Josephine Shaw Lowell was a Progressive Era reformer, here concerned with the overcrowded and mixed-gender penitentiaries at the end of the 19th Century. Although ostensibly a defender of women in prison, Lowell actually normalized the rhetoric of female victim-blaming and mobilized racist theories of eugenics. Although increasingly doubtful about the reformative capacities of individuals, these activists hoped the prison would quell the intemperate social order as a whole. Although fairly pessimistic, then, they were incredibly patriotic in their attempts to create a more biologically and morally fit citizenry which they hoped to achieve through greater biopolitical state control.
Cite As:
Enos Thompson Throop. Papers, #1157. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
The content in the 19th Century Prison Reform Collection is believed to be in the public domain by virtue of its age, and is presented by Cornell University Library under the Guidelines for Using Text, Images, Audio, and Video from Cornell University Library Collections [http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/CULCopyright]. This collection was digitized by Cornell University Library in 2017 from print materials held in the Rare and Manuscript Collections, with funding from a Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences Grant to Katherine Thorsteinson. For more information about these volumes, please contact the Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.
