tell the obduracy of the female heart when hardened and lost in sin. As woman falls from a higher point of perfection, so she sinks to a profounder depth of misery than man" (p. 18). Freedman argues that the fallen woman was a direct challenge to the dominant social ideology of sexual purity for women. Upon this purity depended much moral power, even the very fabric of social life. A woman guilty of a crime, especially "crimes against chastity or decency:' symbolized resistance to the ideal. Her fate was neglect and disdain. In this context...