After a bountiful Thanksgiving dinner of tomato cocktail, turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, creamed onions, peas, and cranberry sauce, topped off with a huge piece of apple pie and a piping hot cup of tea, we all took a much needed walk to the Industrial Building where we enjoyed the following Thanksgiving program…

The Hour Glass, Autumn 1940 (p. 34), Connecticut State Farm for Women

Being no stranger to garden work because my family grew a sizable one each year, I expected to do some basic maintenance, reaping and sowing. I also had envisioned enjoying some fresh fruits and vegetables. It quickly became obvious that we were human mowers and the methods employed in the field were only for maximum discomfort and had no aim to feed the prison population. We were raising cash crops and if we did eat any portion of a crop it was because it was too poor quality to be sold…

“Texas Didn’t Get The Message,” Lisa Jackson, Tenacious, Winter 2020

The reality of being incarcerated in the Connecticut State Farm for Women in Niantic, Connecticut in the 1930s and 1940s seems to be a far cry from the reality of current female prisoners in the United States: the inmates at Niantic celebrate holidays and observe each with customs specific to their farm; they are offered educational opportunities by way of a library on the grounds; they are given journalistic privileges to write about their experience on the farm in The Hour Glass, their newsletter; they perform plays and worship the Lord; the tone of their pieces is one of positivity, optimism, and openness to reform and community. The place is imbued with progressive ideals of reforming women thought to be guilty of crimes such as “lascivious carriage, prostitution, manifest danger of falling into habits of vice, intoxication, delinquency, vagrancy, theft, forgery, being a habitual offender, neglect of children, impairing the morals of a minor child, frequenting disorderly houses, street walking, incorrigibility, and being lewd, wanton or lascivious,” according to historian Paul Harrison (1).

Compare this to the prison zine Tenacious and you will see a stark contrast: the women writing in Tenacious describe the indignities of hard labor in fields with little water and few bathroom breaks; they describe the personal pain and turmoil they experience in their estrangement from friends and relatives in moving lyric verse; they expound on the frustration with the parole systems under which they are subject. Tenacious oozes despair, anguish, and the blunt self expression of the women writing in its pages.

And how do we know about any of these documented experiences, considering how well the American prison industrial complex hides the stories of its inmates?

Primarily, we know by consulting scans of these primary sources. For the former, The Hour Glass, we can thank Reveal Digital’s recently launched project, American Prison Newspapers. As an early funder to the open access project, SCU Library has advanced access to the repository. By using the link below and selecting SCU from the institution list to prompt a login, any SCU student, staff, or faculty member can access this digital collection. Although the women’s prison’s newspapers are not yet included in the collection, the administrators of the project provided a description of the women-authored titles that are coming down the pike. Using this information, I was able to locate digitized copies of The Hour Glass in the Connecticut State Library digital collections.

For the latter, Tenacious, Dr. Kirstyn Leuner acquired a PDF of the zine from the editors, in support of her research and the course she teaches, ENGL 68: Women’s Prison Writing. To access Tenacious yourself, you will need to purchase a copy of the most recent issue from the Tenacious website.

For my work with the class a couple weeks ago, leading the students through an analysis activity comparing the these two news sources from two groups of women subjected to very different correctional facilities in two very different eras provided powerful insights into varying ideas of penalization, reform, and punishment. As with nearly all primary source research, I was left with so many questions, rather than answers: What happened to our progressive spirit of reform? What cultural factors in America led to the draconian prison systems, and their lack of humanity? Why don’t we view prisoners like the women of Niantic State Prison as worthy of taking pride in their labor, and use that as a defining key to building character, self sufficiency, and self esteem in order to give the women the tools for successful re-entry into society? Perhaps I will read Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? along with the class when it is offered again next quarter in order to start finding some of the answers.

Until then I will continue to pore over the digitized pages of The Hour Glass in awe at the singular perspective it offers into a community otherwise not often considered.

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(1) Beach, R. (Sept 17, 2018). “The State’s Only Prison For Women Began as a Working Farm,” Connecticut Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.connecticutmag.com/the-connecticut-story/beachcombing/the-states-only-prison-for-women-began-as-a-working-farm/article_c818ca0c-b62a-11e8-94ce-b7a04066f4a3.html

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Header image: the cover of the Summer, 1936 issue of The Hour Glass.