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Stories of female prisoners: the voices of forgotten women

Prison, violence, crime, disobedience, all words that traditionally hold masculine connotations. At the same time, prison establishments tend to be male-dominated spaces, in terms of both inmates and staff. We almost forget that women are also imprisoned there and, even more so, were imprisoned there in the past.


  • Le Pennec A., 2022, Histoires de prisonnières. Les femmes incarcérées dans les maisons centrales du sud de la France au XIXe siècle, Presses universitaires du Midi, coll. “En tous genres”, Toulouse.

Anna Le Pennec is a member of the FRAMESPA laboratory, University of Toulouse II Jean Jaurès: annalepennec@gmail.com


In the footsteps of female prisoners

What were the lives of history’s forgotten female prisoners like? By gathering together their personal narratives, we can write a much more global story, that of female imprisonment and so-called marginal women. Forgotten, and regarded as such for many reasons: firstly, as women, whose story was overlooked until the first works started to emerge in the 1970s; then as prisoners, because prison is a grey area, both in society and in research. Since the 1970s, historiography has taken an interest in the prison world too. Ultimately, women represent a very small majority in prison, which further contributes to their erasure, both in the archives (we mainly speak of just “prisoners”) and then in the resulting historical narrative. To carry out this research, we needed to search for the few traces of these women who, at first glance, seemed to have been condemned to oblivion.

In order to do this, we adopted a reduced scope of observation, starting with the archives from prisons intended only for women. The study focuses on central prisons, where sentences exceeding one year were carried out. Specifically, in these prisons, the prison administration was careful to divide men and women into separate establishments, facilitating our research work as this makes female prisoners easier to identify. These central prisons were set up at the beginning of the 19th century, following the implementation of the criminal code of 1791 which made prison the main penalty. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the number of women in prison declined steadily. Many central prisons closed their doors in the 1920s and 1930s. Women were gradually transferred to separate areas within mixed prisons.

From 1800-1930, the history of segregated confinement, that is, where women were separated from men, can be traced in the central prisons located in the southern half of France, in Montpellier and Cadillac in Gironde. The archives from these establishments contain correspondence between directors and prefects, and ministers of the interior, but also the personal files of female prisoners and staff members.

Women’s imprisonment has its own story

During this period where prisons were single-sex, the management of female imprisonment started to develop in ways that were sometimes specific – with the implementation of certain treatments and an emphasis on religious moralisation, which was thought to have more of an effect on women – and sometimes tainted by those of men – they were treated in the same way as their male counterparts, despite the specificities linked to their gender, such as pregnancy.

As measures were put in place, which together constituted the Prison Code (then the Correctional Code), and some adaptations were made for women, the daily life of female prisoners evolved. Occasionally, temporary changes occurred as a result of external historical or political events, such as the 1848 revolution or the First World War. Added to this were the upheavals following changes in supervisory staff, specific to women’s prisons: lay guards up until 1839, then nuns until 1906, and finally lay supervisors.

Looking at the crossovers of these different scales, daily life in the Cadillac and Montpellier central prisons, the national prison framework and the broader societal context, the aim is to report on the evolution of the daily lives of female prisoners and their reactions to these changes. For example, the tightening of prison privileges in 1839, with the implementation of numerous restrictions and in particular a total ban on speaking, provoked a backlash among the inmates, caught between resistance and adaptation. The hardships faced by female prisoners also changed according to the staff: numerous cases of sexual abuse by male guards against female inmates were recorded; the nuns were sometimes overzealous in rallying the lost sheep entrusted to them towards the Catholic faith; the secular supervisors encouraged preferential treatment and all kinds of trafficking. Each time, a new prison was created, a new sentence began, bringing with it non-statutory hidden punishments.

The prison of intimacy: the captives facing imprisonment

But who were these women, what was their life like before they were convicted, during their time behind bars and after they were released? In what evolutionary ways did they experience imprisonment and how did it impact their present and future lives, as well as those of the people around them? Sociability takes centre stage in the second part of this research: the virtual sociability maintained through the correspondence of the inmates with their loved ones and the hidden sociability that the captives secretly wove between themselves. We aim to highlight how these social links interfered in each person’s daily life and their experience of imprisonment. Through letters between inmates and their loved ones, portraits of women emerge.

