WOMEN'S PRISON FILMS, 1950-1962 In this article, I will examine four women's prison films, produced between 1950

and 1962, in which prison is presented as an agent to return women to domesticity. In these films, however, the agent typically fails at its task because it brutalizes and masculinizes both female inmates and female staff members. While domesticity is valorized as an appropriate aim (and women who try to avoid their womanly roles are castigated), prison is the site of contradictions. First, 1950s gender ideology would argue that women are innately homemakers and civilizers and should not require correctional institutions to educate them to do their jobs. Perhaps as a result, these institutions fail at their stated purpose and create women who are unsuited to domestic life; significantly, the most signal failures in the supposedly rehabilitative process are those women who entered prison as good wives and mothers. Another area of contradiction is that men are shown as the agents who drive women to prison in the first place (and who are ultimately responsible for their brutalization); however, they are also the only ones who can successfully reintegrate the female inmate into society. Gender thus becomes a central concern in these films, despite--or because of--the fact that the true gender of the woman inmate is invariably made ambiguous. Three interlocking discourses inform the filmic experience of women's prison in Caged (1950), Women's Prison (1955), Girls in Prison (1956), and House of Women (1962): the medical, the educational, and the economic, the latter covering consumption and production. Even the first two, it turns out, have a strong economic component. Women in those films are revealed to be a means of exchange among men, because their prison experience shows that they have no use value for themselves or for other women. (Only men can appreciate them, and only men can save them.) All three discourses are used to control women while they are in prison--and out of it, one might add, but that is another story. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault seeks to establish paradigms to govern the discussion of penology in modern Western history. He argues that three modifications to punishment, each of them relevant to the interlocking discourses I will explore here, occur during the transition from ancien regime to Enlightenment. The first trend is the increasing interiority of punishment: rather than working solely on the prisoner's body, punishment works on her soul. The second is the loss of interest in punishment that chiefly seeks to mark on the guilty body the outward signs of criminality and the answering power of the sovereign. And finally, Foucault notes, "society" or "the public" replaces the monarch as the interested and injured party where criminal behavior is concerned. Thus prison becomes at once a means of regulating deviant behavior and an attempt to restore the outcast to society---on society's terms. The standards of the sovereign, in pre-Enlightenment times exterior to the public, are now represented as internal to society, which has both the right and the duty to police itself. Although Foucault does not link the establishment of the modern bourgeois family to changing notions of punishment, one could make a strong connection between the family, as yet another entity modified by the Enlightenment, and notions of discipline and punishment. Indeed, the standards of the bourgeois family are among those policed by prisons, even as that regulation exposes the contradiction behind the assumption of "natural" sex roles that nonetheless require substantial external pressure to propagate. Estelle B. Freedman, for instance, notes that American

women's prisons (the first one opened in 1873) were originally established "to retrain women through sympathetic female staff, prayer, education, and domesticity"--ideals that were quickly and contradictorily leavened with a counter emphasis on discipline (90). This connection between the family and the prison becomes explicit in the four films examined here, as does the "tension between domesticity and discipline" that Freedman also observes. Social historian Carl N. Degler characterizes the period that produced these texts as a time when "the mass of women. . . were in fact breaking out of the traditional bonds of home and motherhood" (429), to such an extent that "during the 1950s and the 1960s. . . for the first time in American history more women than men took jobs" (418). Although Degler argues that women's family rules were not changing significantly under the pressures of their mass entry into the public sphere, the most cursory examination of American films from this era indicates that Hollywood perceived such change as probable and in response produced quantities of pictures detailing the effects of, and countermeasures against, this approaching feminine rebellion. On the one hand, then, the films I will discuss depict women's prisons as agents of socialization for women; the jail's ostensible project is to retool the female inmate for domestic life. Nonetheless, while that aim is lauded, prison is disparaged as brutal and masculinizing, working against its stated aim to the detriment of society and the women it should be reintegrating into family life. And indeed, the "male" crimes women commit are naturalized as the product of a broken agreement with male caretakers--thus women kill men who abuse them, or are led into temptation and