The Home
Introduction
While reading the Diary, Hopper often references that women were sent to the “Home.” Since Hopper does not define the Home within his entries it becomes unclear exactly where he is sending many formally incarcerated women. In order to better understand exactly what the Home does and means to these women it is vital to understand the history first.
Historical Background
Before the establishment of the Female Department and the Home, women did not have their own separate prisons, rather they were housed in the same prisons as men. However, women’s daily schedule varied greatly. While men went to “workshops, messhalls and exercise yards,” the women prisoners were secluded and left in their quarters for the duration of their sentence.[1] Food and their feminine activities, such as sewing, were brought to them. In the mid-1800s, it was decided that “traditional prison architecture was unsuitable for the care and treatment of women, whose milder, more passive, nature required a gentler environment,” thus continuing the gendering of the prison system. [2] The new system for women prisoners, “adopted the late nineteenth century penology of rehabilitation, but they tailored it to fit what they understood to be women’s special nature. To instill vocational skills, they used not prison industries but domestic training. Inmates were taught to cook, clean, and wait on table.”[3] All of these tasks resembled those of very traditional gender roles. In 1835, Mount Pleasant, the first women’s prison in the United States, opened in Ossining, New York as a separate part of Sing Sing.[4]
In 1844, the Prison Association of New York was founded. Its main goal was the “amelioration of the condition of prisoners.”[5] This association encompassed any and all incarcerated individuals. However, it was soon determined that incarcerated woman needed their own type of support group that could advocate for their needs specifically. Isaac Hopper was a huge supporter of this idea and encouraged it in any way he could. Therefore in 1845, The Female Department of Prison Association of New York was founded. Years later in 1853, the Female Department would separate from the Prison Association and become chartered as the Women’s Prison Association (WPA). This became “the nation’s first organization dedicated solely to working with criminal justice-involved women and their families.”[6] In conjunction with their association they would also have a house that would act somewhat similar to a halfway house for women after they are released from prison. The WPA argued that, “that little effectual could be done by the discharged female convict without a place of reception, where she could be preserved from evil influences and subjected to beneficial ones, while a situation was being found for her.”[7] This house would come to be called “The Home for Discharged Female Convicts” or The Home for short.[8] The WPA emphasized that, “when a woman leaves prison penniless, or with a few shillings in her pocket, her almost inevitable fate is a return to vice, unless an asylum be at hand” but with a home available to them it becomes easier to avoid these vices.[9] The Home was opened on June 12th, 1845.
A Gendered Prison
Upon their release, women prisoners were viewed as “hopelessly fallen” while male prisoners were let off for their crimes. For the public at this time, which was heavily influenced by traditional gender stereotypes, it seemed ‘natural’ that men would be capable of committing crimes or acts of violence. However, when it came to women who were imprisoned it went against the belief that woman’s nature was gentle and timid. Therefore after being released from prison both men and women faced a multitude of challenges. It was often inferred that it was easier for men to repair their image in society and re-acclimate. However, for women they were often dismissed by their families and friends and lacked a support system to enable them find alternatives to committing crimes. Thus, the Home aimed to provide women with that needed support system. The Home was operated by women who followed and preached traditional female gender roles.[10] This was evident through the tasks and activities that the Home’s staff had the women perform, such as household domestication and skills for raising a family. It is obvious that these women did not have a choice in whether or not to partake in the practices of womanhood. One author and researcher, Nicole Hahn Rafter, stated that,
“the criminal justice system became a mechanism for punishing women who did not conform to bourgeois definitions of femininity.”[11]
Thus, she emphasized the never ending cycle of traditional acts of womanhood that were implemented on women at this time in the Home and the women’s prison system.
