Book Review

This is a good book in some important respects and a weak one in others. It is thoroughly researched. According to her bibliography, Butler examined manuscripts in twenty-three archives, as well as a substantial amount of published but obscure material. The result is a finely grained history of women's treatment in western penitentiaries. The study's strength is its descriptions of female prisoners' lives: the wretched conditions they lived under, the nature of their work, the sexual assaults and propositions that confronted so many, and their varied and at times effective attempts to resist. The reader learns a great deal about everyday penitentiary life for male inmates, too. Much of this makes for compelling reading. Butler's prose is not always clear, but she has a good eye for evocative quotations. She also does a fine job of setting her study in the context of historical developments in American penology. She is sensitive to class and particularly race; indeed, much of the book focuses on African-American women. This monograph, then, fills some yawning gaps in our historical understanding of women prisoners.	1
But this book is not much more than the sum of its useful parts. Its central argument seems to be that the violence women suffered from in western penitentiaries "demonstrated that possible and actual violence surrounded and threatened all women in the West" (6). Butler allows that "not every woman experienced personal violence." But "all lived in a western society where one might fall prey to its sudden attacks, if the fates brought her inside a male penitentiary" (6). Yet women constituted a tiny proportion of prison inmates during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, less than one percent in some places. Furthermore, as Butler demonstrates, respectable western men commonly defined female prisoners as inherently unwomanly. She does not explain how abuse directed at a relatively tiny population of women widely regarded as deviant demonstrates widespread violence toward all women. Butler's focus on violence is muddied further by more particular imprecisions. She at times uses "violence" to mean the use of physical force, but at other points it seems synonymous with sexism, abuse, or simply any sort of ill treatment. Butler makes a strong case that female prisoners suffered particular disadvantages, such as overcrowding and inattentiveness to women's health, and she demonstrates that some suffered horrible physical tortures. But she does not demonstrate that male prisoners were less apt to suffer beatings, whippings, or other severe punishments. Indeed, an analysis of executions would suggest quite the opposite.	2
Its central argument notwithstanding, this book raises some interesting questions about gender relations. Butler illustrates that community leaders were troubled by instances of female criminality, a reaction that suggests that men feared women's capacity for violence more than they were willing to admit. Perhaps the calumny and abuse that violent women suffered at the hands of male newspaper writers, jurists, and prison officials sprang from deeply held misogynistic impulses that more respectable women felt less directly. In any event, there were clearly some intriguing links between these marginal women and the respectable people who condemned them, and one wishes that Butler had explored them more fully and sensitively.	3
Nor does Butler adequately explain her choice of place, time, or topic. Like many self-professed western historians (she edits the Western Historical Quarterly), Butler attributes a geographical and chronological unity to "the West" at odds with its actual history. Her study includes nineteen of the twenty-five states west of the Mississippi River; it leaves out only Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. The exclusion of these Pacific states is certainly defensible, though one might argue that Oregon or Washington had more in common with Idaho and Colorado than did Louisiana or Arkansas. Butler allows that these nineteen states were diverse, but that certain commonalities, such as "quarrelling over land and water," bound them together (4). Yet Californians were more quarrelsome over such matters than Minnesotans or Iowans. This argument for coherence is insufficiently developed. The chronology is also peculiar. It is not so much that the sweep is too ambitious; the study stretches a half century, from 1865 to 1915. Rather, Butler tends to treat this period as a single piece. The chapters are organized topically rather than chronologically, and the reader gets little sense of change over time during a period of profound changes. Nor is it clear why Butler chose these particular years. She remarks that the close of the Civil War precipitated settlement in the West, which "unleashed a cyclone of societal forces" (5). This hardly describes the history of, say, Missouri or eastern Kansas. The boundaries of this study, then, seem arbitrary. Indeed, the principal justification that Butler offers for selecting the West, male penitentiaries, female inmates, and violence as her book's primary components is that this mix has not before been attempted. But one could say the same for any number of random combinations of places and topics.	4
The book is also weakened at times by vague prose. One chapter closes by concluding that women's prison labor "and inappropriate birthing conditions, both highlighted by the absence of gender dignity, gave male overseers yet another form of violence to make a woman's prison time distinctive" (168). Another concluding section refers to "gender disadvantage" and "an aura of continuing violence" (192).	5
In sum, this book greatly advances our knowledge of the particulars of women's imprisonment, but it does not much contribute to a broader understanding of the relationship between law and gender.	6
David Peterson del Mar University of Northern British Columbia

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