abandoned by the men whom society tells them to trust, such as husbands and fathers. In Foucauldian terms, then, the films describe the successful "disciplining" of the guilty, who may indeed be redeemed for domesticity, but also the unjust "punishment" of the innocent, on whose bodies are inscribed the stigma of masculinity (which it might be hoped that incarceration would remove). This paradox suggests that the attitude women's prison films may be taking toward penology is that women who have left the home to commit a crime need the parodic home that prison supplies, whereas women whose crimes are nonexistent or, say, committed in an excess of wifely loyalty are destroyed by those very parodic aspects. Jail is not a genuine home, and thus "real" women do not belong there. Ideally, however, prison should serve as a "halfway home," a means of funneling wayward women back into their proper domestic setting. The prison of the forties and fifties functions much like its contemporary counterpart, the psychoanalyst's office. As Janet Walker suggests, psychoanalytic treatment at this time likewise focused on women "as wives and mothers, [a thrust that] though designed to be objective or neutral, often amounted to a prescription for exclusive domesticity" ( 8). Indeed, the medical trope is essential to all women's-prison narratives of this period that I have looked at, insofar as the salvageable inmates are typically presented as "patients."[ 1] And in these filmic narratives, the role of the good care provider is inevitably assigned to men. There is a male prison doctor in Caged, Women's Prison, and House of Women. In Girls in Prison, a prison chaplain serves the same psychic function--again emphasizing the rehabilitative nature of incarceration, because the heroine responds to his spiritual ministrations and his concern for her physical welfare by attempting to make restitution for her theft.

The function of the good care provider, I would argue, is to provide a male love object who expresses concern for the prisoner and thus facilitates her return to the domestic sphere. Thus in Women's Prison, House of Women, and Girls in Prison the doctors or chaplain are objects of admiration and affection who point the way to the proper treatment of women (one that is not brutal). They effect the transition from prison to husband (Women's Prison), promote the heroine's adaptation to the outside world (House of Women), or reconcile her to the remainder of her sentence (Girls in Prison). It is no accident that in the one instance in which this role is not assigned to a man (Caged), the heroine cannot make the transition to domestic life. In Walker's analysis of "transference-countertransference as a love affair. . . the psychiatrist has the position of authority in the woman's life, guiding deviant femininity toward the path of marriage, whether or not he himself is the prospective spouse" (52). When women usurp this role in prison films, the results are disastrous, even when their intentions are good. Indeed, success is impossible simply because they are female; it appears that the attempt to set up transference between two women is a form of deviance equal to anything the prisoner might have been jailed for in the first place. In this context, the good warden in Caged (Benton, played by Agnes Moorehead) is worth examining in conjunction with the evil sub-warden of Women's Prison (Amelia Van Zandt, played by Ida Lupino). Although their intentions vis-a-vis the prisoners' welfare are poles apart, both Benton and Van Zandt fail in their redemptive task, because their inmates do not leave prison ready for marriage. To be sure, Caged valorizes Benton as a spiritual descendant of the liberal nineteenth-century school of female prison reformer and administrator. She is a sympathetic professional who softens her suits with frilly blouses. A photograph of her husband (although we never see him or hear him referred to) is displayed on her desk in almost every shot that takes place in her office, so her problem--unlike Van Zandt's--is not that she cannot love men but simply that she is not one. But Benton, significantly, is the only woman with any authority who is not wholly masculinized and therefore unfeeling and dangerous to the women in her charge. Caged is the earliest of the films analyzed; the attitude toward the female official becomes harsher in Women's Prison and House of Women.[ 2] Benton's failure in Caged can be partly explained by the fact that she vies for control of the prison with a corrupt bureaucracy: the male appointees who fund and supervise it and their protegee, the matron Harper.[ 3] The real problem, in other words, is that there is no strong male within the prison with whom Marie Allen, the protagonist, can cathect. She is thus thrown to the mercy of "the boys" who run a shoplifting syndicate, which eventually recruits her for a life of continued crime. While Benton's desire to control women is muted because it is reassigned to Harper--who expresses it physically with disciplinary hair-clipping and isolation cells--Van Zandt's mastery in Women's Prison is direct and identifies the struggle with inmate wills as one involving psychoanalysis and masculine ways of thinking. In a heated exchange with the prison doctor, Van Zandt outlines her philosophy of rehabilitation: "What you call hate is complete understanding . . . . I know these women, all of them, and only a strong mind can control them. If you had any real understanding you'd know what I'm trying to do to rehabilitate them. Yes--even the psychopath." But Van Zandt's very love of power disqualifies her from the position (as does

