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The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915-1965 Author(s): Estelle B. Freedman Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 397-423 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178421 Accessed: 05/06/2009 09:52

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THE PRISON LESBIAN: RACE, CLASS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION

OF THE AGGRESSIVE FEMATE HOMOSEXUAL, 1915-1965

ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN

In the mid-twentieth century, the subject of lesbians in prison began to attract both scholarly and popular attention in the United States.1 After World War II, criminologists depicted les- bian inmates as menacing social types. In popular culture, as well, women's prisons became synonymous with lesbianism. The emergence of the prison lesbian as a dangerous sexual cat- egory, and its changing contours over time, provide a unique historical window on the social construction of homosexual identity.

The prison lesbian also reveals a complex reconfiguration of the class and racial meanings attached to sexuality in moder America. In the early twentieth century, most prison literature equated female sex crime almost entirely with prostitution and rarely inquired into the homosexual activities of delinquent women. As criminologist Charles A. Ford puzzled in 1929, de- spite widespread evidence of lesbian relationships within wom- en's reformatories, very few studies had been written about the subject. When authors did mention homosexuality, they usual- ly identified Black women as lesbian aggressors and white women as temporary partners. By the 1960s, psychologists and criminologists had become intrigued with lesbianism in prison, publishing books and articles on the subject and suggesting that homosexuals "present the greatest sexual problem" in women's prisons. Unlike the earlier literature, the later studies extended the lesbian label to white women, emphasizing the threat of their aggressive homosexuality.2

The following exploration, first of the criminological litera-

Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (summer 1996). ? 1996 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 397

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ture and then of the records of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, analyzes these simultaneous shifts in the concep- tion of the prison lesbian. From an initial association with Afri- can American women, the image of the aggressive female ho- mosexual extended after World War II to include white work- ing-class prisoners as well. At the same time, greater public scrutiny of prison lesbianism, and concern about its "contami- nating" effect on the society at large, intensified the process of labeling female homosexuality in women's prisons and beyond their walls.

A small body of historical literature provides a context for in- vestigating the prison lesbian. Alongside earlier studies of mid- dle-class women's romantic friendships and their medical re- classification as perversion in the twentieth century, a rudi- mentary narrative of working-class lesbian identity and com- munity is now emerging. In brief, it suggests that in industrial- izing America, economic necessity led some working-class women to "pass" as men and sometimes marry other women; in the early twentieth century, some single working-class wom- en pooled resources and lived together as couples in urban, fur- nished-room districts. For African American women, the Har- lem Renaissance fostered a sexually experimental subculture that offered a measure of tolerance for homosexual relation- ships. During World War II, women's work force and military participation intensified a process of homosexual community formation. Even in the postwar decade, when the hostile cold war climate condemned homosexuals as subversive, a public, working-class lesbian bar culture became increasingly visible.3

The prison system provides another location for understand- ing not only working-class lesbian history but also the impor- tance of race and class relations within this history. By the 1920s, almost every state and the federal government had es- tablished a separate adult women's reformatory.4 The majority of inmates came from working-class backgrounds and were of- ten daughters of immigrants; only a small minority were African American.5 Most of the reformatory inmates had been sentenced for "crimes against public order," including drunken- ness, vagrancy, and a variety of prostitution-related offenses

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once labeled "crimes against chastity." Many of the educated and professional women who worked in the reformatories sought to "uplift" the sexual morality of female inmates. Until the 1940s, however, women's prison authorities concentrated on diverting inmates from heterosexual acts prohibited by law- especially prostitution. They rarely mentioned lesbianism as a problem, and most women's prison officials ignored evidence of homosexuality among inmates. This lack of interest contrasted with the approach of administrators of men's prisons, who fre- quently labeled and punished homosexuality.6

The one exception to the disavowal of lesbianism in women's prisons highlights the racial construction of the aggressive fe- male homosexual in the early twentieth century. Beginning in 1913, criminologists, psychologists, and state officials de- nounced one form of lesbian relationship-cross-race romances between Black and white inmates-for disrupting prison disci- pline. These accounts usually represented African American women prisoners as masculine or aggressive and their white lovers as "normal" feminine women who would return to het- erosexual relations upon release from prison. The earliest criminological study of lesbianism in prison described the prac- tice of "nigger loving" by young white women committed to re- formatories. Author Margaret Otis explained that "the love of 'niggers'" had become a tradition in which Black inmates sent courtship notes to incoming white inmates. The ensuing rela- tionships ranged from the casual to those of an "intensely sex- ual nature." Despite this intensity, Otis claimed, once released the white girls rarely had contact with "the colored race," nor, presumably, with women lovers.7

Observations of interracial lesbianism recurred within wom- en's prisons over the following decades. An officer at the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills testified in 1915 that "the colored girls are extremely attractive to certain white girls." Another official explained that these relationships had existed since the founding of the reformatory in the nine- teenth century, but recent overcrowding had made them more frequent. Blaming unrest at the reformatory on these liaisons, an investigative committee recommended the segregation of Black inmates at Bedford Hills. Their rationale echoed the sex- ual fears that underlay Jim Crow institutions in the South. The committee held that segregation was necessary not simply

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"because of the color line" but because "the most undesirable sex relations grow out of this mingling of the two races." Even though these homosexual relationships did not lead to the kind of amalgamation most feared by white supremacists, namely mixed-race offspring, the thought that white women would re- ject heterosexuality entirely-and thus reject their racial duty to reproduce-was intolerable. Even segregation, however, did not discourage interracial homosexual unions or lessen the mythology surrounding Black women's sexual aggression. Black-white relationships persisted noticeably in New York prisons, for example, fifteen years after the Bedford Hills in- vestigation.8

In writing about interracial lesbian relationships, criminolo- gists emphasized the ways that race substituted for gender in women's prisons. Black women took the role of "husbands," white women of "wives" in the New York reformatory Ford studied in the 1920s. Samuel Kahn later quoted a New York City inmate who claimed: "There are more colored daddies and more white mamas" in the city jails. In 1943, one scholar rea- soned that Negroes were sexually attractive to whites "because the White girls interpret the Negro aggression and dominance as 'maleness'" and because the Blacks' "uninhibited emotional expressions and some of their physical characteristics (dark skin) seem to enhance the sex attraction of the Negro girls."9 In a 1941 fictional portrayal of a segregated women's reformatory in the South, novelist Felice Swados incorporated the stereo- type of Black lesbian aggression. Inmate lore described "a cute blonde with dimples" who "got to going around with niggers." The woman wound up in the hospital after "a great big black" woman "got too hot. Went crazy. Just tore her insides out."10

Explanations of interracial attractions in terms of "male" ag- gression by Black women mirrored, in part, the then-dominant theories of homosexuality as a form of gender inversion.l1 At the same time, assigning the male aggressor role to Black women and preserving a semblance of femininity for their white partners racialized the sexual pathology of inversion. In this interpretation, white women were not really lesbians, for they were attracted to men, for whom Black women temporari- ly substituted. Thus, the prison literature racialized both les- bianism and butch/femme roles, implicitly blaming Black

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women for sexual aggression and, indeed, homosexuality, by associating them with a male role.

