held up as the proper place for women, even as some middling and elite Anglo-American women agitated for women’s education, equality, and political power. While some men might tolerate or even embrace changes demanded by their own wives and daughters, they did not extend this view to the masses, the poor, or the organization of the prison. Rather, penal authority pushed back against all sorts of challenges to the social order. Enslaved, bound, or hired working women would have squeezed domestic work in between other wage-earning duties, but this was not an option in prison. The predominantly Irish and African American women who filled the prison were marked as capable of only the most undervalued forms of work.
The prison was at the forefront of a movement that narrowed the possibilities for women’s work and lives in the American city. Much of the ideological work of labor was unspoken. The sexual division of labor was hardly explained or celebrated, but it was more highly prized than profit. The strict adherence to this principle reveals how invested the state was in naturalizing differences and establishing the social category of gender. The great accomplishment of this period was the largely invisible way in which the sexual division of labor became formalized. Only where women were concerned was the totalizing effect of penal labor realized. Women’s labor was not profitable per se, but it was indispensable. This process served to naturalize a feminine gender that was both incapable of skilled work and fundamentally submissive. There was no way out for women. Those who refused to work, spoke out against visitors, or generally misbehaved were deemed incorrigible, fallen, and worse than male criminals. Those who worked quietly, submitting to penal authority and serving as model inmates to observers, were credited with nothing more than being women—if more properly so than when they first arrived.
CHAPTER 2
Sentimental Families
WHILE THE WAR for Independence from Britain looms large in its impact on late eighteenth-century American politics and culture, older forces, including the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening, inspired a great deal of social transformation as well. The Enlightenment was characterized as “the age of reason,” in which human progress would be measured through advances in science, medicine, technology, culture, and politics. Enlightenment writers from Cesare Beccaria to Montesquieu produced progressive theories of criminal justice that rejected the legacy of European brutality and aimed to put logic, predictability, and fairness at the heart of punishment. In part because of the tremendous importance of these writings, the revolutionary generation relished the opportunity to craft laws fit for democracy. While these ideas inspired many people to question longstanding practices of violent, corporal, and excessive punishment, the Great Awakening compelled large numbers of Protestants to take action to alleviate the suffering of the masses and pursue salvation for themselves. Together, these forces shaped a culture of humanitarian sensibility among elite and middling men and women.
When botanist and future Massachusetts senator Manasseh Cutler visited Philadelphia in 1787, he met with many local luminaries, including Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Willson Peale. Cutler stayed at the well-appointed Indian Queen on Third Street between Market and Chestnut, along with several men attending the Constitutional Convention. Cutler’s hosts wined and dined him, canceling other appointments to spend time with him and show off the best of what their city had to offer. Cutler was part of a new generation of men who asserted themselves as leaders in the revolution’s wake.1 Humanitarian sensibility required that Cutler cultivate an awareness of everything around him. On his walk around the area of the State House and over past Walnut Street Jail, Cutler’s senses were awakened in ways both positive and negative. He described the walk around the State House as being full of “beauty and elegance,” only to have his own experience of “pleasure and amusement” diminished by “one circumstance that must forever be disgusting.” Cutler contrasted the elegance of the prison building with “its unsavory contents.” He seemed appalled that it was impossible for him to escape the sights and sounds of the inmates, complaining, “In short, whatever part of the mall you are in, this cage of unclean birds is constantly in your view and their doleful cries attack your ears.” Cutler was made very uncomfortable by the prisoners’ disruption. He claimed, “Your ears are constantly insulted with their Billingsgate language, or your feelings wounded with their pitiful complaints.” His remarks expose the limits of the sentimental project. Though sensibility required that he intervene in social matters and mitigate the suffering of others, Cutler seemed more rattled by his own discomfort than that of those imprisoned.2
The cultivation of sensibility was a central value for this generation of elite and learned men. They embraced sensibility—“human sensitivity of perception”—as a way to improve themselves and transform society.3 Late eighteenth-century sensibility combined both reason and feeling in what could be an uneasy balancing act.4 Men aspired to balance between the embrace of feeling and a fear of the effects of too much feeling in themselves and others. The expansion of penal authority was rooted in this tenuous quest. Early American culture privileged sentiment as a valued individual pursuit. Sensibility had its roots in eighteenth-century England and later “broadened the arena within which humanitarian feeling was encouraged to operate.”5 Reformers targeted many different groups with their efforts, including the poor, the enslaved, alcoholics, immigrants, and prisoners.
The legacy of European punishment and popular perceptions of inmates together made prison an implicitly degraded, vile, and hardened place. When public punishment brought the degradation of the prison into the city streets, Pennsylvania’s leading statesmen were moved to action. The sentimental project would face its ultimate test in working with liberty’s prisoners. Far from politically neutral, however, it became a vehicle for the naturalization of sexual differences while imposing white upper- and middle-class family values on predominantly African American and Irish working and poor people. By reaching out to men and women in prison, offering assessments of their progress and assistance in securing pardons from the governor, male reformers could cultivate a refined, controlled, and benevolent masculinity. They stood in contrast to the brash, aggressive, unfeeling keepers and guards who maintained ultimate authority over inmates. They sought to differentiate themselves from men of lower classes who were “hardened” while encouraging gendered notions of work and dependency among those imprisoned.
The sentimental family became an important idea in punishment, as it was in larger social discourses.6 Punishment called for imprisonment and total isolation from one’s family. This manipulation of family ties and dependencies was dynamic, contradictory, and violent, though done in the name of enlightenment and progress. Visitation with loved ones was restricted while reformers inserted themselves forcibly into the lives of the imprisoned, asserting their own ideas of proper visitation. When given the chance to articulate their needs and dreams in petitions for pardons, inmates crafted stories of love, loss, and family that were highly gendered and sentimental. Ideals such as virtue that had long been cast outside the reach of immigrants, African Americans, and poor native-born whites were embraced by these very groups as they sought to establish themselves as worthy of respect, pardon, and even citizenship. Women in prison claimed a feminine subjectivity for themselves that was anchored not only in family and motherhood but also in work.
Pardons
Several of Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention—Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, Jared Ingersoll, and Thomas Mifflin—would play key roles in redefining and enforcing the penal laws of Pennsylvania. PSAMPP was incorporated in 1787 and became the nation’s leading prison reform organization. Reformers of relatively modest means, including artisans, ministers, and shopkeepers, joined with political leaders, merchants, and local elites in devising a revised system of punishment. White men collaborated across class in doing this work, to some extent. Quaker Caleb Lownes, an ironworker by trade, and shopkeeper John Connelly devised the organizational structure of the Board of Inspectors while elite men including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush held the spot-light.7
