Workshop 24

24.
Between Punishment and Discipline:
Early Modern Workhouses and the Public Woman

Organizers:

Jane Kromm, Art History, SUNY Purchase
Melissa Mowry, English, St. John’s University
Cristine Varholy, English, John Jay College, CUNY

Description:

This workshop is designed to generate discussion about the intersection between early modern constructions of women’s sexuality and the fluid, often contested nature of public space between the years 1540 and 1685. Spurred in part by David Halperin’s article “Forget Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality” (Representations, 1998), scholars of early modern Europe have been reexamining discourses that differentiated proper from errant sexual practices to see whether they might, despite their early appearance, nonetheless participate in a Truth/Power regime similar to the one Foucault attributes to the nineteenth century (see, for example, the debate between Carla Freccero, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Theo Van der Meer in the Journal of Women’s History, 1999). Despite the fact that prostitutes were understood specifically as public women, these reexaminations often fail to take full account of the fact that early modern descriptions of women’s sexuality were inextricable from contemporary negotiations of public space. Because workhouses like Bridewell and Spinhuis were an invention of the early modern period, they offer a truly unique stage for investigating these two traditionally disparate structures. We envision a workshop in which the organizers will each offer a 5-min. description of the primary materials from Bridewell and Spinhuis that each participant will be provided in advance. After this introduction, we would like the workshop to consider the unique set of methodological and material questions that Bridewell and Spinhuis raise.

Methodology:

How do we talk about space in the context of an institution that, though belonging to the public, nonetheless was devoted to reforming women out of the public eye?
How do we map the relationship between women’s sexuality and women’s work, particularly since labor was used punitively in these institutions?
How do we evaluate the relationship between female inmates specifically committed on charges of “lewd” behavior and other women committed for “other” charges?

Material:

Given the fact that female inmates produced none of the “evidence” from Bridewell or Spinhuis, what can these documents tell us about the ways early modern England and Holland constructed the identities of public women?
What bearing did local and national politics have on the early modern period’s interest in reforming public women?
Who were the governors of these institutions and how did they influence the way public women were committed and punished?

Description of Primary Materials

Bridewell 1553-1557
Bridewell Royal Hospital was established in 1553 by a grant from King Edward VI to the mayor, commonalty and citizens of London, as part of a larger initiative for dealing with urban poverty and vagrancy. Documents related to the Hospital’s founding, the indenture of covenants by which Edward VI established the hospital (1553) and the ordinance and rules for its governance (1557), offer an idealized vision of the institution’s aims and practices, a vision predicated on discernment between ordered and disorderly public spaces and on gendered notions of acceptable behavior for London citizens. These documents present Bridewell as an institution that could maintain order in the rapidly changing London metropolis.

Spinhuis 1596-1645
Amsterdam’s workhouse for women, its Spinhuis, was founded in 1596, situated in buildings that originally had belonged to the convent of St. Ursula and were dedicated to the rehabilitation of idle or wandering girls, maids, and women through employment in sewing, knitting, and spinning. In 1643 the hybridized structure of the former convent burned. In 1645 a new Spinhuis was erected. This structure, its organization and use, as well as its inmates belong to a new kind of urban institution that is conceived on the basis of blurring the traditional distinctions between public and the private in the early modern period. With the Spinhuis in particular, there are numerous problematic areas, including its relation to changing behavior standards for women, to presumptions about women’s labor, and to the relationship between independence and prostitution. The rich symbolic economy of spinning, and the Netherlandish preoccupation with women engaged in interior settings quietly absorbed in needlework, also add nuanced layers of understanding to the Spinhuis’ occupants and their activities. Their spatial segregation, their cloistered institutional affiliation, contrast with the clear exterior markings of the building in which its clientele are depicted in varying degrees of diligence and disobedience.

Bridewell 1660-1681
Despite the fact that the original Bridewell Hospital burned in 1666, a significant number of the Court Books from the late Stuart period are extant. Those records present a complex archive for scholars of early modern sexuality. Not only do the minutes from the Court of Governors chronicle the commitments and discharges of inmates for the court’s biweekly meetings, but they are combined with the court’s other mission to put poor orphan boys to work. Consequently, each set of minutes lists a series of petitions and declarations that pertain to the establishment of trades within the Hospital’s precincts, the rent charges for tradesmen and their families, and various other sorts of business. The workshop will offer participants one full set of minutes from the biweekly meetings in order to illustrate the archive’s deep structure. The example will also illustrate the ways in which the archive prompts scholars to think about the rich and intricate ways multiple analytical categories intersect to delineate sexuality and public space during the late Stuart period.

Workshop participants will be supplied with the following packet of material prior to the conference as well as a list of additional suggested readings.

Founding documents for Bridewell Hospital. 3 pp.
4 images of Spinhuis and 1 seventeenth-century poem that describes the workhouse.
3 Minutes from Bridewell Court of Governors 17 March 1681 (transcribed).
Laura Gowing, “’The Freedom of the Streets’: Women and Social Space, 1560-1640,” in Londinopolis: Essays in Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London eds, Mark Jenner and Paul Griffiths (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), 130-151. 11 pp.