Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote an earlier account of life in a women’s prison, The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner.76 At the height of the McCarthy era, Flynn, a labor activist and Communist leader, was convicted under the Smith Act and served two years in Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women from 1955 to 1957. Following the dominant model for women’s prisons during that period, Alderson’s regimes were based on the assumption that “criminal” women could be rehabilitated by assimilating correct womanly behaviors—that is, by becoming experts in domesticity—especially cooking,
...more