Whether or not these explanations accurately reflected women inmates' own erotic systems, the official interpretations reinforced long-standing associations among race, sexuality, and gender roles. In the nineteenth century, for example, med- ical authorities had regarded African women's genitals as pathological and, according to Sander Gilman, they even asso- ciated "the concupiscence of the black" with "the sexuality of the lesbian." Because lesbian then connoted both maleness and a lack of feminine virtue, the label effectively denied gender privileges to Black women. Like the cultural assignment of strong, even unsatiable, sexual desire to African American women, the identification of Black women as aggressive butch lesbians rested on a denial of their womanhood.l2

Similarly, twentieth-century criminologists often correlated race, sexual deviance, and aggression. Theories of Black wom- en's greater criminality rested in part on a model of sexual in- version, in which Black women more easily engaged in "male" aggressive behaviors. As one criminal psychiatrist explained in 1942, "colored females" predominated among aggressive wom- en criminals, because the "accepted ideological codes of Har- lem" condoned violence on their parts, especially if related to a love triangle. The writer identified one other pattern of aggres- sive female felonies, which he labeled "lesbian homicides." Presumably referring to Black or white women, in these cases "murder obviously afforded an unconscious destruction of the murderess' own homosexual cravings." Another study of work- ing-class Black women suggested that homosexuality was prevalent among Black prostitutes because both prostitution and homosexuality stemmed from a "fundamental inability" to accept the "feminine role."13

White women clearly participated in lesbian relations in prisons and no doubt with white as well as Black partners. Yet the early-twentieth-century criminological literature on white women's sexuality invariably discussed prostitution, not homo- sexuality. Even as psychoanalytic concepts filtered into Ameri- can criminology, it was white women's heterosexual deviance that attracted attention. As historian Elizabeth Lunbeck has shown, in the early twentieth century, the new diagnosis of sexual psychopathy-a term implying uncontrollable libidinal

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instinct that would later become a code for male homosexuali- ty-at first applied to heterosexually active white women. Be- cause psychologists presumed that Black women were natural- ly promiscuous, they did not label them as diseased psycho- paths.14 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the growing litera- ture on psychopathic crime rarely addressed lesbianism. A 1934 study of psychopathic women, for example, found that only a few cases could be classified as homosexual. As late as 1941 one criminologist argued that juvenile homosexuality was more common among male than female offenders, while "[h]etero- sexual delinquency is by far the girl's premier offence...." Even as a "lesbian taboo" within marital advice literature warned middle-class women to remain heterosexual or risk becoming abnormal deviants, few writers portrayed white lesbians as dangerous criminals.l5

The paucity of either scholarly or popular attention to les- bianism among women in prison did not necessarily reflect the extent of the practice between 1915 and 1940. The few crimi- nologists who did observe women's relationships in prison doc- umented a sexually active and often racially constructed les- bian subculture. In the New York City House of Detention, for example, women prisoners engaged in "bull diking," and their love affairs included regular tribadism. At other institutions, "wives" and "husbands" found ways to send sexually explicit love letters to each other. "You can take my tie/You can take my collor/But I'll jazze you/'Till you holler," one Black hus- band wrote to "My dearest Wife Gloria," who responded "Sugar dady if I could sleep with you for one little night, I would show you how much I hon[es]tly and truly I love you." Other inmates scratched their "friend's" initials on their skin and smuggled contraband presents in their bras. The administrator of one re- form school recalled that white girls aggressively pursued Black girls, a pattern rarely reported in the criminological lit- erature.16

For the most part, women's prison administrators either tol- erated these lesbian relationships or denied their existence. When physician Samuel Kahn published the first book-length study of prison homosexuality in 1937 (based on research con- ducted a decade earlier), he seemed dismayed to report that at the New York City Women's Workhouse, in contrast to the

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men's division, "the homosexuals have been unclassified and are not segregated ... so that they all mingle freely with the other inmates." Even though Kahn sought out lesbians to in- terview, neither the woman warden nor the male priests at the workhouse were willing to identify inmates as homosexuals. In Five Hundred Delinquent Women, the classic 1934 study of women prisoners conducted at the Massachusetts women's re- formatory, criminologists Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck never referred to lesbianism.17

Women's prison administrators may have been reluctant to call attention to the subject of homosexuality because many of them were single professional women who maintained close personal bonds with other women and could be vulnerable to charges of lesbianism. According to the superintendent of sev- eral reform schools for girls, in the 1920s women prison work- ers recognized the problem of homosexuality but never openly talked about it. One superintendent who lectured inmates of a girls' reformatory about the dangers of homosexuality was pressured into resigning in 1931, in part because she ad- dressed such an "embarrassing subject" and in part because she accused both staff members and local businesswomen of "immoral relationships." In 1931, officials preferred to be silent about these possibilities for lesbianism rather than to call at- tention to them.18

The disinclination to acknowledge lesbianism in prison last- ed until the 1940s, when both prison administrators and crimi- nologists began to express more concern about female homo- sexuality. The reasons for a gradual shift in awareness includ- ed increased arrests for prostitution during World War II and consequent prison overcrowding. Some prostitutes were also lesbians, while the doubling up of women in cells may have in- tensified lesbian activity. A growing lesbian subculture cen- tered around predominantly white, working-class bars may have heightened identity for some women who wound up in jails and prisons. Aside from any actual increase in lesbian ac- tivity in prison, fears about the dangers of female sexual ex- pression escalated during wartime, especially targeting white women as the purveyors of venereal disease to soldiers or as seductive saboteurs. It was in this context that female homo- sexuality in general, and among white women in prisons, came under closer scrutiny.

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A new consciousness about prison lesbianism appeared, for example, among the superintendents of women's institutions, who met annually to discuss common problems. Several of them had acknowledged Black-white sexual liaisons in institu- tions previously, but for the most part the superintendents had been concerned about heterosexual irregularities among in- mates. Only during the 1940s did they introduce the topic of how to manage homosexual relationships in institutions. At one annual conference, for example, they questioned their guest speaker, Margaret Mead, about "how much we should worry about homosexuality." Although Mead advised them to "keep it down as much as possible," the anthropologist-who had herself been sexually involved with women-also argued that female homosexuality was much less socially dangerous than male homosexuality because women tended toward more or less permanent relationship[s] in which one person looks after the welfare of the other, makes them silk underwear, etc. The male homo-sex- uality, on the other hand, is exploitive and promiscuous-it is not a paired sexuality.

Mead believed that women's relatively benign institutional ho- mosexuality was a temporary substitute for heterosexual rela- tions. Unlike earlier writers, however, she did not identify any racial patterns in lesbian role-playing. Her tolerant attitude, echoed by other speakers, counseled adequate recreation and social stimulation as diversions from homosexuality in prison.19

In the postwar decade, however, the relative tolerance that had characterized the treatment of prison lesbianism gradually gave way to greater surveillance and ultimately to condemna- tion. The shift from lack of interest to fascination with the pris- on lesbian can be seen within U.S. popular and political culture shortly after World War II. In the 1950s, True Confessions mag- azine sensationalized accounts of "love-starved girls in reform school," while pulp novels incorporated women's prison seduc- tion scenes. Hollywood produced a series of women's prison films, replete with lesbian innuendo. In contrast to the earliest women's prison films, in which the lesbian was portrayed as comic and benign, a dangerously aggressive lesbian criminal now threatened the innocence of young women, as in the 1950 film, Caged. At the same time, politicians began to target "ag- gressive female homosexuals" in prison as a serious threat to

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moral order. During the 1950s they invoked images of lesbians in prison as part of a larger cold war campaign to discredit lib- eral reformers for being soft on perversion, as on communism.20 By the late 1950s, women who formed homosexual relation- ships in prison had become stock cultural characters associated with threats to sexual and social order. At the same time, Black women ceased to be the primary suspects as prison lesbians. Class marking seemed to be replacing earlier race marking, making both Black and white working-class women more vul- nerable to charges of deviance, while still exempting middle- class women. By the 1960s, the criminological literature no longer relied on an exclusively racial definition of lesbians and emphasized the social threat of white lesbian activity.

