MCCOY, Ted – Four Unruly Women: Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019. Pp 148.

Abstract

MCCOY, Ted – Four Unruly Women: Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019. Pp 148. 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). The book is organized into four substantive chapters (plus a short introduction and conclusion), each of which is devoted to one woman’s story. Drawing from the KP punishment registers, McCoy recounts the stories of four women who were “so intractable, so difficult to control, that [the institution] desert[ed] the principles of moral reformation” (p. 74). Each woman’s “unruliness”—manifested, variously, through violence, shouting and cursing, refusing to work, destroying their clothing or cells, or speaking back to prison officials—was met with increasingly fierce discipline, from whippings (until this punishment was abolished in the late 1840s), to being held in “the box,” to solitary confinement in the “dark cells” or “the dungeon.” Despite these punishments, the four women in this book continued to engage in acts of defiance, which McCoy reads as an embodied form of working-class resistance to the equally embodied form of patriarchal capitalist authority personified in their keepers. Thus, each woman’s story is also a story about the class and gendered tensions inherent in the ostensibly humanitarian goal of penitentiaries, institutions that are, themselves, unique to and emblematic of the moral and economic discipline of capitalist production. Chapter 1 is devoted to the story of Bridget Donnelly, who would become one of KP’s longest serving prisoners. First sentenced in 1838 to one year in KP for larceny at the age of 18, we follow the struggles of Bridget as she returns to KP seven more times, until she disappears from the record in 1880. With each sentence to KP, ranging from two to three years, always for larceny, Bridget becomes increasingly recalcitrant and earns some of the harshest penalties that the penitentiary has the capacity to mete out. In this chapter, we are introduced to the disciplinary regimes of the penitentiary, and McCoy simultaneously sets the stage for a key argument of the book, which is that “resistance was not simply a personal or individual choice…; it played a central role in how modern penal systems developed” (p. 18). McCoy reads Bridget’s acts of resistance as paradigmatic of class struggle and, specifically, of the tension between a workingclass claim to customary rights (e.g.. the right to refuse work) versus the administrators’ commitment to stamp out these rights and substitute them with a capitalist work ethic. Thus, Bridget’s unruliness can also be read as a power struggle about gendered authority and capitalist discipline. Although Bridget could not win in such an asymmetrical struggle, her tenacious refusal to completely submit also helped to shape the penitentiary itself. Chapter 2 introduces us to Charlotte Reveille, who, like Bridget, did not suffer her imprisonment (1846-1849) quietly: rather, she was increasingly severely punished for being “noisy” in the cells, as well as for being violent, destroying her clothes, refusing to work, and threatening the matron. But Charlotte was also very unwell, both physically and mentally, and she spent much of her sentence in the hospital wards for various ailments, including a suicide attempt. Thus, Charlotte’s experiences open up for view mid-nineteenth-century debates about the links between gender, sexuality, criminalization, and medicalization. Like Bridget, Charlotte’s unruliness forced prison administrators to face the inherent contradictions in the penitentiary, including whether the physical punishments for resistance were a response to “wickedness” or a cause of “moral insanity.” The final two substantive chapters are shorter, but similarly address the multiple layers inherent in each woman’s story. In “Alias Kate” (chapter 3), we are introduced to Mary Byron, more commonly known as Kate Slattery, who was imprisoned in KP in 1890 for breaking windows in Montreal. Like Bridget and Charlotte, Kate was also described by the then warden as...