










































Publication Draft – SSCH – 2004


Intended Practice: 
The Curriculum at the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, 1932-1957 

Dominique T. Chlup 
Texas A&M University 

 
Abstract:  This paper discusses the role of women 
inmates as historical agents active in curriculum 
development at the Massachusetts Reformatory for 
Women at Framingham during the 1930s, 40, and 50s.  
Explored are the educational programs and practices 
established for and by women inmates in the Era of 
Reformatory-Prisons.  The historical legacy of these 
programs and practices are then discussed in view of 
the lack of contemporary programming available at 
MCI-Framingham. 
 
 Ann’s1 eyes skimmed the catalog’s course 
offerings…journalism, playwriting, psychology, 
biology, piano lessons, beginner’s English.  Her eyes 
widened as she thought of all of the possibilities.  
How would she find the time to take them all?  
Rivaling the curriculum to be found at any of the 
women’s colleges located throughout the Northeast, 
this particular institution prided itself on the fact that it 
was modeled after one of the oldest and most 
prestigious of women’s colleges in Massachusetts—
Wellesley College, which was chartered in 1870 and 
opened its doors in 1875.  Only this institution was not 
a school in the traditional sense.  Rather it was the 
Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at 
Framingham.2  The school Ann was readying herself 
to enter the next morning was a prison school. 
 Of the eighteen prison-reformatories opened 
for women between 1877 and 1933 in the United 
States, Framingham was one of the most committed to 
providing educational programs for its inmates.  In a 
criminal justice system where a gendered application 
of the law was in effect that disproportionately 
arrested women and girls for crimes against morality, 
the unique educational programs and practices 
implemented by Superintendent Dr. Miriam Van 
Waters, the staff, and the inmates, themselves, 
allowed the justice these women received to be an 
educative one.3  Educative Justice meant that the 
women could step outside of their role of gendered 
“prisoner” and participate in the role of academic 
learner.  It was the intended practice of the prison 
superintendent and staff to foster an environment 
where inmates could participate in the role of 
academic learner. 

Historically, with a few exceptions, the 
portrayal of prisons and women’s experiences in those 
prisons has been bleak.  Early women’s prison 
histories claim that educational programs were one of 
the few places of inspiration and genuine good work 
in women’s reformatories.  Contemporary women’s 
prison histories debate this finding and revise the 
historical lens through which we look at prisons.  I 
believe that the legacy of the women’s reformatories 
is complicated and complex enough to allow for both 

of these histories.  I maintain that while the early 
histories may have focused too narrowly on the 
“good” intentions of educational programs, later 
histories focus too narrowly on the negative outcomes 
of the “good” intentions.  I would argue that the 
history of the women’s reformatory movement is a 
rather complex and complicated one, and it is only by 
investigating both the transformative experiences 
women had in the reformatories and the limitations of 
those experiences that a comprehensive portrait of 
women’s reformatories begins to develop. 

When the first women’s prison opened in the 
United States in the 1870s, education was valued as 
the tool to be used toward reformation and 
rehabilitation.4  Curiously, despite the indication that 
education was uniquely at the foundation of women’s 
penal reform, no modern scholarship has been devoted 
to this topic.  In light of this neglect, this paper 
explores the nexus between the Era of women’s prison 
reform and the subsequent curriculum development.  
It was these programs which intentionally allowed for 
the practice of inmates to initiate and contribute to the 
prison curriculum.  The central research questions this 
paper addresses are:  What input did student inmates 
have on the curriculum at the Reformatory, what 
educational ideas did they articulate, and how were 
students able to initiate and respond to the 
development of their education?  The historical legacy 
of these programs and practices are then discussed in 
view of the lack of contemporary programming 
available at MCI-Framingham.5

This paper is based on a historical study and 
as such relies on methods of historical inquiry.  This 
study is based on the manuscript collections at the 
Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced 
Study) of Framingham Reformatory’s Superintendent 
Dr. Miriam Van Waters, Framingham prison art 
teacher Amy Paddon Row, and prison staff member 
Anna Spicer Gladding.  I use both primary and 
secondary sources to explore my research questions.  
Primary sources include empirical studies conducted 
by social scientists during the time period, published 
newspaper accounts of Framingham, selected articles 
from the Journal of Correctional Education (1949-
2004), periodicals, including prisoner produced 
periodicals, and archival sources such as class reports, 
student-inmate reports, library holdings, prison policy 
reports, newspaper accounts, the writings of individual 
prisoners, and 2,699 inmate case files held at the Mass 
State Archives.  Secondary sources I consulted, which 
provide a larger context for my study include the 
biographies of the female superintendents of women’s 
prisons, literature on the history of prison education, 
literature on the history the women’s prison reform 
movement, literature on the history of delinquency 



 

 8 

and rehabilitation of women and girls, and the 
literature on Progressive Era social reforms.   

