Gender and History最新文献

Reflecting the carceral turn in scholarship, this introduction to a special issue on engendering carcerality explores the difference that gender makes in the history of the carceral in its various forms over time and space. It considers the multiple meanings and spaces of imprisonment, surveillance, and confinement; incarceration of mothers; confinement of sex workers; imprisoning of political prisoners, and reforming of youths, taking account of intersectional identities, sexuality and resistance. It looks forward by looking back, engaging in a dialogue with abolitionist movements and current global struggles to encourage critical gendered histories of incarceration and resistance.

Gendered order in the Soviet camp system shaped women inmates’ experiences of labour and factored in their survival. This article zooms in on the published memoirs of four women political prisoners who survived the Gulag and explores how they experienced and narrated carceral labour. It focuses on three types of labour taking place in the carceral setting – forced labour, care work and clandestine crafts – and investigates the gendered dynamics that surrounded each of these interrelated types of labour. Historically-situated forms of women inmates’ constrained labour-related agency, as the memoirs show, were diverse and not always limited to outright resistance or compliance.

Using a microhistorical lens on the prison of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, this article focuses on practices and regulations concerning mothers and children and ideas about motherhood and practices of care to show how different powers intersected and were ‘at work’ within the prison. Analysing the decision-making, discourses and practices the authorities used to exert power over criminalised women and their children, this article argues that the prison policy was not designed to care for or protect mothers and children. On the contrary, it led to the deaths of many infants incarcerated with their mothers. Moreover, it paradoxically deprived incarcerated women of one of the pillars of nineteenth-century bourgeois femininity: motherhood. The mothers, however, actively resisted and negotiated the prison's power mechanisms to create opportunities to care for their children and influence their fate.

Despite the rights and protections enshrined in its new constitution, the West German state confined beggars, alcoholics, convicted prostitutes and vagrants in workhouses on criminal sentences until 1969. Using administrative and inmate files, alongside local press coverage, this article turns to the largest remaining workhouse in West Germany, Brauweiler, between 1950 and 1969 and considers the internment of women arrested under the ‘correctional post-internment’ measure. It explores the gendered experiences of workhouse inmates, from the reasons for their internment to the reproduction of gendered boundaries during incarceration. Rather than providing an institutional history, it considers the micro-perspective of inmate experiences.

This article reconstructs the earliest known movement for sex workers' rights in US history. It interprets collective assertions of due process as a strategy to overturn vagrancy laws, which permitted municipal officials to summarily commit ‘common prostitutes’ to the penitentiary for months. Mass arrests sparked an anticarceral movement of ‘streetwalkers’ who refused to be contained. Unlike the middle-class Woman's Rights Movement, which sought equal rights for their own sake, streetwalkers acted to build a world in which they could control their own labour, have sex without punishment and move freely through their city.

This article analyses the expansion of the borstal system for young male offenders in late colonial India. Based on legislative debates and prison administration reports, it considers the ways in which young adults were defined and treated within the context of these penal institutions. It reveals how institutionalised care for young men was used to reinforce the power of middle class coercive networks; to define and produce particular forms of masculinity among the poor youth of India and to contribute to wider, emerging discourses about the distinctive position of adolescents in Indian society.

Tracing the organising efforts of criminalised survivors inside the California Institution for Women during the 1990s, this article explores the social and political history of Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA). Members built communities of self-affirmation and care within institutions designed to stamp out their humanity during an age otherwise marked by punitive legislation, prison expansion and growing incapacitation. How these women fostered collectivity and became political advocates fighting for joint clemency complicates conventional and gendered understandings of the punitive 1990s as a low point in the American prison movement. Narrated from the perspective of incarcerated women organisers who stewarded elaborate care networks and undertook significant political organising, this article restores women's prison organising during the 1990s to the prison movement record, while also showcasing the limits and harms of mainstream anti-violence policies in the lives of incarcerated survivors. Drawing upon incarcerated women's writings, testimonies and oral histories, I examine the politics of mutual care, solidarity and resistance that incarcerated women developed in response to a prison regime that was and remains actively hostile to collectivity of any kind. I argue that care work nurtured sustained political engagement from inside prison.

This article explores the controversial itinerary of Harvey Karman and his development in the 1970s of a manual vacuum abortion method which promised a simpler alternative to traditional methods. It highlights Karman's role, often overlooked in abortion rights narratives, as he navigated the transition from illegal to legal abortion, engaging with feminist collectives, doctors and population controllers. Drawing on diverse sources, it examines Karman's efforts to promote his devices and his complex position within medical and feminist circles. The article argues that post-1972 tension between Karman and feminist activists reveals the gendered alliance dynamics of the abortion movement before and just after Roe v. Wade (1973). It also shows how these tensions encouraged feminist groups to redefine their own practices and led to the delineation of the boundaries of self-help.

This introduction to the forum of articles on ‘Histories of abortion beyond Roe’ addresses the difficulty of telling abortion (hi)stories without reference to the procedure's legal status. A brief survey of the history of reproductive medical interventions and recent scholarship on US abortion history illustrates how the contemporary concept of ‘abortion’ emerged only once abortion could be narrativised in medical and legal terms as an intentional act. Thus, the stories told about abortion had and continue to have the power to shape abortion's meaning, its history and even its legal status, as summaries of the forum's three articles illustrate.

In the 1840s, newspaper reporters and prosecutors in New York City began to use literary tropes about seduction to characterise unmarried women who had abortions. This article uses an 1844 trial over an abortion performed on a young French immigrant woman to demonstrate how the uptake of such tropes obscured women's own perspectives about sexual relations and vilified abortion providers. This process ultimately fostered growing anti-abortion attitudes in the decade before the American Medical Association's campaign to criminalise abortion, revealing the cultural, not just medical, roots of anti-abortion activism in the USA.