Author and historian, Estelle B. Freedman, in her book, Their Sisters’ Keeper, was shedding light on the differences between society and the women who worked at the Home. She wrote,
“in contrast to most prison officials and male reformers, who condemned the fallen women as a social outcast, these women insisted on removing the stigma that separated them from their fallen sisters. As one of their reports explained, ‘we would approach the fallen woman, and when all the world turns away with loathing from her misery, we would take her by the hand, lift her from her degradation, whisper hope to her amid her despair, teach her lessons of self-control, instill into her ideas of purity and industry, and send her forth to work her own way upward to her final destiny.’”[12]
According to the First Report of the PANY, non-incarcerated women should help incarcerated women because they knew and shared the same common interests since they were both the same sex.[13] This was seen as one of the only ways that women could be helpful during the 1800s, by assisting each other. With helping one another came instilling traditional notions of womanhood. However, it is worth noting that going against these gender roles would in turn, in the Home staff's eyes, lead to committing crimes. Therefore, the cycle was formed where women are taught by each other to act a certain way or do particular things and failure to do so gave them the title of "fallen."
The Home in Action
The goal of the Home was similar to the Prison Association's mission of helping formally incarcerated woman get re-acclimated to society, find employment, and avoid those aspects of their lives that troubled them before. The Home’s motto represents their goal, “Never Despair.”[14] All women were welcomed and their stay there was voluntary. They were asked to follow the rules and be willing to work. They assisted with household labor such as kitchen work, were taught how to sew, and were taught lessons in “reading, writing and arithmetic.”[15] They were not allowed to, “leave the premises, or make purchases, without the approbation of the Matron.”[16] They had to avoid all “profane and indecent language,” and give up using tobacco and alcohol.[17] By following these guidelines they were allowed to live in the Home until they were prepared to leave.
In the book, The Helping Hand, written by, Mrs. Caroline Matilda Kirkland, one of the women who ran the Home, she emphasized that women were had a greater disadvantage after being released from prison then men. She stated,
"A woman who has ever been imprisoned – a discharged female convict – must necessarily be an outcast from society. Who will employ such an one? What family will receive as an inmate a creature fresh from the penitentiary? Who can trust a woman who has been convicted of theft? What mother will introduce among her daughters or her servants one familiar with the Tombs? It cannot be expected."[18]
Where Did They Go?
It is worth noting the success and failures that the Home had during their first few decades of operation. As you can see from the two House Reports that are above, many of these women came and went to a variety of different places. The first image represents a table showing 1845 to 1851 for the Home. While the second image displays just 1859 for the Home and the breakdown of just that one year. It is evident from both of these images that the Home helped some few hundred women find places to go within just the first few years of being operational. According to the Home’s annual reports, “it served as temporary shelter for more than 1,300 women, more than 800 of whom were listed as either ‘Irish’ or ‘widow’ or both.”[19] Another way to explore their success rate is to look at a few women’s stories in particular.
One woman whose initials were B. S. came from Blackwell’s Island to the Home. She, according to the women who ran the Home, was one of their “most hopeless cases.”[20] She lived in the Home for a few months until she acquired her first employment in Flushing, NY. She then moved into a home by herself however due to her health she decided to seek a place in the country. She found a home with, “the family of a clergyman” and there she did “remarkably well.”[21]
Another woman who went by S.C. was also considered somewhat hopeless, however, she showed “occasionally such encouraging signs that we [the Home] did not dare reject her.”[22] She was often very violent and known for losing her temper. Additionally, she, like many other guests in the Home, turned to religion for help. Within a year she was completely changed and was referred to as kind and pleasant.