These changes coincided with a larger cultural emphasis on both the power of female sexuality and the need to contain it within domestic relationships among white and middle-class Americans. Reflecting the rhetoric of cold war America, which sought to identify internal enemies who threatened social or- der, the postwar clinical literature on lesbianism elaborated upon the image of the aggressive female homosexual, but it rarely targeted Black women. The new stereotype drew upon earlier concepts of the male sexual psychopath, whose uncon- trolled, often violent, sexuality threatened to disrupt social or- der. In contrast to earlier studies that had posited little rela- tionship between psychopathy and lesbianism, writers now suggested "the possibly greater tendency of the [female] psy- chopaths to engage in sex acts with other girls." New psycho- analytic theories also contributed to the image of a dangerous, promiscuous lesbian. One writer, for example, differentiated between those female homosexuals who simply preferred the company of women and a rarer group containing "the more dangerous type-the promiscuous Lesbian who passing quickly and lightly from affair to affair, usually with physical relations, may cause great harm and unhappiness." Just as the male psychopath was invariably portrayed as white, and often mid- dle-class, the dangerous lesbian was no longer marked as a racial minority but appeared to be white, although usually working class.21

Along with serious psychological studies, pseudoscientific works of the 1950s conflated the lesbian and the woman crimi-

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nal. In her study of postwar lesbian imagery, historian Donna Penn has summarized the portrayal of the lesbian found in popular works, such as Frank Caprio's Female Homosexuality, as the "promiscuous, oversexed, conquering, aggressive dyke who exercised masculine prerogative in the sexual arena." Like the prostitute, the lesbian now spread moral contagion. In Penn's view, the demonization of the sinister, working-class les- bian helped shift the meaning of female homosexuality away from the "Boston marriages" and innocent romantic friend- ships of middle-class women.22

The prison literature confirms Penn's analysis but suggests a racial, as well as class, realignment in the demonology of les- bianism. The dangerous lesbian had moved away from a ra- cially specified aggressive invert. Even though interracial unions continued to characterize women's prison life, by the 1950s it was the homosexuality of white women prisoners that became the object of intense scrutiny. Larger social trends con- tributed to this racial shift, including the gradual sexualization of white women in popular culture and the emergence of visible white, working-class lesbian institutions in the postwar peri- od-such as the bar culture studied by Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy.23 The prison lesbian now ap- peared not primarily as an African American but more typical- ly as a white woman, albeit one who may have sexually crossed a racial boundary in the process of becoming homosexual. Of either race, she became the "unnatural woman" personified, a threat to other inmates and to women outside the prison. If earlier tolerance had rested on an assumption of the natural depravity, or inherent sexual inversion, of Black women, it is not surprising that the revelation of white women's lesbianism in prison would sound an alert, a warning about the potential degeneration of theoretically "true" womanhood. Indeed, by the mid-1950s, institutional tolerance gave way to a call to "sort out the real homosexual" in prison through psychological test- ing and to "segregate those who show strong homosexual incli- nations," with no reference to race.24

A good example of the new attitude toward prison lesbian- ism appeared in a 1956 popular book written by Katharine Sullivan, a conservative member of the Massachusetts parole board. According to Sullivan, "No age or race is immune to the

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temptations of homosexuality in prisons." Moreover, the prison lesbians she described had violent, almost animalistic, charac- ters. Jealousies led to "hand-to-hand fights or even free-for- alls." If separated from a lover, Sullivan warned, the surviving partner "may suffer an acute attack of homosexual panic, with violent screaming and frothing at the mouth, followed by a pe- riod of wan anxiety."25

In contrast to earlier writers, Sullivan firmly believed that once a woman engaged in homosexual acts in prison she quick- ly became "addicted" and built her life around the practice af- ter release. In one example, a young, white parolee named Mary learned about the "doll racket" in prison and now wanted nothing to do with men. Visited on parole, she sported a new boyish haircut, no makeup, wore boys' clothes, and, significant- ly, had set up a household with two Black women. Unlike the "nigger lovers" described by Otis in 1913, who rejected interra- cial relations after release, Mary continued to associate with Black women on the outside. She even adopted a butch identi- ty that had been racially specific to Black women in the past. Earlier racial stereotypes continued to operate as well. Sulli- van depicted Mary's Black roommates as the antithesis of nat- ural women: they were "large," "rangy," and sloppily dressed in jeans and T-shirts. Mary, she implied, had descended into an interracial netherworld from which she would emerge an ad- dicted lesbian. Indeed, Mary declared that when she turned twenty-one she intended to "leave home and go to live perma- nently in one of the big cities in America, where Lesbians flourish." Sullivan clearly wished to prevent white women like Mary from being exposed to homosexuality in prison; she seemed much less concerned about the Black women who adopted male styles.26

By the time the prison lesbian became the subject of exten- sive academic inquiry in the 1960s, race had practically disap- peared from the scholarly research agenda. Sociological ac- counts of the "problem" of the prison lesbian described wide- spread homosexuality in women's institutions and focused on the butch-femme role system that organized prison life, but like other supposedly "race-blind" works of the period, they evaded race, even when it influenced their findings.27 The two classic case studies that appeared in the 1960s-David A. Ward

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and Gene G. Kassebaum's Women's Prison: Sex and Social Structure and Rose Giallombardo's Society of Women: A Study of a Women's Prison-avoid mentioning race in their descrip- tions of prison social life and sexual roles. Giallombardo's dis- cussion of fictive marriage patterns among women prisoners never referred to race, even though her kinship diagrams, read closely, reveal that the majority of "marriages" were interra- cial.28 In short, race may have continued to play a role in the erotic life of prisoners, but observers presented a lesbian world that, lacking racial markers, appeared to be entirely white.29

The racial shift in the construction of the prison lesbian, tak- en together with other evidence of postwar moral panics, sug- gests deep-seated cultural anxieties about the instability of white heterosexuality. Although focused on working-class women who wound up in prison, and who were forming a les- bian subculture in various cities, the discourse reached a broader public. Literary critic Lynda Hart has argued that the historical construction of the lesbian has often projected a "se- cret" sexual identity on to working-class women, as well as women of color, while it simultaneously speaks loudly to fears about the sexuality of middle- and upper-class women. In post- war America, as popular and commercial culture elaborated upon white women's sexual availability, and when effective medical treatment of venereal disease made prostitutes seem less threatening than in the past, several new boundaries ap- peared to help shore up white, marital heterosexuality. The outlaws included the frigid career woman, the Black welfare mother, and the prison lesbian.30

A case study of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women fur- ther illustrates both the changing racial construction of the ag- gressive female homosexual and the shift from a period of insti- tutional denial or tolerance to one of labeling and strict surveil- lance. The reformatory, founded in 1877, typically housed be- tween 300 and 400 adult female prisoners, the vast majority of whom served two-to-five-year terms for minor offenses against public order, such as drunkenness or prostitution (often coded as vagrancy or "lewdness"). As in most northern reformatories,

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until the 1960s the population was overwhelmingly white. The institution had a scattered history of liberal administrations aimed at uplifting so-called fallen women. Miriam Van Waters, who became the reformatory superintendent in 1932, expanded upon this mission by providing education, social welfare ser- vices, psychiatric counseling, and work opportunities outside prison.

