“Women in Prison”: The Gendered Environment of the Alderson Federal Prison Camp, c. 1928–60

In this presentation I will examine the gendered environment of Alderson Prison, the first all-women’s federal correctional facility, to expose tensions between the goals of its creators and administrators and the experiences of its inmates. I will conduct this analysis by looking at the history of the prison written by its first superintendent, the progressive penal reformer Mary Belle Harris, alongside the extensive correspondence of Grace Carlson during her time as an inmate in 1944 and Helen Bryan’s published account of her incarceration in 1950. Carlson and Bryan were both political prisoners, victims of America’s Red Scares, whose voices reveal not only their respective experiences at Alderson but also those of many of their fellow inmates, most of whom had been sentenced for vice related crimes. Superintendent Harris’ vision for the prison was one in which the minimum-security environment of Alderson would foster reformation and self-respect among all the women prisoners, but, as the scholarship of L. Mara Dodge has shown, such cottage-style penal systems actually created spaces in which women were intensely surveilled and where they engaged in various acts of resistance to maintain their dignity and autonomy under such a repressive and invasive regime. As the sources from Alderson Prison that I examine show, demands for ideal domestic and heterosexual feminine behavior inherent in prison rules (regarding manners, deportment, dress, and daily activities) stood in tension with the prison’s all-female environment where women engaged in work (on the prison farm and workshops, for example) and in relationships (with other women) that defied such “ideal” behavior. The women inmates may have found ways to nurture their self-respect at Alderson but not necessarily in the fashion that Harris originally intended.