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list price: $21.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook Hardcover
category: History
published: Mar 2019
ISBN:9780774838887
publisher: UBC Press

Four Unruly Women

Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison

by Ted McCoy

tagged: women, social history, women's studies, criminology
Description

Bridget Donnelly. Charlotte Reveille. Kate Slattery. Emily Boyle. Until now, these were nothing but names marked down in the admittance registers and punishment reports of Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s most notorious prison.

 

In this shocking and heartbreaking book, Ted McCoy tell these women’s stories of incarceration and resistance in poignant detail. The four women served sentences at different times between 1835 and 1935, but they shared experiences that illuminate how those most marginalized in society – the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged – reckoned with poverty and crime and grappled with the constraints placed on them by shifting notions of punishment and reform.

 

The inhumanity they suffered while locked away from male prisoners in dark basement wards – from starvation and corporal punishment to sexual abuse and neglect – stands as profoundly disturbing evidence of the hidden costs of isolation, punishment, and mass incarceration.

About the Author
Ted McCoy is an assistant professor in Sociology at the University of Calgary
Contributor Notes

Ted McCoy is the author of Hard Time: Reforming the Penitentiary in Nineteenth-Century Canada. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary, where he teaches law and society.

Editorial Reviews

Although Ted McCoy’s Four Unruly Women is a short and accessibly written text—and, therefore, an excellent teaching resource!—it also offers a meticulously researched and multilayered analysis of four women, all imprisoned at the notorious Kingston Penitentiary (KP) at different times, for a revealing glimpse into the gendered pains of imprisonment over the course of a century (1838–1934).

— Histoire social/Social History

This book honours Bridget Donnelly, Charlotte Reveille, Kate Slattery and Emily Boyle by bringing their disturbing stories to light.

— Herizons

"Four Unruly Women: Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison provides an in-depth understanding of women’s resistance in Canada and the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples in Canada."

— Canadian Journal of Law and Society

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