her sex, which in the context of the 1950s consorts badly with the love of power). The doctor analyzes her and turns the definition of psychopath around on her: It is not the easily upset women like Helene Jensen, the heroine of the film, who are borderline psychotics because of prison brutality, it is women like Van Zandt, who enjoy the work. That enjoyment, of course, is suspect because it renders sexually perverse the woman who experiences it, but it also reflects her lack of sexual fulfillment, as the doctor argues: You dislike most of the women here because, deep down, you're jealous of them. You're feminine, attractive--you must have had opportunities to marry. Maybe you even cared for somebody once in your cold way. But possibly he turned to someone who could give him what he really wanted: warmth, understanding, love. There's hardly a woman inside these walls who doesn't know what love is. This presentation of the professional woman warden as monster is strikingly similar to the dynamics that Walker sees at work in The Snake Pit (1948): Nurse Davis employs shock treatment on Virginia as a punitive measure because she is secretly in love with Dr. Kik and jealous of the attention he lavishes on Virginia . . . . Nurse Davis fits within the Hollywood convention of the "masculinized" (unfulfilled) woman. (95) One is invited to conclude from those portrayals that women have no business being professionals in charge of other women. Their sexual feelings for men turn them into ravening brutes, more dangerous and less stable than the men nominally in charge of these institutions.[ 4] The male warden, for example, is corrupt and unfeeling, but the prison riot at the end does not unhinge him as it does Van Zandt, who becomes psychotic when the rioters confine her to her own padded cell. The nexus between medicine, control, and economy is demonstrated by the tropes of the physical examination and prison maternity. In the films, the reception of prisoners requires a medical examination with a gynecological component. This practice helps illuminate the institution's handling of feminine-domestic roles and functions. It situates the prisoners in terms of gender (this experience is perforce unique to female inmates) and suggests that means of surveillance and control specific to women will be employed to discipline them. In Caged, the medical examination prefigures the heroine's experiences with the sadistic Harper. Protagonist Marie Allen has been convicted of assisting in an armed robbery staged by her husband, who is killed while committing the crime. As Made puts it, the judge called her an accessory because she went to her husband's aid in the scuffle. She learns that she is pregnant via the harrowing examination scene, during which a prison nurse looks into every available orifice with only a querulous "I said open wide" for a bedside manner. Marie's exchange with the nurse after this implied rape is still more revealing of institutional attitudes: When Made responds that the father of the child can only be her husband, the nurse replies, "Well, ain't we getting respectable!" When the nurse learns that the husband is dead and thus unable to help with expenses, she grumbles, "Another bill for the state." It is important to note here that Marie immediately is established as "innocent"; her crime was not volitional but a matter of wifely

loyalty (moreover, the haul totaled only 40 dollars, 5 dollars above the cut-off for a misdemeanor). Also, Marie's response to her pregnancy shows that she sees the incipient baby as a family matter: a child belonging to herself and her husband. The nurse, in contrast, demonstrates why prison will corrupt rather than rehabilitate the domestic woman. To the institution, the only "family" is the bureaucratic one, so a child is defined in purely economic terms and assigned to the state rather than to the individual. As that moment in Caged suggests, the treatment of inmate pregnancy, which also arises in House of Women and Women's Prison, works not only to underscore the institution's brutality (because children have no place in it), but also to illustrate prison's antidomesticity. In Caged, Made Allen finds out about her pregnancy when the nurse asks, "Say, you expecting company?" as if she were entertaining someone in her body at the state's expense. This sense that childbearing is essentially an illicit visitation recurs in Women's Prison, in which Joan Burton is impregnated by her husband (who is a con in the connecting men's prison) in the closet of the prison laundry room. The baby poses an intolerable mystery, namely how Burton got to his wife. Consequently, both male and female wardens see Joan as the weak link in a conspiracy involving not uxoriousness but escape (of course, within this narrative, normal marriage is a form of escape from the perverse institutional "family"). To get Joan to talk, Van Zandt tortures her by waking her at night for questioning and kicking her in the stomach, ultimately killing both mother and child. That Joan's baby dies in the womb doubtless reflects its strange parentage. In the film's terms, the baby results from the union of warden with subwarden, male prison with female prison. As the idealistic doctor (played by Howard Duff) puts it when he announces Joan's pregnancy, "Congratulations, Warden, you two [the