2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

How do prisons as institutions impact upon or intersect with gendered systems of labor, reproduction and citizenship? This panel explores the gendered dimension of the carceral system, not by looking at women who were prisoners, but by looking at the symbolic and material ways in which women came into a relationship with prisons. Recent scholarship by sociologists (such as Megan Comfort, Christopher Wildeman, and Anna Haskins) has drawn attention to the impact of imprisonment on families and especially on women "doing time outside." This panel expands upon and historicizes that insight by attending to the significant presence in and around prisons of women who were not themselves prisoners: reformers, prison visitors, (alleged) prostitutes, wives or female servants of prisoners. How are the meanings of gender and family affected by the carceral system.? How does the labor of women inside or outside prison sustain or complicate the system? How does the presence or absence (or unacknowledged presence) of women in an institution construct what it means for men to be imprisoned? The geographic focus is the Anglo-American world (united to some extent by the Anglo-American legal system), but we have deliberately covered a long span of time, during which the prison changed from a place of “mere detention” to one of punishment/reformation to an institution fundamentally structures the life trajectories and social organizations of impoverished communities.