This historical study is significantly different 
in its focus from previous scholarship on prison 
reform as it is focuses on women and girls’ prison 
education programs and looks at the work and lives 
and roles of student inmates who both shaped and 
were the subjects of progressive educational ideals
and reforms.  Although a number of historians and 
legal scholars have studied the history of prisons and 
prison reform in the United States,

   In 1935, the Framingham superintendent’s 
report documented that out of 296 women inmates 250 
were enrolled in the voluntary school classes.

6 no one has yet 
examined the curriculum in these all-female 
institutions from the prisoners’ point of view or 
investigated the role played by prisoners in the 
outcome of particular reforms.  Thus far, the literature 
often reduces prisoners to passive beings who 
benefited from reformer’s humanitarianism or 
suffered at the hands of anti-educational forces; little 
of it investigates the consciousness of prisoners and 
the consequential effects on educational 
programming.7  My research in this area suggests that 
the educational programs at the Framingham 
Reformatory were progressing in vital and important 
ways late into the 1950s, over twenty years after 
prison historians claimed that the prison reform 
movement had exhausted itself.   

While reformatory-prisons are often deemed 
to have remained prisons at heart,8 the Framingham 
Reformatory’s educational classrooms were spaces in 
which inmates could “forget lock and key” and 
operate as students rather than inmates.  The director 
of the Boston Children’s Museum wrote of one 
classroom at the Massachusetts Reformatory for 
Women as a place where they “forgot time and locks” 
and found “inspiration and real encouragement to try 
again.”9  The Framingham Reformatory for Women 
was seen as a “place, not for punishment, but for 
reformation, training, and treatment.  A place of 
comfort and dignity, where discipline is tempered with 
kindness and understanding.”10

In 1870, at the Cincinnati National Prison 
Congress, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes [later the 
19th President of the United States] welcomed a host 
of 130 wardens, chaplains, judges, and humanitarians 
to Ohio to begin the work that in essence would later 
be termed the beginning of this country’s reformatory 
movement.11  The National Prison Congress, which 
would later change its name in 1955 to the American 
Correction Association, first convened in order to 
professionalize prison management and encourage 
humane prison conditions.  Another one of its 
purposes was “to transform prisons into schools.”  The 
delegates adopted a “Declaration of Principles.”  
Principle Ten dealt specifically with correctional 
education. 
 
X.  Education is a vital force in the reformation 

of fallen men and women.  Its tendency is to 
quicken the intellect, inspire self-respect, 

excite to higher aims, and afford a healthful 
substitute for low and vicious amusements.  
Education is therefore, a matter of primary 
importance in prisons, and should be carried 
to the utmost extent consistent with the other 
purposes of such institutions.12

 

13  By 
1940, twenty-six classes were offered.  This number 
would continue to grow into the late 1950s and 
included classes in the visual arts, beginners’ English, 
poetry, biology, typing, Bible study, metal craft, 
arithmetic, folk dancing, and a Biography class run by 
the superintendent’s mother.14  This did not include 
the correspondence courses, which were procured for 
the University Extension Division of the State 
Department of Education, and at one time 50 classes 
alone were being offered in this way, nor did it 
include the various clubs.15  All of the clubs met 
weekly and were designated for specific purposes.  
For instance, the 36 members of the Merry Makers 
Club were all African Americans, whose purpose in 
meeting was to “encourage the interest of the 
members in the leaders in their race—books are read 
about the lives of outstanding [Negro] men and 
women.”16  Other clubs included the Garden Club, 
Glee Club, Barn Club, Parole Club, the Two-Sided 
Club,17 the Good Fellowship Club, the Mothercraft 
Club, Junior Council, and the Birthday club, which 
threw a birthday party for all the women in the 
institution who celebrated a birthday during that 
month.  Another group of students comprised the 
editorial board of the Harmony News, which was the 
student run periodical that was in operation for over 
twenty years.  The subscription base extended beyond 
the reformatory as many community members also 
subscribed to the news magazine.  In a span of twenty-
five years [1932-1957], 90 different classes would be 
offered and 14 different clubs. 

