Capitalism, Carceral Culture, and the Domestication of Working Women in the Early American City

Ideas about race, gender, and sexuality were driving forces in the transformation of both manufacturing and punishment in the nascent years of industrial capitalism. Arrest and imprisonment was an occupational hazard for hucksters, sex workers, and tippling house operators, while the penitentiary imposed ideals of femininity defined by whiteness, domesticity, and submission on the poor working women behind its walls.