Dangerous Felon or Divergent Femme? Women, Criminality and the Spinhuis Ideology

The second in a series: On the indefinite ideologies of women's criminality and 'imprisonment'.

Prisoners and governesses in the seventeenth-century Spinhuis (sourced).

To begin this post, I ask the reader to think a moment about their preconceptions when hearing (or rather seeing) the words: women, crime and imprisonment. Did you immediately think of Foucault and self-regulating society? Did you think about Matthew Hopkins, self-professed ‘Witchfinder General’, and the seventeenth century witch-hunt that threatened to eradicate women who did not fit the mould? Or did you even think of the vengeful Mrs Lovett from “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”? (…perhaps, just me)

The point I am trying to make is that each reader has a different opinion on what it means to be ‘criminal’, what it means to be ‘punished’ and even what it means to be ‘woman’. Historically speaking, definitions of criminality in different periods, different situations and by different perpetrators were so varied – specific and, at the same time, indefinite - that I can almost understand why some contemporary justice systems seem prejudicial and shambolic.

The building, which now hosts Huygens ING, has existed on Oudezijds Achterburgwal in Amsterdam for quite some time. It is called the Spinhuis; quite literally, the ‘spin house’. Again searching for a sordid geschiedenis van de Gouden Eeeuw, I was to be (pleasantly) disappointed. The Spinhuis was founded in the year 1597 as a correctional facility for female-only prisoners. The original building was destroyed in a fire in 1643 and rebuilt in 1645. Rebelling against the European trend for female criminals to be locked up together with male inmates, male prison guards and subjected to all manner of horrors, the Spinhuis was a revolutionary reformative organisation.

It was established on the former cloister of Saint Ursula and, as Martha Peacock argued in her chapter on “The Amsterdam Spinhuis and the ‘Art’ of Correction,” the building’s location, origin and operation provided an air of something “historically and culturally oriented toward female power and control.” Women were there (guarded by both male and female overseers) to spin, weave, sew and make lace in a labour-driven attempt to turn their lives around. Peter Spierenburg described the objectives of the Spinhuis, as outlined in the burgomasters’ proposal: “Young girls and others, who are used to begging and idleness, could be trained in spinning wool and earning their living, so that they would stop begging and going about idly.” Fairly straightforward.

The Spinhuis as depicted in 1783 (sourced).

Some women were imprisoned in the Spinhuis in the 'traditional' sense; as in, they had committed a serious crime and could not leave. Others were imprisoned under a community service-style contract. There were inmates kept from their families during the day, but allowed to return home at night. Other inmates, without a residence, were permitted to work during the day only to return at night. The Spinhuis was essentially created as a self-operational, charitable prison; long before the nineteenth-century obsession with reform and poor relief. It was, albeit, presented more positively than realistically (see first image). But, the effort and, most importantly, the attention was certainly there. This was not the case in other reformatory institutions housing women: the Bridewell Prison, Magdalene Asylums among others spring to mind.

Reforming female criminals was not always a goal of the authorities. An example from the Women Writers VRE, the case of Protestant middle-class English woman, Mary Blandy, born in Oxfordshire in 1720. The story goes that Blandy poisoned her father with arsenic after he denied her a relationship with army officer, Henry Cranstoun. She pled 'not guilty'; unaware the concoction was anything other than a 'love potion' meant to soften her father to the idea of marriage. Blandy is included as an author in the database as she wrote a tell-all novel of her situation while imprisoned. There was no evidence as to where she obtained the poison or how she administered it, however, on 6th April 1752, she hanged for patricide. Paying dearly for 'her crime', some contemporary commentators on the Blandy case questioned her guilt - others reinforced it. Nevertheless, two ideological tropes of women's criminality were emphasised in her case. Blandy was either the 'wilting, confused, love-sick victim' or the 'vindictive, cunning, recalcitrant wench' and both neatly fell into the categories of understanding females and their crimes.

There was no room for deviation in the nineteenth-century ideal (sourced).

Moving away from imprisonment and capital punishment, women who committed crime were also punished through other methods. In reference to other ideological elements of punishment and the rigidity of 'separate spheres' in women's lives, the thesis I am currently writing focuses on domestic servants in Dundee, Scotland between roughly 1860 to 1910 and their relationship, both as victims and perpetrators, with violent assaults. Taking the examples of my own strong, Scottish, wooden-legged female relatives, I can only assume these maidservants were stoic, hard-working and absolutely resilient women. Some of them were thieves, drunkards or worse, but many of them were simply working-class women forced into situations of crime through their disadvantaged circumstances.

Jane Ann McKenzie, a domestic servant “just passed out of her teens” in the village of Edzell, was, on 1st April 1905, arrested for drowning her six-week-old infant daughter when she was found walking, dazed and confused, along the banks of the Westwater river with her child’s corpse in her arms. As yet, I have no further context for this case. Did McKenzie fall in love with a male visitor to the house in which she worked? Did she visit a ‘public house’ in one of her rare nights off and things got out of hand? Or, as the newspaper reported her as being, “held in esteem by all who knew her,” is it more likely that she may have been raped by the master of the household in which she slept, ate, worked and lived out her life as she knew it? If this was the case - as it was with many impregnated domestic servants - what kind of exceptional fear must she have felt to rather commit infanticide than lose her position, her income, her reputation and become imprisoned by the reality of single, unemployed motherhood?

This is another kind of imprisonment society placed on women. Enforced, not only by the threat of poverty and starvation, but by the ideological imprisonment of respectability and femininity; the bricks and mortar prison of the mind and morality. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in Le Deuxième Sexe, "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman," and, I think, looking at the conceptual changes in 'women', their 'crimes' and 'punishments', over time pays homage to that statement. Women's criminality is an enlightening, but under-researched area of gender history. In future, I hope my thesis, the contribution of academics and VREs like Women Writers can move toward closing the gap.

#History #women #crime #criminality #imprisonment #Spinhuis #HuygensING #womensliterarystudies #research #MaryBlandy #prisons