"Free" Women in the Early Modern English Gaol

In 1680 a prisoner in Lancaster Castle protested when his wife was suddenly banned from visiting; until then he had enjoyed “the liberty of having his wife to come to him and be with him and to assist him in providing his diet.” His wife was one of the many women who, although not prisoners themselves, could be found throughout the prisons of 17th and 18th-century England. They were there as servants, (alleged) prostitutes, visitors, live-in companions and caretakers of prisoners’ children. Women contributed to the maintenance of prisoners, but were also a flashpoint for (or bargaining chip in) conflict between gaolers and prisoners. This paper asks what “free” (not formally incarcerated) women were doing in prisons. In practical terms, what work did they do, how did the connected prison economies and welfare economies use their labor?  It also considers the symbolic meanings of women’s presence and labor in prisons: if control over women (as Patemen has suggested) is the basis of membership in a polity, conflicts over women’s presence  were conflicts about the citizenship and manliness of male prisoners. By the late 18th century, the routine presence of women in prisons created a dilemma for reformers: it paradoxically assured that prisoners were human men (which reformers desired) but left women and children to the corruption (which reformers deplored). Attending to that contradiction illuminates the eventual emergence of prison sexual segregation in the 19th century and the changing relationships between carceral, welfare and familial institutions.