Bobby pins, belts and diets: Survival strategies of women political prisoners within the gendered carceral regime at Alderson Prison, 1944–1960

This article examines the gendered carceral regime at the Federal Industrial Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia that was created by its first superintendent, Mary Belle Harris and the experiences of three women political prisoners – Grace Holmes Carlson, Helen Bryan and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – who served time at Alderson between 1944 and 1960. It offers a critical analysis of Carlson's, Bryan's and Flynn's firsthand accounts of their time in prison to reveal these women's strategies for surviving Alderson's reforming mission that included, paradoxically, both a rejection of the middle-class femininity inherent in that mission and, at times, an accommodation to it.