First, there are the “blocked” mothers, whose children were entrusted to relatives or foster families. Their maternal influence was jeopardised by this sudden distancing, which breaks away from the traditional pattern of the 19th century in which parental responsibility fell almost exclusively upon women. A mother who was found at fault in the eyes of the law saw her authority discredited within the home, and all the more so in a social context where impeccable morality was expected of women, especially in the family context. Imprisoned mothers feared and longed to be reunited with their children in equal measures who, in turn, were also condemned to a precarious future.

Then there were the girls who had sinned in the eyes of their parents and whose punishment ultimately came down to an uncertain quest for their forgiveness. Their future depended on this forgiveness and they would need the support of loved ones upon their release to avoid reoffending. When a woman went to prison it damaged her family. Resentment festered and disappointment intensified in the face of expenses, childcare, agonising administrative procedures and all kinds of other different problems. This damaged turned into a veiled debt which the prisoner would potentially never be able to repay.

Then, there were the wives and lovers, in very different situations, but who were inevitably transformed by the prison experience. Some of them could count on the unconditional love of their spouse. Many were getting ready to rejoin a family where gender attributions had been disrupted by their absence, where fathers had had to temporarily assume roles traditionally carried out by wives. Others wondered about the benefits of going back home and the mistreatment or harmful influences associated with it.

Finally, there were the girls, wives or mothers abandoned by those around them who, devoid of all hope, left one prison just to join another: some requested to be transported to a penal colony in Guyana or in New Caledonia for the rest of their lives, where they hoped to make a fresh start; others begged to be admitted to a shelter for released women prisoners, which in many ways functioned in the same way as a prison. The evolution of family relationships and the overall future of the convicted woman also depended on how her offense was judged – petty theft was more quickly forgotten than violence against a minor – and the possibility of re-offense.

These few lines outline the main issues that the convicted women faced. However, the female inmates’ letters reveal an infinitely larger and more complex world, made up of personal stories, slices of life, dreams for the future, concerns, contrasting and changing emotions, contradictions, lies and things left unsaid. They are all testimonies to the social links of women within 19th-century working-class families, which usually go unheard in sources.

In parallel with these letters to the outside world, female prisoners secretly wrote messages to each other, subsequently breaking the rules of the centre which prohibited them from any communication whatsoever. These notes reveal the underground culture of prisons and also what made them transgressive in the eyes of the prison administration: there are intimate relationships between female prisoners, of course, but also numerous satires poking fun at the Catholic religion, the prison priest and sisters, in the form of sarcastic songs and caricatures. These exchanges call into question the representation of women prisoners as particularly docile and pious. Instead, they reveal a prison microsociety in the shadows of cold regulations, where female prisoners developed strategies and feigned submission so as to better evade the surveillance of the administration and, in turn, gain a certain agency in this forbidden world.

As literacy improved, testimonies from captives multiplied during the 20th century. But at the same time, the proportion of women in prison has reduced considerably, only representing 3.3% today. Nowadays, they are mainly women’s quarters, and no longer women’s prisons. There are still two specificities in terms of their supervision: the establishment of “nurseries”, where female prisoners are imprisoned with their babies, and the obligation to have female prisoners supervised by people of their own sex, while men can be supervised by women.


Illustration by Adèle Huguet for Mondes Sociaux: CC BY-NC-ND To see more of her drawings, visit https://adelehuguet.wordpress.com/

 
Image credits in CC : Freepik, Flaticon, triangle squad, Vitaly Gorbachev

  For other articles in english


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Anna Le Pennec (24 février 2025). Stories of female prisoners: the voices of forgotten women. Mondes Sociaux. Consulté le 19 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13czd


Anna Le Pennec

Anna Le Pennec, Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès, laboratoire FRAMESPA (annalepennec@gmail.com)

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