Women have been vastly subjected to waywardism laws because they were seen as a threat to men. The law didn't get applied to men and boys until the 1920s. Waywardism could be brought against you by the police, but also your parents could have you incarcerated for waywardism without ever being tried. So of course she's going to end up being a prostitute. She's either too sexual or she's too masculine and unable to get any other kind of job. Instead, a wayward girl is anyone who was thought to be improperly feminine to the point where she has an invitation to prostitution. And that's where they really get into danger, right? Because suddenly the charge of prostitution has nothing to do with sex work or exchanging sex for money. The first waywardism laws in New York State start in the 1880s and they only apply to girls and women, originally ones who are arrested for prostitution and then expanded greatly in the late 1800s to women who might become prostitutes. On women and queer people being incarcerated for "waywardism" That's the law that gets used to arrest protesters for wearing masks or other costumes while protesting. The law not only gets used then, but during Occupy Wall Street. In the 20th century, it gets used to target gay men, trans women, lesbians, trans men, anyone who dressed "incorrectly" for their gender. The law says it is only illegal to dress in a "costume" if you're in the act of committing another crime. In the late 1800s it starts to get used to target queer people, particularly those who are gender non-conforming in some way. Originally, it criminalized people who dressed in costumes to protest tax collectors - upstate farmers, mostly. still on the books and it's still being used. That law actually dates back to the mid-1800s. On arresting women and gender-nonconforming people for their clothes And that is the reason why so many gender-nonconforming people, why so many queer women, lesbian women, butches, studs, trans men get caught up in the prison system, because for those people who are concerned about the lives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, queerness was seen as a threat to ever being a normal, healthy, happy, productive member of society. But for women, the prison tries to make you a good woman - and that's a very different thing. So the prison system, understanding that women were often being arrested because they were poor, tries to remold them into "proper" women, who will not be arrested for being poor because they will be able to have these jobs and they will be good people.įor men, the prisons try to make you a good citizen. If you go back to that moment, that 1870s moment, what we see is that a system that had mostly been intended to punish the violent, anti-social acts of white men gets repurposed for social control over Black people of all genders and women of all races and all of these things that weren't considered crimes or were considered maybe something you would get a fine for or a citation suddenly become vectors for incarceration when they're applied to Black people and to women.ĭiscipline And Women In Prison In Prison, Discipline Comes Down Hardest On Women
Right at the same time, the census is asking about women's employment for the first time. And in fact, the origins of our women's prison system come about in the 1870s, right after the Civil War. It's not about crimes against people like violence, and it's not about crimes against property like theft. Women's incarceration is a different situation. On the ways in which prison is used to control people who aren't white menĬonstantly I was shocked to see the way in which our system of justice for women simply is unjust and different from the one we have for men. In his new book, The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Ryan writes about the prison, and about the role it played in the gay rights movement of the '60s, including the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. "All of these things could have gotten you arrested if you were perceived as the 'wrong kind of woman.'" "Drunkenness, waywardism, disobedience to their parents, being out at night by themselves, wearing pants, accepting a date from a man, accepting a ride from a man," Ryan says. Author Hugh Ryan says that in many cases, the prisoners were charged with crimes related to gender-nonconforming behavior. In New York City, in the 20th century, tens of thousands of women and transmasculine people were incarcerated at the so-called House of D, a brutal women's prison that opened in Greenwich Village in 1932. She was taken from FBI headquarters to the Women's House of Detention. Angela Davis is escorted by two FBI agents after her arrest in New York on Oct.