Abigail Hopper Gibbons

BORN: December 7, 1801 • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

DIED: January 16, 1893 • New York, New York

American prison reformer

Abigail Hopper Gibbons was a noted prison reformer of the nineteenth century. Like other prominent social activists of her era, she came from a Quaker family, and she was involved with the antislavery movement. But Gibbons's main focus was on helping women in New York City and elsewhere who were in police custody, sentenced to jail terms, or released from jail and ready to begin new lives. One of her most important achievements was the passage of a law that granted women the right to be searched by a female officer, rather than by a male officer. This guarantee was still in use in the twenty-first century. More than a hundred years after Gibbons's death in 1893, her descendants were still carrying on her work at New York City's Women's Prison Association, which she founded.

"There died in this city yesterday one of the most remarkable women of this century."

     —New York Times, January 18, 1893.

Quaker ideals

Gibbons was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 7, 1801. She was the third of ten children in the family. Her father, Isaac Hopper, was a tailor by profession, but was active in several civic and charitable organizations. Sarah Tatum Hopper, her mother, taught school and sold tea to bring extra income to the household, and Gibbons sometimes helped her mother on her sales rounds when she was little.

Gibbons spent her childhood in Philadelphia, a bustling urban center that had even served as the U.S. capital between 1790 and 1800. Philadelphia, a Greek term for "brotherly love," had been formally founded and designed by London-born William Penn (1644–1718) in 1682, as the capital of his Pennsylvania colony. Penn planned his colony to be a model of religious tolerance and democratic freedom, and the city itself was largely settled by many of his own faith, the Quaker religion.

The Hoppers were Quakers, too. This religion was formally known as the Religious Society of Friends and had been founded in England in the 1650s. The Quakers' progressive, or forward-thinking, ideas, which centered around the principles of simplicity, equality, and honesty, also meant that they were committed to helping the most disadvantaged members of society. The term "Quaker" came from their claim that they trembled at the word of God. These ideas, along with their opposition to war, made the Quakers targets of ridicule and official harassment, and many fled England in the 1700s for the newly established North American colonies.

Quaker families like the Hoppers also recognized another important principle of their faith: that women were equal to men, both spiritually and economically. At Quaker meetings, female members were granted the same speaking rights as men, and outside of their meeting-houses Quaker women were active in various charitable causes. One of the most important of these was the free-school movement, which offered basic education to children in Philadelphia and other cities with Quaker populations. These schools were open to all and gave instruction in reading, math, and other basic skills at a time before public, fee-free schools were open to children of all races and income levels.

Quaker activism

Gibbons attended such a school herself, then founded her own in Philadelphia around 1821, the year she turned twenty. She ran it for nearly a decade while also participating in another important issue for the Quakers: the abolition of slavery. One of the Quakers' most important beliefs is that all men and women are created equal and possess the same divine inner light granted by God, no matter what their race or religious orientation. Enslaving another for economic gain, therefore, was considered to be morally wrong, and the Quakers became fervently involved in the abolitionist, or antislavery cause.

One of the leading antislavery activists among American Quakers was Elias Hicks (1748–1830), a preacher from Long Island, New York. He played a key role in securing a New York law in 1827 that formally banned slavery in that state. Hicks also caused the first major split within the Society of Friends, the so-called Separation of 1827, which occurred over doctrine, the basic beliefs of an organization. Gibbons and her family stayed with the Hicksite branch and took part in its regular meetings after the family moved to New York City. Sarah Tatum Hopper had died in 1822, and Isaac Hopper remarried a few years later and moved his family to New York City. There, he played an active role in the antislavery movement and in prison reform efforts.

After 1830 Gibbons served as the director of the Friends' School in New York City. In 1833 she wed James Sloan Gibbons, a native of Wilmington, Delaware. A fellow Quaker, he was also an antislavery advocate and a successful merchant, who later became a banker. That financial success would provide funds for Gibbons's charitable causes later in her married life. Gibbons and her husband belonged to the Manhattan Anti-Slavery Society, and even hid escaped slaves in their home. Their activities, however, brought an official reprimand from the Hicksite Society of Friends branch in New York City. Gibbons's husband and father were officially ejected by the group in 1841, and Gibbons herself formally resigned a year later.

The need for prison reform

Gibbons's father had become involved in the prison reform movement in the early 1840s, and she followed him into it. The prison and jail situation in the United States was becoming increasingly bleak during this period. The country had grown rapidly since Gibbons's childhood. Major cities had grown quickly, too. New York City's population had soared since the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal, New York State's main waterway, which turned Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs into a major commercial and transportation center. With the increase in population, however, came housing shortages and fierce competition for jobs. Overcrowded conditions and the need to feed one's family forced some into criminal acts. Other, more devious types, simply took advantage of what they considered to be an ideal economic opportunity to break into houses, rob well-dressed gentlemen after dark, and steal horses and carriages in the increasingly affluent city.