When Framingham opened its doors in 1877, 
it only met some of the original goals of the prison 
reform movement.  Rather than cottage-like housing 
facilities, which reformers advocated, a large stone 
edifice adorned the center of the thirty acres of land 
designated for buildings.18  Inmates were prohibited 
from talking at all, and if they passed another inmate 
in the corridor, “one of the two had to stand and face 
the wall with her arm over her eyes until the other had 
passed.”19  Framingham, also called Sherborn because 
its land spilt over into the town of Sherborn, was 
located thirty miles west of Boston in a pastoral 
setting on 333 acres of land; this met with the 
reformers’ approval.20   

When the Reformatory first opened, other 
conditions also met with the reformers approval.  The 
windows had no bars, white linens adorned the 
mattresses, and women who earned privileges were 



 

 9

allowed to decorate their cells.  But the most unique 
feature was the nursery, where infants brought with 
their mothers or born while their mother was at the 
institution stayed until they were two.  While 
reformatory nurseries did exist elsewhere in the 
country, few were as well-known as Framingham’s.  
The administration considered Framingham to be a 
child-centered institution where “parent-education 
[was] not limited to the mother-child relationship, but 
included individual development and achievement.”21   

The legacy of the moral reform campaign 
against prostitution was still in effect during the 
1930s, 40s, and 50s, as it was these crimes against 
chastity that many unwed mothers and pregnant girls 
had been locked up for committing; these were crimes 
for which their male partners never received penalties.  
Recognizing that a gendered application of the law, 
which linked women’s deviancy and criminality to 
their sexuality in a way that men’s was not, the 
academic educational programs and practices at 
Framingham did allow women the opportunity to 
develop and foster a gender consciousness that 
operated outside of the normed prison system.  In 
large part, this was accomplished by the student-
inmates, themselves, who initiated and contributed to 
the educational curriculum.  In conjunction with the 
prison staff and superintendent Miriam Van Waters, 
the inmates had the possibility to make their time at 
Framingham educative. 

Dr. Miriam Van Waters accepted the 
superintendency of Framingham in 1932 and stayed 
for 25 years, the longest tenure of any female 
superintendent before or since.  Thought to resemble a 
college president more than a prison warden,22 she 
sought to reframe institutional life by suggesting that 
the institution was a school—albeit a reformatory—
rather than a prison.  One of the most impressive ways 
in which she accomplished this was by calling her first 
assembly to inform the prisoners that she was 
changing their collective title from “women,” the term 
the former superintendent Hodder had used, to the 
term “students.”  She officially banned the term 
“prisoner.”23   

The students at Framingham often spoke 
glowingly of the educational opportunities they were 
afforded at the Reformatory.  One inmate whose piece 
“Frustration, or…” appeared in the Harmony News, 
Framingham’s student-run and produced news 
magazine and literary journal (the piece was then 
reprinted in the men’s prison magazine Agricola) 
described how the reformatory acted as place where 
she could receive an education that she would not 
have received otherwise.  

  
Now that I am here, I have completed a 
short story course, two years of English, and 
a short course in Basic Psychiatry.  I would 
never have taken the time to do this outside, 
and through doing these things, I have found 

that I can do things I never knew I could 
do.24

 
Another inmate in a letter entitled, “For my 

daughter when she reaches an age of understanding,” 
iterated the importance of passing on the value of 
education.  She stressed the need for her daughter not 
to take for granted her early schooling since this 
would teach her right from wrong and respect for 
others.  She advised her to pick friends who she would 
be proud to bring home and to “stay away from the 
ones that have no ambition and don’t like school.”25

Since the educational programs were not 
compulsory, except for in the cases of illiterates, the 
Education Department was proud that they maintained 
an average of 75-80% of all the women participating 
in some portion of the program.26  Foreign students 
were not the only ones found to be illiterate, but so 
were the younger girls “whose migratory families 
have been unable or unwilling to keep them in 
schools.”27  Given the variety of choices, it was easy 
for inmates to find at least one course they wanted to 
take.  The curriculum was not set, but instead, 
Director Weinberg changed the classes from year-to- 
year based on student interest and teaching staff 
availability.28  What was consistent from year-to-year 
was the value placed on education:  “We stress 
education from the time of the introductory class, 
which is a form of orientation while students are in 
isolation, until the day the student leaves the 
institution.”29   

