‘No sword could ever pierce my heart more than when I must miss my child’: Power dynamics, agency and motherhood in the prison of ‘s-Hertogenbosch 1820–1880

Abstract

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.