The question of how to keep cities and citizens safe in a new, modern environment where urban dwellers did not know their neighbors, nor their neighbors' families, was a topic of controversy in Gibbons's time. An expanding law-enforcement system could arrest, place on trial, and punish criminals, but ideas about where to jail them and how to punish them were widely debated. Some of the early practices concerning crime and punishment were carried over from Great Britain, where a long list of capital or serious offenses, from thievery to murder, were punishable by death in the eighteenth century. For lesser offenses, some form of corporal punishment, such as public beatings or whippings, were common court sentences.

Imprisonment was a relatively modern concept that became more widely used by Western nations in the eighteenth century. Isolating the lawbreaker from his family, friends, and society drew upon Christian religious doctrine, which stressed that the criminal was a sinner and that the sin could be cleansed through confinement. In most prisons, however, men were housed in large rooms, regardless of the severity of their crimes, and were difficult to control. In contrast, solitary confinement was considered heartless and cruel; it was known to lead to psychiatric, or mental, disturbances. Prisons themselves even posed a risk to society. In 1802 New York City's large Newgate Prison, built where Greenwich Street ended at the Hudson River, was the site of a bloody riot and near jailbreak.

Quakers had been involved in prison reform since the early days of America. In 1682 Philadelphia founder William Penn advocated reform, not punishment, for criminal behavior. Pennsylvania's original penal code—the policy concerned with the punishment of criminals—was one of the more progressive, or modern, in the original thirteen American colonies. Later generations also furthered this emphasis on penal reform. In 1787 the Pennsylvania Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (PSAMPP) was founded by Quakers. This group was formed in reaction to a new, harsher penal code enacted in 1786 in Pennsylvania. Convicts were put to work on chain gangs—groups of prisoners chained together usually while performing hard, manual labor outside. In this case, the prisoners were building roads, and the sight of the chained men provoked public outrage.

Rehabilitation or punishment?

The PSAMPP's work led to the establishment of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, which was the first to provide separate quarters for female inmates. This was a new and innovative idea at the time. Before this, women were generally confined in the same room as men, and the results of this arrangement ranged from festive to violent. The Walnut Street Jail also had a few prison industries, which helped the convicts learn a useful employment skill. The jail also offered regular religious services and educational classes. But the Walnut Street concept, imitated across the eastern United States, fell out of favor after the 1802 Newgate riot. Such prisons, it was judged, were far too lenient for the criminal.

After that, New York's penal system became dominated by the so-called Auburn model, a more disciplined and punitive system than the Walnut Street project. It was named after the Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York, which opened in 1819 and was considered a state-of-the-art facility at the time. The Auburn system was based on the idea that prison life actually bred more crime—that few convicts, no matter where they were held, ever learned anything useful while imprisoned. At Auburn, prisoners worked during the day in silence and returned to solitary confinement at night. Auburn prisoners were also used to build a new prison facility outside New York City, near Ossining, which opened in 1828.

Conditions inside these large, warehouse-like facilities could quickly slide into organized brutality, however. State inspectors for Sing Sing, as the Ossining facility became known, called for the formation of a group to aid prisons and prisoners as well as provide rehabilitation once such men and women were released from confinement. Gibbons's father, Isaac Hopper, responded to this call, and he joined with others to establish the New York Prison Association (NYPA) in December 1844. The NYPA's goal was to aid in the rehabilitation of prisoners and help them re-enter society upon their release. The association's work was based on the idea that all human beings are capable of being perfected, no matter how great their failings. Its founders were also interested in the social and economic factors that led men and women into crime, and how these might be solved to build a safer society for all.

"The Home" opens

Gibbons helped her father's prison work and several months later set up the NYPA's Female Department. This branch of the group helped women who were jailed or sentenced to prison. It campaigned for separate quarters for women, which would be supervised by female staffers in order to reduce the risk of sexual abuse. This would help eliminate the risk of women inmates being forced into participating in prostitution rings, which were run by some prison staffs for the benefit of male convicts. Gibbons was also instrumental in establishing "The Home," a shelter for recently released female convicts, in 1845. Run by the NYPA, it would later be renamed the Isaac T. Hopper Home in honor of Gibbons's father. Its original location was at Fourth Street near Eighth Avenue. During its first three years in business, it housed and assisted 450 women.