Not only was education in terms of classes 
stressed, but the department endeavored “to use all of 
the teaching potentialities of our staff and student 
body, thus providing a well rounded, integrated 
program of wide variety.”30  This meant that inmates 
did teach their own classes.  For example, one inmate 
taught a painting on glass class.   Not only was it an 
educational endeavor, it was a profitable one as the 
inmates sold their own wares:  “The activity is set up 
on the same financial basis as the weaving; that is, it is 
self-supporting, does work by order, using donated 
materials or those brought with profit from sales.”31  
The inmates initiated and responded to the curriculum 
as they saw fit. 

Students took on several unique leadership 
roles in the reformatory.  For instance, they ran the 
monthly student assemblies at which students from 
each of the reformatory’s departments gave progress 
reports.  They also wrote and produced their own 
plays.  One such play, “Reunion,” performed in June 
of 1948, was a portrayal of institution life from the 
day of admission to the day of discharge.  The play 
was written with the larger community in mind.  
Students invited members of the community to the 
play and used it as a teaching performance, offering 
community members the chance to see institutional 
life from the prisoner’s perspective.  One visitor, Irja 
Kanttii, a European visitor from Finland, likened the 



 

 10 

student run assemblies to “a student government 
meeting at any American College.”32  Sitting in the 
dining room, Kanttii felt as if she were “back in my 
college dining-room, for everything was conducted 
very much like a boarding school.”33

During World War II, a staff shortage gave 
several inmates the opportunity to hold positions of 
staff duty.34  These “outstanding students” held jobs 
running the sewing room, the laundry, the cannery, 
and one was given “full charge of [the] Institution.”35  
Framingham also hired ex-offenders for staff 
positions, another policy that came under attack 
during the Van Waters’ investigation.36  For instance, 
the Assistant Superintendent Margaret (Peggy) 
O’Keefe had served time for a juvenile offense.  The 
storekeeper, switchboard operator, and two of the 
female reformatory officers also had arrest records.37

This was exceptional then and now to find in 
a prison setting.  Inmates have been allowed to work 
as teacher aides, but the case of inmates managing 
their own classrooms and occupying staff positions 
seems to be unique to Framingham.  Kathy Boudin, an 
inmate until the summer of 2003 at Bedford Hills in 
New York State, for a brief time did teach her own 
literacy class.  In writing about her experience, she 
describes that administrators limit the amount of 
responsibility inmates can possess in a classroom so as 
to limit their independence; it is part of the social 
control of prisons.38  The Framingham education 
department’s policy, rather than ensuring its control 
over the lives of students, respected the lives of the 
women and the knowledge they could share with their 
fellow students.  They saw them as more than 
prisoners.  These women could also be educators.   

Nellie Doughton one of the agricultural 
instructors saw the educational endeavor with her 
students as a shared one.  She poignantly describes the 
educational process she had been through with her 
students:  “We were climbing; we fell back, but 
always we climbed again with a bit more strength and 
hope for in climbing and in falling our feet touched 
the earth.”39

Unfortunately, these same opportunities do 
not exist for today’s prisoners.  In the past, the prison 
educational programs were paradoxical in the ways 
they could be both liberating and confining.  Today’s 
lack of academic programming make women’s prisons 
simply confining.  According to the U.S. Department 
of Justice, 87% of state and federal prisons offer some 
form of educational programming for inmates, but 
most women do not take advantage of these 
opportunities.40  According to criminologist Chris 
Rose, there has never been an instance between 1979 
and 1997 (the last year of her study) where the 
majority of female prisoners were participating in 
some form of educational programming.41  In fact, the 
number of participants has declined from 49% in 1986 
to 30% in 1997.42  Rose cites structural/policy 

changes and individual prisoner motivations to explain 
these changing patterns. 

