female heads of household worked as retail dealers or hucksters while another one-quarter worked as innkeepers and boardinghouse managers.158 Others worked as schoolmistresses, midwives, nurses, cooks, seamstresses, mantua makers, and milliners.159 Working women filled the streets of Philadelphia every day, selling their wares, shopping at markets, and running errands for themselves, their families, and their employers.160 But even these efforts were challenged by crackdowns on tippling houses, hucksters, disorderly houses, prostitutes, and fences—all important sites of work for women.
Accurate accounting of women’s wealth can be difficult to find because of highly gendered assessment practices by constables.161 But there is no mistaking how quickly a woman could go from being productively selfsufficient to unemployed and destitute. Almshouse records show the economic vulnerability of women despite the range of jobs they held. Ann Robeson kept a store with her husband on Second Street near the corner of Black House Alley, but he had deserted her many years ago.162 Mary Conkline was a chambermaid at the city tavern, with a “bad sore leg” that eventually made it impossible for her to do her job.163 Both women turned to the almshouse for support. Mr. Martin’s indentured servant Ann Dames was subject to fits that made her “incapable of being serviceable to him” and leading him to take her to the almshouse himself.164 Women who long worked in the service of others at the city hospital were especially vulnerable to illness themselves. Jenny Byrnes worked as a nurse in one of the hospital wards but became too sick to continue.165 Mary Hall served as the longtime cook at the city hospital before succumbing to illness and old age, making her a “very old helpless woman.”166 Both women were admitted to the almshouse. Women who worked hard to piece together a living in health and youth could easily become sidelined by illness, injury, abandonment, or age. The line between dutiful worker and dependent was both thin and blurry.
While penal reformers had grand visions for turning male criminals into skilled and productive shoemakers, carpenters, nailers, and weavers, they did not train women in midwifery, mantua making, nursing, bartending, or bookkeeping.167 Women’s work in prison was restricted to laundry, cleaning, spinning, and sewing—jobs leftover for the unskilled and poor and yet necessary for the maintenance of all prisons. The relegation of women’s work to distinctly domestic, unskilled, undervalued labor had several consequences. It aligned the disproportionately African American and immigrant inmates with forced domestic work, reasserting their proper place as servants in the homes of others despite the abolition of slavery and abandonment of indentured servitude. This particular sexual division of labor advanced a racialized notion of work that was not formalized within the institution until decades later. Second, it foreclosed on the wide array of work skills that women might have developed to succeed independently in the new republic, promoting instead their financial dependence on men and, as a result, reinscribing a heterosexual political economy.
But even women’s work outside prisons became less visible and less valued as a market-based economy developed in the early republic. As Jeanne Boydston has shown, women, like men, adjusted to the changing market forces that defined this precapitalist moment. While some women’s work might take place in the home, it still involved taking in out-work or increasing domestic production of items for sale or trade at the market. For women, even the visibly productive elements of household labor were becoming increasingly devalued.168 The fact that so many women engaged in so many different forms of public labor became obscured by men’s struggles to secure wage work for themselves. Working poor families long relied on the contribution of women’s wages to meet the basic necessities of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing; those slightly better off may have used the income women earned to cover “the extra expenses of taxes, medical bills, candles, soap.”169 The economy of early America was like a roller coaster. It caused nothing less than a crisis in the heterosexual political economy, breaking up families, forcing men to migrate for work and women into the marketplace. Most jobs were tied to the maritime economy, and both natural and international forces shaped the success of merchants, retailers, shipbuilders, and mariners.170 Even skilled, able-bodied workingmen became less secure in their wage-earning ability—and less able to provide for their dependents. In spite of this—or possibly because of it—men’s work became more valued and visible. Long-standing recognition of the family as an economic unit was gradually replaced by the idea of the male breadwinner. And so women in prison were trained not to take on one of the diverse and profitable jobs that gave women an important place in the colonial economy but rather to assume the position of economic dependent. Women’s labor in prison at the end of the eighteenth century not only forecast but also helped to reassert a heterosexual political economy that erased the value of their work.
Submission
Reports of women’s submission to penal authorities and their embrace of institutional work assignments stood as powerful testimonies for liberal reform, even as women themselves were largely excluded from liberalism’s promises. Women’s work in prison was less monitored than men’s, leaving ample opportunity for women to refuse to work, joke around, or even fight with each other. But misbehavior was rarely documented. Instead, in institutional records from 1794 to 1835, women were nearly always reported to be working hard. In 1801, the Visiting Committee of the Acting Committee of PSAMPP noted great productivity among the women despite the fact that “idleness remains among men.”171 The women vagrants were “generally if not all employed.” As the years went by, the Committee noted that women were either working in similar numbers as before or at an even higher rate. In 1804 it described the women’s wing as “in a better situation generally than sometimes heretofore there being more of them employed.”172 In 1805 the Committee found many prisoners needed clothing and upon purchasing linen reported that one piece of it was “made into 11 shifts and 13 shirts” by female inmates.173 The keeper reported that it took the women “their whole time nearly” to get their work done, a sign they worked steadily and dutifully.174
Though reformers refused to speak of women’s work in anything but the passive voice, they did repeatedly recognize their productivity. The Visiting Committee pointed out “Flannell was made into shirts and shifts by the vagrant female prisoners.”175 Two of the women who received the shifts, Kitty Spencer and Mary Ford, were being held in the dungeon. Kitty, described as “almost naked,” really needed much more than a shift.176 Kitty was a nineteen-year-old African American woman sentenced to nine months at hard labor for stealing, of all things, clothing.177 And so reformers noted that women helped to clothe other women in prison but did so passively.
Reports of female productivity were juxtaposed with those of male idleness. Men were reported positively only in the earliest years.178 But even then, reports of male idleness outnumbered positive accounts. In 1795, the Inspectors noted, “The stone cutters do not cut the quantity of stone they are capable of.”179 The following year, a detailed scheme of punishment through food deprivation was established for those in the nail factory who did not work to their potential. The Inspectors reported that prisoners who failed to complete a “reasonable days work” would be denied breakfast for the first day and both breakfast and dinner should they underproduce for two consecutive days. Continued failure to meet the requirements resulted in solitary confinement.180 In October 1820, the Visiting Committee noted, “About 20 females were spinning and knitting for the convicts, the males have not employment.”181 Constant reporting of male idleness fueled ongoing debates about the role of labor in punishment and the effectiveness of punishment more broadly.
Men’s manufactories were a disaster not just from a labor standpoint but also from a management one. Inspectors struggled to effectively manage the prison manufactories. Unable to sell nails made in the prison, they offered them at a discount to the public; unable to sell linen, they turned to a local warehouse, and then years later to auctions. They expanded store space in the front of the prison to better exhibit the available goods in hopes of increasing sales.182 Sometimes they overestimated the demand or realized that goods produced by prisoners did not have as high a value on the