Gibbons, like her father and his associates, believed strongly in the idea of rehabilitation. She looked for ways to teach prisoners new skills and help them make an honest living once they were released. As supervisor of The Home, she worked with her all-volunteer staff to help the women residents find work, mostly as domestic servants, or maids. They usually sought job placements for the women in the countryside surrounding New York City. The city itself was considered a place that offered too many temptations for the women to return to criminal behavior, alcohol abuse, or involvement with unsuitable male partners. Gibbons also went on to serve as president of the New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice, and she helped create a place of refuge for unwed mothers.

In 1853 the Female Department of the NYPA became a separate organization, the Women's Prison Association. Gibbons served as its president for a number of years. One of her first major efforts was to push for the hiring of female matrons—guards or attendants—in all New York state prison facilities that accepted women detainees. However, this took more than twenty-five years to achieve.

Civil War nurse

Gibbons temporarily halted her prison reform efforts with the onset of the American Civil War (1861–65), a conflict between the Union (the North), which was opposed to slavery, and the Confederacy (the South), which was in favor of slavery. When the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a civilian-run relief effort involving many women, issued a call for nurses to serve in Union Army camps, Gibbons volunteered and was trained at David's Island Hospital in New York. She spent the next four years in military hospitals and camps near major Civil War battlefields. Her first assignment was at the Washington Office Hospital. Her managerial skills proved so capable that she was sent to set up two field hospitals—temporary hospitals staffed by army medical personnel—in Strasbourg and Falls Church, Virginia.

During the war, Gibbons also worked at Point Lookout, Maryland, in a former resort area that was converted into the U.S. Hammond General Hospital, a huge military facility capable of treating 1,500 wounded. While stationed there, Gibbons came into conflict with one of the Civil War's most famous nurses, Dorothea A. Dix (1802–1887). Dix was the Union Army's Superintendent of Female Nurses, but she had also previously worked in prison reform. She had been especially effective in urging officials to isolate mentally ill prisoners from the rest of the population and provide treatment for them, too. At Hammond, Dix and Gibbons sometimes clashed over the treatment of patients. Gibbons also encountered trouble for aiding runaway slaves.

After the war's end, Gibbons returned to New York City and founded the New York Labor and Aid Society, which sought to help veterans. She continued to serve as the primary executive of the Women's Prison Association. In 1874 she supervised its move to a new headquarters and home on Second Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets. Her long crusade to force New York state penal facilities to hire female personnel if they housed women detainees was finally successful in 1887. Known as the Police Matron's Bill, its rules survived well into the modern era and includes the right of a woman detainee to be searched by a female officer. Other reforms that Gibbons pushed through during her long career included a way to care for children whose mothers were imprisoned. In some cases the children were allowed to stay with their mothers in jail. However, this usually turned into a negative experience.

Gibbons's legacy

Gibbons was a mother herself, to William, Sarah, Julia, Lucy, Isaac, and James. Her oldest son died while at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her grief over the loss caused her to devote even more of her time and energy to solving social problems. She became a regular visitor to the city poorhouse, which was later known as Randall's Island. She was moved by the plight of some homeless German immigrant children she once saw and became involved with the German Industrial School. The facility specialized in teaching skilled trades for homeless or impoverished German immigrant youths. Gibbons became its president and ran the school for twelve years.

Gibbons spent many years urging New York state prison officials to open an entirely separate facility for women. Finally in 1892 ground was broken in Westchester County, New York, for a women's work farm and reformatory, a place where female prisoners could be rehabilitated for life outside of confinement. It was still in operation more than a century later as the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. This, Gibbons once said, was the proudest accomplishment of her long career. She died of pneumonia on January 16, 1893. Her New York Times obituary ran on the front page, an unusual honor for a woman at the time. One hundred years later, the same newspaper detailed the current work of the Women's Prison Association, which was still helping female parolees in the New York area. After Gibbons's death, her niece Sarah Hopper Brown took over the organization. Family members still remained involved in the association in the early twenty-first century. The group still provided rehabilitation, job training, and a safe place for women exiting the prison system. It also offered help with substance-abuse issues—which had also concerned Gibbons in her own time—and worked to reunite women with their children and build a safe family environment.

For More Information

BOOKS

Bacon, Margaret Hope. Abby Hopper Gibbons: Prison Reformer and Social Activist. Albany: State University of New York, 2000.

Sullivan, Larry E. The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn Hope. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

PERIODICALS

Kaufman, Michael T. "A Family's Values Endure, Six Generations Later." New York Times (April 12, 1995).

"Mrs. Abby Hopper Gibbons Dead." New York Times (January 18, 1893): p. 8.

WEB SITES

"Abby Hopper Gibbons Papers, 1824–1992." Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/ead/5174ahgi.htm (accessed on July 1, 2006).

"The Founding Family." New York Correction History Society. http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/wpa/html/wpafamily.htm (accessed on July 1, 2006).