One such structural change was the passing 
of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement 
Act of 1993 and the Higher Education Reauthorization 
Act of 1994 in response to Clinton Administration’s 
move to get “tough on crime.”  The Acts, which 
repelled Pell grant funding for prisoners enrolled in 
prison college programs, effectively eliminated almost 
all prison college programs (from 350 in 1994 to 7 in 
2003),43 prisoners who may have been able to benefit 
from an authentic educational experience have been 
denied one.44   

Former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme 
Court Warren Burger once observed that prisoners 
should be allowed to learn their way out of prison.  A 
surprising advocate of correctional education 
programs, this conservative Justice, who served on the 
Supreme Court during the 1970s, felt that prisoners 
were entitled to education programs.  He felt it was an 
injustice not to try and rehabilitate inmates while they 
were in institutional care.  He saw educational and 
vocational training as vehicles through which to 
accomplish this.  Since Chief Justice Burger left 
office, the prison rate has more than tripled.  Prison 
Programming for Women is virtually non-existent.  
Women on average spend 17 hours a day locked 
inside their cells with one hour a day outside for 
exercise.   Men spend on average 15 hours a day in 
their cells with 1.5 hours outside. 

The same system holds inmates, 
administration, and staff accountable in ways that 
foster an emphasis on moving toward prepackaged 
curriculums and standardized assessment instruments.  
The educational assessments, including the Test of 
Adult Basic Education (TABE) or the Basic English 
Skills Test (BEST and/or BEST plus) and a self-
scoring Occupational Interest Survey are administered 
to all incoming inmates.  The curriculum has shrunk 
from 90 classes to 8:  Adult Basic Education (ABE), 
Communications lab (designed for graduates of the 
English as a Second Language (ESL) level 4 and have 
a diploma in their native language or the General 
Equivalency Diploma (GED), ESL, GED, Pre-GED, 
Mandatory Literacy, and Special Education.  This 
focus on basic education and literacy development 
presupposes an understanding that entering inmates 
are all of a certain educational attainment level.  While 
college programs are offered through Boston 
University, in order to participate, inmates must have 
a minimum of 30 transferable credits. 

Education classes as a personal investment in 
oneself or for the active engagement of democratic 
communal learning are no longer the norm at 
Framingham.  Instead, Framingham follows a model 
where classes are used “to maintain order by keeping 
prisoners occupied at seemingly meaningful work.”45  
Prison administrators engage in the “new penology” 



 

 11

whereby mandatory correctional education classes are 
used to control idleness and manage risk.  
Framingham is no longer a place to question prison 
authority, politicize prisoner action, or challenge the 
power structures of dominate culture.  Nor is it a place 
where women inmates are afforded “equality of rights, 
opportunity, and treatment.” 46    

The Educational Programming Department is 
now called the Division of Inmate Training and 
Education.  The emphasis is now placed upon inmates 
who can “make a positive contribution to an 
increasingly more technological society.”47  The 
current prison administration’s emphasis is on 
“competency, development of basic literacy skills, and 
the acquisition of salable skills along with an 
appreciation of the work ethic.”48   

There is hope though for the pendulum is 
beginning to swing.  According to a recent report, 
Current Issues in Correctional Education:  A 
Compilation and Discussion, in the last decade there 
has been a shift away from the “lock them up” 
mentality:  “In general, attitudes have begun to turn 
back from punishment to rehabilitation with more 
emphasis being placed on education in corrections.”49  
However, the same report found that “public policy 
depends on both legislator opinion and current 
economic conditions at any time.”50   

In 1940, a wise student at the Reformatory 
for Women at Framingham described the meaning of a 
democracy.  She wrote, “According to its ideal, a 
democracy wishes to save every human being.  There 
is to be no scrap heap.  No one is to be cast aside; no 
one is to be defeated.”51  Her words remind us that by 
living in this democratic society we have an obligation 
to our prisoners for there is no “scrap heap.”  They 
deserve education not because they are prisoners but 
because our educational system has for the most part 
failed them.  These inmate’s words also remind us that 
the issues we are fighting today are historical in scope.  
These problems are ubiquitous and not unique to 
current times.  There is a traceable legacy that offers 
us lessons and perspectives into our current crisis and 
hidden within these records are instructions of what it 
is possible to do and what should not be done again.  
The example of the Reformatory for Women at 
Framingham honors those instructions by 
demonstrating for us in terms of the history of 
women’s correctional curricula all that can be 
accomplished when the intended practice is an 
educative one.   
 

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Boudin, Kathy.  “Participatory Literacy Education 

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232. 