As in other institutions, the earliest references to lesbian re- lations at the Massachusetts reformatory noted attractions be- tween white and Black inmates. In the 1930s, when Van Waters detected "black-white manifestation of homosexuality," she followed the advice of writers such as Charles Ford and at- tempted to divert the Black inmates by "stressing their pres- tige in Dramatics, Spirituals, [and] Orchestra." Other staff members also learned of romantic liaisons between inmates during the 1930s. One officer informed Van Waters of inmate gossip about the "doll" situation-the prison code for lesbian- and noted "the fuss the white girls make over the colored girls." A few years later, when Van Waters noted no "overt white-white" relationships, she identified several interracial couples.3'

Van Waters and her staff distinguished between true homo- sexuality and temporary attractions. They believed the former could be detected by the Rorshach test; in the absence of such "positive evidence" they assumed that only the boredom of prison routine stimulated unnatural interest in same-sex rela- tionships. An active program of classes and clubs attempted to channel the energies of both Black and white prisoners into what the staff considered healthier recreations. Nonetheless, underground homosexual unions survived. Newcomers quickly learned about "dolls," and love letters circulated among in- mates. In 1938, for example, when an inmate tried to use her fear of sexual advances to convince the parole board to release her from the reformatory, she submitted love letters from other women to support her case. In addition, officers occasionally discovered two women in bed together, a problem that escalat- ed during World War II, when increased prison commitments led to overcrowding.32

Prison records also reveal contradictory attitudes toward lesbian relationships on the part of reformatory and court offi-

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cials. The former were reluctant to label women as homosexu- als, while the latter were willing to impose harsh penalties for openly lesbian relationships. The case of Marie LeBlanc, a white woman of French Canadian background, illustrates psy- chiatric tolerance within the institution and the punitive re- sponse of parole boards and courts.33 LeBlanc had become sex- ually involved with Eleanor Harris, another white inmate. The prison psychiatrist who "treated" her saw no reason not to rec- ommend her for parole. When parole agents learned that, after release, LeBlanc had been sleeping with Eleanor Harris and her husband, they revoked LeBlanc's parole "for the best inter- ests of herself and the community." She returned to prison for a year, then left on parole again. This time she reportedly be- came involved with another former inmate, Jane MacGregor. The court convicted LeBlanc of "Open and Gross Lewdness" and sentenced her to another two years in the reformatory be- cause of her lesbian relationship.34

Jane MacGregor's records further highlight the conflicting policies toward lesbianism. According to a reformatory psychi- atrist, MacGregor had "no preference" between "hetero- and homosexual experience." Because she was "not the aggressive one" in the latter, he did not consider her a true lesbian. Even after officers discovered MacGregor in bed with another in- mate, the psychiatrist emphasized her need for mother love and recommended: "It is far better to have some of these in- tense feelings directed toward an officer where the activity can be controlled than toward another student [inmate]." Only af- ter MacGregor repeatedly appeared in bed with other women did prison officials fear that she was "in danger of becoming a true homosexual." Despite efforts to divert her interests in women into athletics and the care of animals (to "help take care of her need to demonstrate affection"), the psychiatrist eventually concluded that MacGregor was in fact "strongly ho- mosexual." Nonetheless, he supported her request for parole. The more conservative parole board revoked her release, ex- plaining that she "engaged in homosexual activities to such an extent that she is unable to adjust in employment."35

The inmates clearly knew that reformatory officials were re- luctant to label same-sex relations, as the case of Barbara Jones illustrates. A white woman, Jones had been committed

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to prison for idle and disorderly conduct, which may have meant prostitution. At the reformatory she tended to pair off with a "colored inmate," laboring to maintain the relationship by "coveting [sic] favor with small gifts." The staff tried to dis- courage the pairing by transferring Jones to a living division apart from her friend. Annoyed by the move, Jones wrote to a staff member with the expectation of tolerance and under- standing: "You told me one time if I didn't want people to com- plain to you about my actions I shouldn't make them so obvi- ous," she explained. "I didn't this time. It was purely what peo- ple thought. True, I was carrying on an affair, but I certainly wasn't loud about it."36

The relative tolerance toward homosexuality among staff at the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women could not survive long after World War II. Just as the psychological and popular literature began to emphasize a sinister, even predatory, les- bian, conservative Massachusetts politicians seized on the pris- on lesbian to discredit the unusually liberal reformatory ad- ministration. The investigation of an inmate suicide in 1947 led to reports of a "doll racket" at the reformatory, giving the Massachusetts Department of Corrections an opportunity to launch a series of probes of Superintendent Van Waters' ad- ministration. Among their complaints they charged that "many of the inmates receiving special favors are 'known' homosexu- als or dangerous psychopaths." Although Van Waters denied the charges, the politicians exploited them in the press, using prison lesbianism as a sensationalistic wedge with which to ex- pose Van Waters' liberal attitudes toward rehabilitation.

Like the federal officials who soon outlawed the employment of homosexuals on the grounds that they spread corruption in the government, Massachusetts officials claimed that homosex- uals corrupted the young women of the state. Instead of prosti- tution, which had so disturbed an earlier generation of Americans, homosexuality now represented the great destroyer of young women's virtue. As Senator Michael LoPresti told the press, "Supt. Van Waters' administration of the Women's Reformatory has been more damaging to the morals and men- tal health of young girls than has the operation of White Slavery in all New England over the same period of time."37 In 1949, when the commissioner of corrections dismissed Van Waters from office, he charged

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That you have known of and failed to prevent the continuance of, or failed to know and recognize that an unwholesome relationship has existed be- tween inmates of the Reformatory for Women which is called the "doll racket" by inmates and some officer personnel; the terms "stud" and "queen" are used with implied meanings, and such association has result- ed in "crushes," "courtships," and homosexual practises [sic] among the in- mates in the Reformatory....38

Although the grounds for dismissal included Van Waters' al- lowing inmates to work for pay outside of the institution and hiring former inmates on the reformatory staff, the homosexu- al motif ran throughout the charges, fueling sensational news- paper coverage of the issue.

During several months of public hearings, Van Waters suc- cessfully defended her policies, in part by minimizing the exis- tence of homosexuality at the reformatory, in part by deferring to psychiatric authorities when asked about homosexual ten- dencies among inmates. Typical of her strategic evasion was this response to hostile interrogation about whether certain acts or personal styles revealed homosexual tendencies: That, sir, is so distinctly a medical and technical question that I would not presume to answer it. One of the first things we are taught is that a homo- sexual tendency must be distinguished from a homosexual act. A homosex- ual tendency may be completely repressed and turned into a variety of oth- er expressions, including a great aversion to emotion.

