Punishments inflicted on women and slaves were systematically excluded from prison reformers’ agenda.

Evidence

In seventeenth-century Britain, women whose husbands identified them as quarrelsome and unaccepting of male dominance were punished by means of a gossip’s bridle, or “branks,” a headpiece with a chain attached and an iron bit that was introduced into the woman’s mouth. Although the branking of women was often linked to a public parade, this contraption was sometimes hooked to a wall of the house, where the punished woman remained until her husband decided to release her. I mention these forms of punishment inflicted on women because, like the punishment inflicted on slaves, they were rarely taken up by prison reformers. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 104

Categorization

• XREF: Builds Davis’s gendered-and-racialized critique of the reform origin story; connects to her slavery-prison parallel. — connects to: Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 170

Related

• Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible (similarity 0.84)
• Women face unacknowledged state punishment outside formal prison (similarity 0.83)
• Male prisons functioning as the punishment norm drives women’s conditions toward greater repression. (similarity 0.80)
• Men’s prisons are gendered institutions, not the norm against which women’s prisons are judged (similarity 0.80)
• Women who are punished are seen as more aberrant and threatening than men (similarity 0.79)
• Women have been punished more through psychiatric institutions than prisons (similarity 0.79)
• Formalistic equality with male prisons makes women’s prisons more repressive, not less. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible #expands (0.70) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 170