Troublesome Women

Erica Rhodes Hayden uses multiple sources, especially institutional records, to investigate female criminality and incarceration in antebellum Pennsylvania. She documents that the majority of incarcerated females were young, working-class women of color; most had committed nonviolent offenses such as larceny and public drunkenness. Discussions of women participating in riots sparked by political or economic grievances, such as Pittsburgh's rolling mills riot in 1850 and Philadelphia's 1844 nativist riots and 1851 fugitive slave riots, are particularly interesting. The second part of Hayden's book investigates women's experiences in Pennsylvania's penitentiaries and county jails. Unlike their male counterparts, female inmates were generally not subject to prisons’ demands for “total silence and isolation” (p. 102). In fact, many of these convicts were allowed to walk the penitentiary grounds and to act as cooks or servants to wardens. But as Hayden notes, such liberties could lead to women's exploitation. Failure to enforce prison protocols also reflected institutional neglect of female inmates and the belief that most could never be rehabilitated since they had transgressed prescribed views of femininity

Criminology · Femininity · Juvenile delinquency · Neglect · Political science · Politics · Prison · Psychiatry · Punishment (psychology · Silence · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology

• Punitive Pregnancy

  Open Access•Candace Buckner•Journal of the American Academy…•2025

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