By invoking the power of psychiatry, Van Waters acknowledged the shifting meaning of homosexuality, from an act to an iden- tity and from a crime to a mental disorder. At the same time, she tried to avoid a labeling process that would mark close friends, mannish women, and those who had crushes on other inmates as confirmed homosexuals. Responding to further questions, she explained that a woman's mannish dress and preference for men's jobs resulted from early childhood neglect, not homosexual desire.39

Whether consciously or not, Van Waters' testimony repre- sented a form of resistance to the use of accusations of homo- sexuality to discredit nonconforming women. Rather than sac- rifice some "mannish" women or close female friends by calling them either homosexuals, latent homosexuals, or women with homosexual tendencies, she firmly opposed labeling. At the same time, like psychologists of the period, she did so by ac- cepting a definition of true homosexuality as a pathology.

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When the superintendent evaded the labeling of homosexual- ity, she also sidestepped implicit questions about her own sexu- al identity. In her personal life, Van Waters had refused to label her love for a woman as a form of homosexuality, despite her long-term romantic partnership with Geraldine Thompson, who was known publicly only as a wealthy benefactor and a support- er of Van Waters' reforms. So too she hesitated to assume that other women who appeared to fit the definition really were ho- mosexuals, a term she reserved for women's pathological, al- though curable, sexual aggression toward other women.40

In March 1949, a special panel appointed by the governor exonerated Van Waters of all charges and reinstated her as su- perintendent. During the two years of publicity concerning the "doll racket" at Framingham, however, the image of the homo- sexual woman criminal had been widely disseminated by both local and national media coverage of the Van Waters hearings. In the aftermath of the Van Waters case, prison lesbianism came under greater scrutiny, with white as well as Black wom- en subject to the charge. A few months after the hearings, for instance, the Massachusetts Parole Board taunted a white woman they suspected of homosexuality, interrogating her about whether she ought to have a sex-change operation be- cause of her "boyish swagger."41 In addition, popular media fur- ther stereotyped inmates as lesbians. The Van Waters case di- rectly inspired Caged, the prototypical women's prison film, in which older, aggressive lesbians compete for access to an inno- cent young inmate. The lurid True Confessions tales of reform school lesbians also followed in the wake of the Van Waters case.

The image of the "aggressive homosexual," along with greater surveillance by the Massachusetts Department of Cor- rections and the public, helped erode the earlier tolerance to- ward prison lesbianism among Framingham staff. In the 1950s, despite Superintendent Van Waters' continuing belief that healthy recreation could divert women from situational homosexuality, the reformatory capitulated to the antihomo- sexual climate by attempting to transfer lesbians out of the in- stitution. Previously, even evidence of homosexual relations did not disqualify an inmate as a candidate for parole. Now, however, when a white woman on parole "made a connection

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with a married woman with the result that the woman left her husband," Van Waters' staff refused to keep her at the refor- matory. Labeled "hard core," these women were now trans- ferred to county jails to serve their additional terms without benefit of reformatory programs.42

These efforts to weed out hard core lesbians did not protect the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women from further politi- cal scrutiny. In July 1957, an escapee fighting extradition claimed that alcohol, drugs, and homosexuality made her afraid to return to the reformatory. Newspapers had a field day with the ensuing investigation. "Charge Sex Fiends, Boozers Run Wild in Women's Prison" and "Girl Inmates 'Wed' in Mock Prison Rites," the headlines read. A committee chaired by a conservative woman legislator accused "aggressive homosexu- als" of "escaping, assaulting officers and practicing unnatural acts!" The committee recommended greater security as well as the segregation of "aggressive homosexuals and belligerent non-conformists." Even though such activity was "not ram- pant" at the reformatory, the legislators argued that the "real factor to be considered here" was "not the extent but the fact that it appears to have been overlooked. .. ." They stated that there have been mock marriages; there have been unnatural acts witnessed and reported by members of the staff, and there have been numerous indi- cations of parolees carrying this type of activity outside the institution in association with others who had never participated in such actions before.43

Because these lesbians-significantly unidentified by race-were believed to corrupt other inmates and spread homosexual con- tagion into the broader society, officials now called for sexual, rather than racial, segregation. By 1959, after Van Waters had retired, the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women instituted a lecture on sexuality for young inmates in which a psychia- trist warned them away from experimenting with lesbianism, because "[i]t is a sick way of life . ." and one that could never lead to happiness.44

As in the larger society, in which McCarthy-era campaigns identified homosexuals as the source of communist subversion and moral ruin, so too in the microcosm of the women's prison the lesbian became a scapegoat for the demise of institutional

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order and gender propriety. The very term "women's prison" would long evoke an image of lesbian aggression. The associa- tion of lesbianism and criminality may have served as a warn- ing to women who might be tempted to acknowledge their ho- mosexual desires. To do so meant, in part, to become part of a criminal underworld, to lose both class, and, for white women, race privilege, to descend into an underworld vulnerable to the control of police and parole agents. The prison lesbian thus represented an inverse of the ideal white woman of the 1950s, the "reprivatized" suburban housewife who served rather than challenged men.45

The shifting racial construction of the prison lesbian, in which the role of sexual aggressor extended from Black to all working-class inmates, raises larger historical questions about race and sexuality. Although the sources reveal little about how either Black or white lesbians constructed their own iden- tities, or about racial distinctions in the treatment of lesbians in prison, they do point toward a fluidity in the racial construc- tion of sexual boundaries. After the 1940s, prostitution and promiscuity seemed less problematic for white working-class women than they had before; white unwed mothers, for exam- ple, could now be forgiven and "cured." In contrast, homosexu- ality among white working-class women loomed larger as a threat to social order, as evidenced by the negative portrayals of bar dykes, lesbian athletes, and prison lesbians. At the same time, for working-class Black women, homosexual aggression now attracted less attention than did the newly emergent im- age of the Black unwed mother on welfare. Seen together, the literature on deviance reacted against both white women's re- jection of reproductive heterosexuality (lesbianism) and Black women's "excessive" reproductive activity (illegitimacy).46

Specific historical contexts in the postwar period can help explain this shift, including the development of penicillin, which lessened fears about prostitutes, and the increased so- cial costs of out-of-wedlock births, in light of the establishment of government aid to dependent children. The pattern of reac- tion, however, can be found much earlier in American history, especially during the race suicide scare at the turn of the twen- tieth century, when mass immigration triggered admonitions to middle-class white women to bear children lest the foreign

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born dominate American society. Similarly, the shifting sexual and racial demonizations during the 1940s responded in part to the continued northern migration of Blacks. In addition, wartime economic opportunities may have contributed to fears about women usurping male prerogatives, so that the aggres- sive white lesbian became a symbol of excessive female inde- pendence.

