The Women of Yuma: Gender, Ethnicity, and Imprisonment in Frontier Arizona, 1876-1909

Abstract

Until quite recently, histories of imprisonment in America have overlooked women. Prison history has also been limited geographically to institutions in the northeast, and consequently there have been few studies of western prisons. The present historical analysis deals with women who were confined in the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma between 1876 and 1909. It extends and expands upon Nicole Rafter's Partial Justice (1990). Specifically, it covers the experience of women imprisoned in western states and territories during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, describes the racial and ethnic diversity of the female prison population along with the accompanying social and cultural differences, and outlines the treatment that women received from male prison officials. It also develops the concept of the western "bad women" within nineteenth-century popular culture to provide further support for Rafter's claim that prisons function to control gender, race, and ethnicity as well as crime.