 

Bularzik, Mary J.  Sex, Crime, and Justice:  Women in 
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Cox, William B., F. Lovell Bixby, and William T. 
Root, eds.  Handbook of American Prisons and 
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Osborne Association, National Society of Penal 
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Davidson, Howard.  Schooling in a ‘Total Institution’:  
Critical Perspectives on Prison Education.  
Westport, CT:  Bergin & Garvey, 1995. 

-----. “Control and Democracy in Adult Correctional 
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Feinman, Clarice.  Women in the Criminal Justice 
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Freedman, Estelle B.  Their Sisters’ Keepers:  
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-----.Maternal Justice:  Miriam Van Waters and the 
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Gaither.  The Journal of Correctional Education 33.2 
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1870 Principle #10, on the importance of 
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Garrett, Paul W., and Austin H. MacCormick, eds.  
Handbook of American Prisons and 
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Society of Penal Information, 1929. 

Gehring, Thom.  “Special Edition on the History of 
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Correctional Education.  46.2 (June 1995):  38-
83.   

Haynes, Fred E.  The American Prison System.  New 
York:  McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1939. 

Justice, Benjamin.  “ ‘A College of Morals’:  
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Kurshan, Nancy.  “Women and Imprisonment in the 
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Lee, Marian Jeena.  Bad, Mad Women:  Rehabilitation 
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Unpublished undergraduate thesis, Harvard 
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MacCormick, Austin H.  The Education of Adult 
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Massachusetts Department of Correction Inmate 
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<http://www.mass.gov/doc/PROGRAMS/Eductrn
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Rafter, Nicole Hahn.  Partial Justice:  Women in State 

Prisons, 1800-1935.  Boston:  Northeastern 
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Rose, Chris. “Women’s Participation in Prison 
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-----. Superintendent’s Annual Report for the Year 
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Welsh, Michele F.  “The Effects of the Elimination of 
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Wines, Enoch.  Transactions of the National Congress 
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1 Inmate pseudonym.   
2 Throughout the course of this paper the 
Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at 
Framingham is referred to as the “Reformatory,” the 
“Massachusetts Reformatory for Women,” the 
“Framingham Reformatory for Women,” the 
“Framingham Reformatory,” or simply 
“Framingham.”  All of these titles are used as names 
to reference the institution throughout the historical 
literature. 
3 It was the uniqueness of the Framingham programs 
that piqued my interest in studying the institution.  In 
2001, during personal correspondence with Historian 
Estelle Freedman she informed me that the 
Framingham Program, while possibly paralleling a 
few other women’s reformatories at the time, was 
rather unusual.  She wrote, “The MVW [Miriam Van 
Waters’] educational, as well as spiritual, mission was 
pretty unique.”  Estelle Freedman, personal 
correspondence to the author 13 April 2001. 

 
4 Austin H. MacCormick, The Education of Adult 
Prisoners (New York:  The National Society for Penal 
Information, 1931), 292. 
5 The name was officially changed from the Women’s 
Reformatory at Framingham to Massachusetts 
Correctional Institution (MCI)—Framingham in 1956 
and demonstrated an increasing emphasis on 
corrections as opposed to re-forming inmates. 
6 Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers:  Women’s 
Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor:  
University of Michigan Press, 1981), Nicole Hahn 
Rafter, Partial Justice:  Women in State Prisons, 
1800-1935 (Boston:  Northeastern University Press, 
1985), Clarice Feinman, Women in the Criminal 
Justice System (Westport, CT:  Praeger, 1994), Thom 
Gehring, “Special Edition on the History of the Field 
of Correctional Education,” Journal of Correctional 
Education 46.2 (June 1995):  38-39; Benjamin Justice, 
“ “A College of Morals’:  Educational Reform at San 
Quentin Prison, 1880-1920,” History of Education 
Quarterly 40.3 (Fall 2000): 279-301. 
7 Howard Davidson, Schooling in a ‘Total Institution’:  
Critical Perspectives on Prison Education, (Westport, 
CT:  Bergin & Garvey, 1995).   
8 Rafter, Partial Justice; Freedman, Their Sisters’ 
Keepers; Mary J. Bularzik, “Sex, Crime, and Justice:  
Women in the Criminal Justice System of 
Massachusetts, 1900-1950” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis 
University, 1982); Marian Jeena Lee, “Bad, Mad 
Women:  Rehabilitation and Resistance at a Women’s 
Reformatory” (senior thesis, Harvard University, 
1999); Nancy Kurshan, “Women and Imprisonment in 
the U.S.:  History and Current Reality,” 
<http://prisonactivist.org/women/women-and-
imprisonment.html> (cited Dec. 26, 2003). 
9 Mildred E. Manter to His Excellency, the Governor, 
Oct. 29, 1940, box 1, folder 7, Amy Paddon Row 
papers (hereafter referred to as APR papers), 
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced 
Study, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter referred to as SL).   
10 Lynne B. Plummer, “The History of Framingham 
Reformatory,” unpublished manuscript, 1957, p. 1, 
box 23, folder 263, Miriam Van Waters papers 
(hereafter referred to as MVW papers), SL. 
11 Gaither, The Journal of Correctional Education 
33.2 (June 1982): 20.  Quoted in Thom Gehring, 
“Vignette:  1870 Principle #10, on the importance of 
Correctional Education,” The Journal of Correctional 
Education 46.2 (June 1995): 59. 
12 Enoch Wines, Transactions of the National 
Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline 
(Albany, NY: Argus Press), 542.  Quoted in Thom 
Gehring, “Vignette:  1870 Principle #10, on the 
importance of Correctional Education,” The Journal 
of Correctional Education 46.2 (June 1995): 59. 
13 Miriam Van Waters to the Commissioner of 
Corrections, “Reformatory for Women at Framingham 

