"With Measured Tread": Gendered and Racialized Workplace Violence, Economic Citizenship, and the Mid-20th-Century Carceral State

In 1939, twenty-four-year-old New York City resident, Constance, was arrested for prostitution after quitting a waitressing job on 34th street near the Greyhound Bus station because, in the words of the social worker interviewing her, “the boss was fresh with her.” In 1939, twenty-four-year-old Laura was arrested on prostitution charges and later stated that a “boy” she had met at her workplace had “tried to get fresh with her” and when she refused him “he tried to have her locked up." Marguerite Bumbaugh, from whose poetry this paper takes its title, was arrested in 1928 for shooting her former employer who had forced her into an abusive sexual relationship for the entire period of her ten-year employment. This paper will seek to situate the violence of policing and incarceration within women’s experiences of workplace, domestic, and sexual violence that often predated and sometimes led to their entrapment within the carceral state. It will explore how in mid-twentieth century New York, when economic conceptions of citizenship were expanding, women’s lives continued to be circumscribed by gendered violence in highly racialized ways, and the violence of the carceral state comprised only one facet of this constriction.