The representation of the prison lesbian also suggests how class became a clearer marker of sexual identity. Middle-class women who resisted the labeling of lesbianism-as did Miriam Van Waters-may have avoided social stigma for themselves and protected some of the women under their supervision. Nonetheless, the image of the aggressive female homosexual made these reformers vulnerable to political attacks that even- tually weakened their moral authority and lessened their abili- ty to protect working-class lesbians in prison. At the same time, the emergence of the malignant image of the criminal lesbian widened the class gulfs among women. Many white women who loved other women gladly claimed their race and class privilege by disassociating themselves from a category that included bar lesbians and criminals. In the process, these middle-class women often denied their own desires or insured their own social isolation. For those who did acknowledge their lesbianism, maintaining middle-class status meant rejecting any affiliation with working-class lesbians and with the butch- femme roles that had been pathologized by the 1950s.47

It was the prison lesbian, however, who paid the highest price for the greater cultural recognition of women's sexual de- sires and the weakening of middle-class women's public au- thority. Once ignored or tolerated, the prison lesbian became a symbol of social disorder, not unlike the prostitute of an earlier period. Even as subsequent generations of middle-class women first rejected the models of criminality and sickness in favor of lesbian feminism, and more recently have elaborated a subver- sive "outlaw" identity, women in prison have continued to suf- fer from the older cultural construction. Prison lesbians, a 1987 study proclaimed, are "more criminalistic, more feminis- tic and more aggressive" than other prisoners. These stereo- types help explain why lesbians serve longer terms than non- lesbians and why prison officials continue to treat lesbians

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more harshly that other women. The greater vulnerability of prison lesbians is suggested, as well, by the fact that implica- tions of lesbianism have been part of the prosecution strategy in 40 percent of the cases of women currently awaiting execu- tion in the United States.48 The serious consequences of the persistent conflation of lesbianism and aggressive criminality are rarely addressed by either contemporary feminists or pe- nologists, for working-class women in prison remain largely in- visible in critiques of sexual injustice. Ignoring the historical construction of the aggressive female homosexual, however, al- lows the specter of the prison lesbian to continue to police class and sexual boundaries, both inside and outside of prison walls.

NOTES

I am grateful to Martha Mabie for research assistance and to Allan Berube, Susan K. Cahn, John D'Emilio, Sharon Holland, Susan Krieger, Elaine Tyler May, Joanne Meyerowitz, Peggy Pascoe, Leila Rupp, and Nancy Stoller for their extremely useful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

1. Although courts have rarely sentenced women to prison for homosexual acts, les- bianism has long been associated with both crime and insanity. In the nineteenth century, women who passed as men were sometimes arrested and jailed, but it was their defiance of gender roles rather than sexual acts that labeled them criminals. See San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, "'She Even Chewed Tobacco': A Pictorial Narrative of Passing Women in America," in Hidden from History: Re- claiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 183-94. Lesbians have often been institutionalized in mental hospitals and sometimes in re- form schools. For an example of a young woman sent to reform school because she was a lesbian, see Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Rout- ledge, 1993), 59. On the historical association between female criminality, insanity, and lesbianism, see Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. 4-28. Hart argues that the incidence of imprisonment for lesbianism has been masked because crimes labeled "lewdness" or prostitution in fact referred to lesbianism. On this point, see Ruthann Robson, Lesbian (Out)law: Survival under the Rule of Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1992). On associations between women criminals, insanity, gender inversion, and lesbianism in specific historical cases, see Lisa Duggan, "The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the- Century America," Signs 18 (summer 1993): 791-814; and Claire Bond Potter, "'I'll Go the Limit and Then Some': Gun Molls, Desire, and Danger in the 1930s," Fem- inist Studies 21 (spring 1995): 46. 2. Charles A. Ford, "Homosexual Practices of Institutionalized Females," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 23 (January-March 1929): 442; Elizabeth M. Kates, "Sexual Problems in Women's Institutions," Journal of Social Therapy 1 (October 1955):

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187. Other later studies include Mary A. Kopp, "A Study of Anomia and Homosex- uality in Delinquent Adolescent Girls" (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis University, 1960); James Stephen Howard, "Determinants of Sex-Role Identifications of Homosexual Female Delinquents" (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1962); Sey- mour L. Halleck and Marvin Hersko, "Homosexual Behavior in a Correctional Insti- tution for Adolescent Girls," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 32 (October 1962): 911-17; William G. Miller and Thomas E. Hannum, "Characteristics of Homo- sexuality in Involved Incarcerated Females," Journal of Consulting Psychology 27 (June 1963): 277; Max Hammer, "Homosexuality in a Women's Reformatory," Cor- rective Psychiatry and Journal of Social Therapy 4 (May 1965): 168-69; David A. Ward and Gene G. Kassebaum, Women's Prison: Sex and Social Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1965); and Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women: A Study of a Women's Prison (New York: John Wiley, 1966). For a discussion of the criminologi- cal literature on race and gender in reform schools for girls, see Kathryn Hinojosa Baker, "Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in Reform Schools for Girls," Dis- course 15 (fall 1992): 41-61. 3. On middle-class lesbian history, see, for example, Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1991); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (autumn 1975): 1-29; Nancy Sahli, "Smashing: Women's Relationships before the Fall," Chrysalis 8 (summer 1979): 17-27;and Leila J. Rupp, "'Imagine My Surprise': Women's Relationships in Historical Perspective," Frontiers 5 (fall 1980): 61-70. On working-class lesbian history, see, for example, Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Cromwell, 1976), esp. "Passing Women," 209-81; San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project; Eric Garber, "'T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness': Homosexuality in 1920s' Harlem," in Black Men/White Men, ed. Michael J. Smith (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1983); Allan Berube, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990); Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, "Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960," Feminist Studies 12 (spring 1986): 7-26, and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). On medicalization, see George Chauncey Jr., "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptuali- zation of Female Deviance," Salamagundi, no. 58-59 (fall/winter 1983): 114-46; and Jenny Terry, "Lesbians under the Medical Gaze: Scientists Search for Remarkable Differences," Journal of Sex Research 27 (August 1990): 317-39. 4. On the founding, populations, and administrations of the reformatory prisons, see Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). 5. More African American women served sentences in state prisons than in refor- matory prisons. In 1923, for example, Black women constituted 64.5 percent of the women in custodial prisons but only 11.9 percent of the inmates of women's refor- matories. See Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800- 1935 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 146, table 6.5. The overrepre- sentation of women of color in the prison population is evident from 1950 U.S. Census data on institutional populations. Out of a total of approximately 13,000 adult women prisoners, 56 percent were white and 44 percent were labeled "non- white." White women were incarcerated at a rate of 10.8 per 100,000 in the popula-