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Superintendent’s Report,” Dec. 31, 1935, p. 1, box 1 
file 19, APR papers, SL. 
14 Evelyn K., “Education,” Harmony News, Aug.-Sept. 
1940, p. 8, box 1, folder 15, APR papers, SL . 
15 William Cox, F. Lovell Bixby, and William Root, 
eds., “Reformatory for Women, Framingham, 
Massachusetts,” Handbook of American Prisons and 
Reformatories Volume I, 1933 (New York:  Osborne 
Association, National Society of Penal Information 
and The Welfare League Association, Inc., 1933), 
367.  See also Fred Haynes, The American Prison 
System (New York:  McGraw-Hill Book Company, 
1939), 105; Paul Garrett and Austin MacCormick, 
eds., Handbook of American Prisons and 
Reformatories, 1929 (New York:  National Society of 
Penal Information, 1929). 
16 Amy P. Row, “Framingham Reformatory Clubs,” 
n.d. [1939], p. 1, box 1, folder 10, APR papers, SL. 
17 Members of the Two-Sided Club were elected from 
the student body to debate and discuss with Dr. Van 
Waters administrative policies and institutional 
changes they wished to see happen at Framingham. 
18 Estelle Freedman, Maternal Justice:  Miriam Van 
Waters and the Female Reform Tradition, (Chicago:  
The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 185. 
19 Dorothy K., “Progress,” Harmony News, Sept. 
1939, p. 2, box 1, folder 19, APR papers, SL. 
20 William, B. Cox, F. Lovell Bixby, and William T. 
Root, eds., Handbook of American Prisons and 
Reformatories Volume I, 1933.  
21 “A General Description of the Institution as a 
Whole,” [report administered to new staff members] 
n.d. [archivist note says after 1936], box 21, folder 
238, MVW papers, SL. 
22 Louis Lyons in Boston Globe, 28 Dec. 1931, box 
31, folder 406, MVW papers, SL. 
23 Elizabeth Borton, “Inmates Get ‘Student’ Status at 
Framingham Reformatory:  Supt. Van Waters Bans 
Term ‘Prisoner’ for 250-odd women there,” Boston 
Herald, 24 October 1932, n.p., box 31, folder 406, 
MVW papers, SL. 
24 Inmate Writing, “Frustration, or…,” contained in 
letter from Reverend Clarence Swearingen to MVW, 
Oct. 6, 1954, box 24, folder 279, MVW papers, SL. 
25 Inmate Writing, “For my Daughter when She 
Reaches an Age of Understanding,” Nov. 1953, box 
30, folder 393, MVW papers, SL. 
26 Ruth Weinberg “Education,” n.d., box 24, folder 
266, MVW papers, SL. 
27 Miriam Van Waters, Superintendent’s Annual 
Report for the Year Ending 1936, (Boston, MA:  
Department of Correction), 48. 
28 Callahan Report, “Education Department, Miss 
Ruth Weinberg, Director,” n.p. 
29 Ruth Weinberg, “Education,” n.d., box 24, folder 
266, MVW papers, SL. 
30 Ibid. 

