Serving her Sentence: Gender and the Segregation of Carceral Space in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Drawing on court cases, newspaper reports and pardon records from nineteenth-century North Carolina in relation to infant murder and infanticide, this article complicates historical ideas about gender and incarceration by positing that in some circumstances, segregation in carceral spaces by virtue of gender served to benefit some women. Using the example of North Carolina – singular because of its lack of a centralised state prison in the years prior to the US Civil War – the article argues that segregation by gender advantaged white women, in particular, no matter how poor. Local communities accepted that such women, no matter the severity of their crime, could not be incarcerated with men. The absence of carceral spaces for white women then provided pathways to executive pardons for convicted women as there was nowhere to incarcerate them.