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tion; "nonwhite" women's rate was 68.8 per 100,000. (See National Institute of Mental Health, Psychiatric Services and the Changing Institutional Scene, 1950- 1985, DHEW Publication [ADM] 77-433 [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977], 24-25, 60-62, 63-67.) For a rare historical analysis of African American women's prison experience, see Anne M. Butler, "Still in Chains: Black Women in Western Prisons, 1865-1910," in "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible": A Reader in Black Women's History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1995), 321-34. 6. On the concerns of male prison administrators, see, for example, Samuel Kahn, Mentality and Homosexuality (Boston: Meador Publishing, 1937), a study of New York City penal institutions conducted in the 1920s; and, for Massachusetts, Maurice Winslow, Superintendent, Norfolk Prison Colony, to Arthur T. Lyman, Commissioner of Corrections, 17 Aug. 1939, "Administrative Correspondence" file, Human Services, Corrections, Reference Files, Series 1137x, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston. 7. Margaret Otis, "A Perversion Not Commonly Noted," Journal of Abnormal Psy- chology 7 (June-July 1913): 112-16. 8. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers, 139-140; see also Ruth Alexander's discussion of the Bedford Hills inquiry in The "Girl Problem": Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1920-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 91-92. On the impact of "race suicide" fears on white women, who were urged to bear children, and Black women, who were subject to sterilization, see Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Basic Books, 1995), chaps. 2-3. 9. Ford, 442-47; Kahn, 123-24; Theodora M. Abel, "Dominant Behavior of Institu- tionalized Subnormal Negro Girls: An Experimental Study," American Journal of Mental Deficiency 67 (April 1943): 429. 10. Felice Swados, House of Fury (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1941), 40-41. Swados implicitly criticized her white characters' racist objectification of Black women. At the same time, however, the platonic interracial love she fa- vored in the novel served to underscore the pathology of lesbianism. 11. See Chauncey; and Faderman, Odd Girls, chap. 2. 12. Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 237. On the exclusion of Black women from the category "woman," see Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Meta- language of Race," Signs 17 (winter 1992): 256-58. On the historical association of Blacks and hypersexuality, see also Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). A parallel association among nonprison lesbians appears in gynecological literature from the 1930s that described the Black lesbian as having a long, erectile clitoris; according to Jennifer Terry, the description "occupied an analogous position to the common representation of black men as having unusually long penises, signifying an ideolog- ical link between blackness and hypersexuality." (See Terry, 334.) 13. John Holland Cassity, "Socio-Psychiatric Aspects of Female Felons," Journal of Criminal Psychopathology 3 (April 1942): 600. The author also discussed infanticide and prostitutes who attacked their pimps (597-604); see also his "Personality Study of 200 Murders," Journal of Criminal Psychopathology 2 (January 1941): see esp. 303. On prostitutes, Margaret Brenman, "Urban Lower-Class Negro Girls," Psychi- atry: Journal of the Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 6 (August 1943): 321. 14. Elizabeth Lunbeck, "'A New Generation of Women': Progressive Psychiatrists

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and the Hypersexual Female," Feminist Studies 13 (fall 1987): 538, and The Psychi- atric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 194, 204-7, 297-98. 15. Frances Strakosch, Factors in the Sex Life of Seven Hundred Psychopathic Women (Utica, N.Y.: State Hospitals Press, 1934), 61-62; Maurice A.R. Hennessy, "Homosexual Charges against Children," Journal of Criminal Psychopathology 2 (April 1941): 529. On the middle-class "lesbian taboo," see Christina Simmons, "Marriage in the Modern Manner: Sexual Radicalism and Reform in America, 1914- 1941" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1982). 16. Ford; Otis; Florence Monahan, Women in Crime (New York: I. Washburn, 1941), 224-25. On working-class women who first learned about lesbianism while in a girls' reformatory or a women's prison, as well as lesbians who worked as prosti- tutes and served time in women's prisons, see, for example, the report on "bulldik- ing" written by Perry M. Lichtenstein, the physician at the New York City Tombs. His article, "The 'Fairy' and the Lady Lover," from the Medical Review of Reviews 27 (August 1921): 369-74, is extracted in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper Colophon, 1983), 402-3; Rusty Brown, "Always Me," in Long Time Passing: Lives of Older Lesbians, ed. Marcy Adelman (Boston: Alyson, 1986), 144-51; Davis and Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 60, 96ff, 329; and Joan Nestle, "Lesbians and Prostitutes: An Historical Sisterhood," in Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, ed. Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1987), 231-47. 17. Kahn, 24; Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Five Hundred Delinquent Wom- en (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1934). In a 1932 study of a reformatory for girls, sociol- ogist Lowell Selling labeled the pervasive wife/husband interracial relationships as nonpathological "pseudohomosexuality," in contrast to a mere 2 percent of the in- mates characterized by "overt homosexual existence." He recognized, however, that the latter group was "usually shrewd enough to conceal this relationship from the authorities." See Lowell S. Selling, "The Pseudo Family," American Journal of Sociology 37 (May 1932): 247-53. 18. Women who studied or worked within women's reformatories who had long- term female partners include former Bedford Hills reformatory staff member Jessie Taft, who lived with Virginia Robinson, and Miriam Van Waters, who had a long- term relationship with philanthropist Geraldine Thompson. Democratic Party politician Molly Dewson and social worker Polly Porter met when they both worked at a Massachusetts girls' reformatory. See Estelle B. Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1996), chap. 9; Susan Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 55. On reform schools in the 1920s, see Monahan, 223-24. The 1931 case involved the superinten- dent of the Alabama State Training School for Girls and is detailed in clippings files labeled "Reformatories-Ala.-Girls" in the Southern History Department at the Bir- mingham, Alabama, Library. I am extremely grateful to Susan K. Cahn for sharing this material with me. 19. Minutes of the Conference of Superintendents of Correctional Institutions for Women and Girls, 1944, p. 21, file 587, Miriam Van Waters Papers, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter MVW Papers). Note that Mead con- cluded that in the postwar period, "For the first time in our lives, we are going to face society that has more women than men in this generation, and female homo- sexuality will be a problem, not alone in the institutions but in society at large." In 1942 the women superintendents also heard a paper by Caroline Zachery on "Prob- lems of Homosexuality in the Institutions"; in 1943 they invited an Austrian psycho- analyst to discuss "Female Homosexuality in Correctional Institutions" (file 420,

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MVW Papers). 20. "I Lived in a Hell behind Bars," True Confessions (March 1954), 32. Pulp novels include James Harvey, Degraded Women (New York: Midwood Tower, 1962); and Ann Aldrich, ed., Carol in a Thousand Cities (Greenwich, Ct.: Gold Medal Books, 1960). The 1932 women's prison film, Ladies They Talk About, had a brief scene por- traying a comic butch lesbian; in Caged a sinister butch attempted to seduce a young woman played by Eleanor Parker, who was nominated for an Academy Award as best actress for her part. Other 1950s' women's prison films include Girls in Prison and Reform School Girl. (I am grateful to Joanne Meyerowitz for calling to my attention the series of articles in True Confessions, to Allan Berube for remind- ing me of the pulp novels, and to Andrea Davies for a tape of Ladies They Talk About.) On changing depictions of homosexuality in film, see Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); for an analysis of contemporary films about lesbians in prison, see Karlene Faith, Unruly Women: The Politics of Confine-ment and Resistance (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1993), 259-62. 21. A.M. Shotwell, "A Study of Psychopathic Delinquency," American Journal of Mental Deficiency 51 (July 1946): 57-62; Albertine Winner, "Homosexuality in Women," Medical Problems 218 (July-December 1947): 219-20. 22. Donna Penn, "The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Post-War America," in Not June Cleaver: Wom- en and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadel- phia: Temple University Press, 1994). On a corresponding association of female ath- letes with aggressive masculinity, see Susan K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (New York: Free Press, 1994), esp. chap. 7. 23. For an inmate's observation of interracial relations in a women's prison, see Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 178-79. Flynn, like novelist Felice Swados, considered the sexualization of Black women by white inmates as a form of racism, which she called "'white chauvinism' masquerading as 'love,' in interracial lesbian relations'" (178). Interracial lesbian relationships outside of prison may have be- come more common during the 1950s. See Davis and Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold; and Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1983). Lorde observed a predominance of Black butches and white femmes in 1950s' bar culture. On the nexus of race and sexual roles in Lorde's work, see Katie King, "Audre Lorde's Lacquered Layerings: The Lesbian Bar as a Site of Literary Production," in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, ed. Sally Munt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 51-74. 24. Kates, 188, 190. 25. Katharine Sullivan, Girls on Parole (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1956), 111-19. 26. Ibid., 111-21. 27. Ruth Frankenberg describes a shift from an essentialist race consciousness in early-twentieth-century American society to a "color-blindness" that she labels "col- or evasiveness" and "power evasiveness." Her categories well describe the social sci- ence literature on women's prisons in the 1960s. See Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 13-15. On shifting racial paradigms in modern America, see also Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). 28. Ward and Kassebaum, 136, 197-200; Giallombardo, 177, fig. 2; 183, fig. 3. (Six