Lastly M.M. was a woman the Home consider “hardly human” when she first arrived. She was elderly so in the prison system she was often overshadowed and forgotten. While at the Home she greatly improved as one matron put it, “it is a common observation in the house how much M, has improved.”[23]
Abigail Hopper Gibbons
The Home and WPA was run by a large group of individuals who devoted time and resources to helping these women in need. One of these individuals was Isaac Hopper’s daughter, Abigail Hopper Gibbons. She, similar to her father, took an interest in abolition and prison reform. Abigail was heavily influenced by Quakerism as well and utilized their values in her reforms. However, like her father, she resigned her membership of the Society later in her life.[24] One article refers to her as a “Forgotten Feminist” due to her large involvement that often gets overlooked. She created the Female Department that later became the WPA. She was known for “lobbying for better conditions for the incarcerated and for separate jails for female prisoners” and for the employment of police matrons, or female prison officers.[25] Abigail also helped establish the Isaac T. Hopper Home (named after her father) and joined the board of its overseers. She brought with her a “new approach to women offenders” and a belief that it would take more than just better conditions in prisons to help women.[26] People who worked alongside Abigail remarked that sometimes she was “condescending, and often controlling, in her work with her poorer clients.”[27] However, her reforms made her into a “trail blazer” as her biographer, Margaret Hope Bacon called her. Abigail followed “her conscience where it led her, to new developments in work with women prisoners.”[28] Without her push for a separate department and space for women’s prison issues to be addressed many formally incarcerated women would have been without hope and a future.
Once again in The Helping Hand, Kirkland explained why a home was a necessity for helping these women. She argued,
“But the difficulty of procuring board in decent families, for women fresh from prison, proved so great, that is became evident to all that the Female Department could do nothing materially to benefit the subjects of their care, without a HOUSE in which to receive them; a temporary HOME, where kindness, order, neatness and industry, might all be brought into action, to fit them for residence among the regular and the good, who would, it was hoped, be induced to give them a trial in that best of all moral schools, the humane and religious private family.”[29]
Conclusion
By analyzing the Women’s Prison Association, it is evident that without the establishment of the Home and the assistance of Abigail Hopper Gibbons incarcerated women would not have been as successful in making the transition back into society during the mid-19th century. However, it also becomes very clear that the Home and other systems established to help women at this time were extremely gendered and instilled traditional gender roles upon the women as a way of 'fixing' them. Today the WPA is still involved in advocacy and reform movements that work to continue to change the current prison system. The Home remains operational today and helps newly released and homeless women. It is important to recognize the success of the Home and the steps that were being taken during the period Hopper wrote the Diary.
Footnotes
[1] Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Change (New York: Routledge, 2017), xxvi.
[2] Ibid., xxvii.
[3] Ibid., xxviii.
[4] Ibid., 16.
[5] “First Report of the Prison Association of New York,” (New York: Jared W. Bell, Printer, 1844), 3.
[6] "History & Mission," Women's Prison Association, 2019, accessed April 24, 2019, http://www.wpaonline.org/about/history-and-mission
[7] Kirkland, C.M, The Helping Hand. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), 30.
[8] Ibid., 13.
[9] Ibid., 36.
[10] Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Harbor: The University of Michigan, 2000), 31.
[11] Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice, xxii.
[12] Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 32.
[13] “First Report of the Prison Association of New York,” 4.
[14] Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 49.
[15] Ibid., 57.
[16] Ibid., 62.
[17] Ibid., 61.
[18] C.M, Kirkland, The Helping Hand. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), 38.
[19] Andi Wang, “For Over a Century, a Home For Women Who’ve ‘Sunk So Low,’” Bedford and Bowery, 2019, accessed April 14, 2019, http://bedfordandbowery.com/2016/12/for-over-a-century-a-home-for-women-whove-sunk-so-low/
[20] Kirkland, The Helping Hand, 98.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 99.
[23] Ibid., 101.
[24] Elizabeth A., O’Donnell, review of Abby Hopper Gibbons: Prison Reformer and Social Activist, by Margaret Hope Bacon, George Fox University 6, no. 2 (2002), 212.
[25] “Abigail Hopper Gibbons,” The Forgotten Feminists Museum, WordPress, 2019, accessed April 27, 2019, https://www.forgottenfeminists.com/abigail-hopper-gibbons/
[26] O’Donnell, review of Abby Hopper Gibbons, 213.
[27] Margaret Hope Bacon, Abby Hopper Gibbons: Prison Reformer and Social Activist, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), xvii.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Kirkland, The Helping Hand, 31.