 
31 Callahan Report, “Painting on Glass, Inmate 
Teacher,” n.p. 
32 Irja Kantti, “Rehabilitation of Human Lives in an 
American Reformatory for Women,” April 1950, p. 4, 
box 23, folder 254, MVW papers, SL. 
33 Ibid., p. 2. 
34 This would be one of the policies challenged by the 
Commissioner of Correction during the investigation 
and subsequent firing and rehiring of Superintendent 
Van Waters in 1948-1949.   
35 Miriam Van Waters to Mrs. Lewis S. Thompson, 
“Framingham Report,” Jan. 24, 1945, p. 2, box 16, 
folder 191, MVW papers, SL. 
36 In 1949, a new Commissioner of Correction Elliot 
McDowell dismissed Van Waters from the 
superintendency following an investigation headed by 
Frank Dwyer that charged her with overstepping her 
authority, hiring ex-convicts, condoning homosexual 
activities among inmates, and allowing women to 
participate in day work.  The subsequent trial brought 
Van Waters to national prominence.  She appealed her 
case to the governor, and many of her friends, some 
quite famous, rallied to support her.  Estelle Freedman 
covers this topic extensively in her biography of Van 
Waters.  See Freedman, Maternal Justice, 274-312. 
37 MVW to Commissioner Elliot McDowell, June 7, 
1948, box 17, folder 195, MVW papers, SL. 
38 Kathy Boudin, “Participatory Literacy Education 
behind Bars:  AIDS opens the Door,” Harvard 
Educational Review 63.2 (Summer 1993):  207-232. 
39 Nellie C. Doughton to MVW, Mar. 19, 1948, box 
16, folder 194, MVW papers, SL. 
40 Chris Rose, “Women’s Participation in Prison 
Education:  What We Know and What We Don’t 
Know,” The Journal of Correctional Education 55. 1 
(March 2004):  78-100.  Given what I know of 
contemporary prison programming women, it is hard 
to believe that this figure is as high as 87%, but what 
is believable is that substantial barriers do exist that 
keep women from participating in correctional 
education programs.   
41 Ibid., 80. 
42 Ibid., 80-81. 
43 Jeannette Hanlon, personal conversation with the 
author, 6 June 2004.  See a further discussion of the 
effects of the elimination of Pell Grants see Michele F. 
Welsh, “The Effects of the Elimination of Pell Grant 
Eligibility for State Prison Inmates,” The Journal of 
Correctional Education 53.4 (December 2002):  154-
158; R. Tewksbury and J.M. Taylor, “The 
Consequences of Eliminating Pell Grants Eligibility 
for Students in Post Secondary Correctional Education 
Programs,” Federal Probation 60.3:  60-63. 
44 Rose articulates that cutting Pell grant funding is 
just one piece of the puzzle.  Other explanations to 
explain the pattern of women’s participation in 
correctional educational programming include:  a 
344% increase in the number of incarcerated women 



 

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(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999), which puts more 
pressure on the prison services that are already 
inadequate and substandard; inadequate health and 
medical services; separation from their children, 
which results in increased anxieties and in turn 
influences their mental health.  See Rose, “Women’s 
Participation in Prison Education”, 85-87.   
45 Howard Davidson, “Control and Democracy in 
Adult Correctional Education,” in Handbook of Adult 
and Continuing Education, ed. Arthur L. Wilson and 
Elisabeth Hayes (San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2000), 
393. 
46 Ibid. 
47 Massachusetts Department of Correction Inmate 
Programs Description,” updated 23 Feb. 2005, 
<http://www.mass.gov/doc/PROGRAMS/Eductrng.ht
m> (cited 23 Feb. 2005). 
48 Ibid. 
49 Gail Spangenberg, Current Issues in Correctional 
Education:  A Compilation and Discussion 
(Washington, DC:  Council for Advancement of Adult 
Literacy, 2004), 5. 
50 Ibid. 
51 Inmate Writing, “As the Page Turns,” Harmony 
News, Jan.-Feb. 1940, box 1, folder 17, APR papers, 
SL. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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