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of the ten "marriages" between women diagrammed consisted of interracial couples, three others were between white women [two of them "divorced"] and one other be- tween Black women.) The only passing reference to race suggested that whites were slightly overrepresented as butches, Blacks as femmes, an observation rarely found in this literature. For examples of reform school literature that similarly ignores, or evades, race, see Halleck and Hersko; and Sidney Kosofsky and Albert Ellis, "Illegal Communication among Institutionalized Female Delinquents," Journal of Social Psychology 48 (August 1958): 155-60.

The absence of any discussion of race in these studies does not reflect the prison population. Giallombardo's figures on prior commitments, broken down by race, re- veal that over 40 percent of the Alderson prison population was "Negro." The as- sumption of a liberal "race-blind" approach during the 1960s may have represented a reaction to earlier social scientific arguments linking biological race and criminali- ty. Ward and Kassebaum, for example, explicitly reject biological explanations of ho- mosexuality, although they tend to substitute psychoanalytic interpretations (p. 104, n.4 and passim). Both studies are sympathetic to their subjects, resisting the demonization of lesbians in popular literature in favor of a functionalist explanation of the sexual and familial roles assumed by women prisoners.

For evidence of the continued eroticization of race in female correctional institu- tions, see Barbara Lillian Carter, "On the Grounds: Informal Culture in a Girls Reform School" (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1972), chap. 6. In this study, a Black female observer found that "the single most important factor" determining butch/femme roles was race. Disproportionate numbers of Blacks became "Butches and high status girls; and whites, equally disproportionately, became Femmes and lower status girls" (128). 29. Thus far I have found only one passing reference to Mexican American lesbians in prison. See Michela Robbins, "The Inside Story of a Girls Reformatory," Collier's, 30 Oct. 1953, 74-79, cited in Baker, 59. The juvenile delinquency and post-1945 women's prison literature may provide richer sources for a multiracial account. 30. Hart, 107-9, 117. On postwar sexual regulation, see Estelle B. Freedman, "'Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960," Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 83-106; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), esp; chap. 4; D'Emilio; and Ricki Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992). 31. Miriam Van Waters (hereafter MVW), handwritten notes, 11 Apr. 1938, file 241, and Helen Schnefel to MVW, 4 Oct. 1932, file 177, MVW Papers. 32. Dr. Pavenstedt, Report on student 16590, 1943-47, and 18572, 30 Mar. 1948, in McDowell Exhibits, 20 Feb. 1949 and 21 Feb. 1949, file 251; Interview by Mr. Swanson, 19 Jan. 1949, file 251, MVW Papers. 33. All inmate names have been changed. 34. McDowell Exhibits 125, 125A, 18 Feb. 1948, file 251, MVW Papers. 35. MacGregor eventually married a man she had met in a local jail, but she contin- ued to pursue lesbian relationships. McDowell Exhibits 126, 16A, 20 Feb. 1949, file 251, MVW Papers. 36. McDowell Exhibits 125, 125 and 126, 126A, 129, 129A, 18 Feb. 1949, file 251, MVW Papers. 37. Elliot E. McDowell to MVW, 28 July 1948, file 250 and Van Waters, "Superin- tendent's Answers," 1 June 1948, file 248, MVW Papers; LoPresti quoted in "Sher- born Probe," Boston Herald Traveller, 9 June 1948; "Immorality Charged at Re- formatory," Boston Herald Traveller, 13 Sept. and 15 Sept. 1948; Boston Evening American, 10 Nov. 1948. On the cultural context for associating homosexuality with communism, see D'Emilio; and May, Homeward Bound.

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38. McDowell to MVW, 7 Jan. 1949, file 201, MVW Papers. 39. John O'Connor, "Van Waters Rejects Inmate Sex Charge," Boston Herald, 1 Jan. 1949, 1. 40. Rumors about Van Waters' sexuality are discussed in MVW to Ethel Sturges Dummer, 26 Sept. 1948, file 825, Ethel Sturges Dummer Papers, Schlesinger Library, and in letters from a former inmate to MVW, 1 June 1948, file 195, and from Harry R. Archbald to MVW, 7 Feb. 1949, file 203, both in MVW Papers. For a full discussion of Van Waters' interpretation of lesbian identity and the political re- sponse to rumors of her own homosexuality, see Freedman, Maternal Justice, esp. chaps. 9, 12, 14, and 15. 41. Peg O'Keefe to MVW, 15 June 1949, file 215, MVW Papers. 42. A. Perry Holt Jr., Deputy Commissioner, to Commissioner Reuben L. Lurie, 21 May 1954, in "Escapes" Framingham, Human Services, Corrections, Reference Files, Series 1137x, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Archives. 43. "Report of the Special Committee Authorized to Study the Reorganization of the Correctional System," Commonwealth of Massachusetts House Document No. 3015 (Boston, 1958): 12-13, 56-59, 60, located in Framingham File, Human Services, Cor- rections, Reference Files, Series 1137x, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Archives. 44. "Remarks Made by Anne L. Clark, M.D., at Hodder Hall, Massachusetts Cor- rectional Institution for Women, Framingham, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, May 13, 1959," file 69, pp. 2-7, Massachusetts Society for Social Hygiene Papers, Schlesinger Library. I am grateful to Donna Penn for calling my attention to this document. On the segregation of lesbians in contemporary women's prisons, see Faith, 216; and Robson, 108. 45. On men's efforts to "reprivatize" women in the 1950s, see Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 36. For alternative historical interpretations of women's lives in the 1950s, see Meyerowitz. 46. On differential treatment of white and Black unwed mothers, see Solinger; and Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Profes- sionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). On bar dykes, see Davis and Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. For a dis- cussion of lesbianism and women's sports, see Cahn, esp. chap. 7. At the same time, sterilization efforts in the South shifted their targets from white to Black women. See Rebecca R. Lallier, "'A Place of Beginning Again': The North Carolina Indus- trial Farm Colony for Women, 1929-1947" (M.A. thesis, University of North Caroli- na, 1990). I am grateful to Susan K. Cahn for this reference. 47. On the persistence of class divisions among lesbians through the 1970s, see Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, chap. 7; Davis and Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, esp. 4, 138-45; Katie Gilmartin, "'The Very House of Difference': Intersections of Identities in the Life Histories of Colorado Lesbians, 1940-1965" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1995); and Susan Krieger, The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women's Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), chap. 11. 48. Robson, 109-10, and Ruthann Robson, "Convictions: Theorizing Lesbians and Criminal Justice," in Legal Inversions: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Law, ed. Didi Herman and Carol Stychin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Faith, 216.

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