other is Van Zandt, the subwarden] are going to have a baby. . . it won't exactly be yours, Amelia, but it will belong 100 percent to this institution." The system's response is generally to kill or lose these children; as Marie's case in Caged also shows, the prison's imitation of the home (female prisoners' lives revolve around food and laundry work, for instance) is only an imitation, in which any movement toward real family life must be out of place. Thus legitimate pregnancy is inscribed as somehow adulterous or perverse. The "good" inmate's desire for a baby responds to this question of true domesticity and ultimate ownership. Erica, heroine of House of Women, knows she is pregnant when she enters prison. After the prison doctor warns her that hysteria may hurt her baby, she says defiantly that she is not sure she wants it, as it must be born in prison. When the doctor says that the birth will take place in the county hospital and that the state provides child care in the prison until the youngsters reach their third birthday, Erica changes her mind.[ 5] But for Erica, as for Marie and Joan in the other films, genuine family life proves a chimera. When no one can be found to keep Erica's daughter until Erica's parole is granted, the institution reasserts its ownership of the child and sends her away to be adopted when she turns three years old. Erica is so desperate to regain custody that she consents to sleep with the con-hating warden in order to get parole. This scheme, of course, makes her still more firmly the property of the prison system than she was to start with; she becomes a wife-substitute for the warden, who denies Erica parole in order to keep her. That his legitimate wife has eloped with a male parolee underscores that convicts will often have a truer understanding of family life than prison officials do. The warden, apparently, can only create a family by caging his "wives."

Like the family, the womb threatens the prison economy. It is a hiding place within the body and must be policed as such--although it makes women vulnerable, it also makes them defiant. The loss of a child or child-substitute is the invariable cause of rioting. As Joan says on her deathbed of the baby she will never have and the husband she will never see as a free woman, "That's why I've got to live." From the antidomestic point of view, the womb also constitutes an attempt to defraud the taxpayer by slipping unwanted, nonpaying guests into the prison. Thus the evil warden of House of Women objects to the quantity of milk consumed. When the doctor points out that this expense is because of babies, the warden responds that if he had his way there would be no babies, in part because they make the milk bill so high. Finally, babies represent imagined sexual crimes on the part of the inmates (the nurse implies that Marie should not be so quick to maintain her child's legitimacy) or actual crimes on the part of society (the improper mixing of male and female prisoners in Women's Prison, or conversely the callous separation of lawfully married inmates). That children constitute a disciplinary threat to be dealt with in specifically economic terms is established by the exchange between Made and the discharge officer at the close of her prison term. Her laundry-room wages are docked three days for an infraction that lands her in solitary confinement but ten days for childbirth--a far more serious "confinement," in prison terms. The spokeswoman for the prisoners who protest Joan's mistreatment restates the problem as one of unfair punishment of "any girl who can't do a full day's work," suggesting that an economic motive underlies the desire to keep men and women separate. (And indeed this protest is first expressed as a work stoppage.) Maternity and the womb identify what is really at stake in punishing women. The problem is not merely bodily control, as with male inmates, but the shaping or destruction of the family. While prison ostensibly safeguards the family by enforcing society's laws and creating a kind of faux family, its pursuit of discipline into femininity's innermost recesses is actually designed to root out maternal feelings and womanliness. This system punishes the wrong women. For instance, only rarely in these films are women incarcerated for unmotivated crimes against the family. One such example is the nurse/abortionist's assistant in Caged, who notes that she was led astray by her love for the man she worked for. Although she tends Marie during her pregnancy, and thus might be said to have made restitution, she hangs herself when she fails to get parole. Even this plot twist indicts the prison system rather than the criminal, inasmuch as Marie finds the body--the shock induces premature labor, putting her survival at risk and shifting the blame from former abortionist to the prison, which nearly recapitulates her crime. An example of the potentially anti-family criminal who is brought back into the fold despite, rather than because of, her prison experience is Helene Jensen in Women's Prison. Helene is jailed for manslaughter for running over a little girl with her car. Significantly, she has no children of her own. That she is nonetheless family material is evident because of her dependence on men and her model husband's devotion. She survives the rigors of internment because the doctor facilitates her reunion with her husband by sneaking the latter's correspondence to her while she is still in quarantine. In order to be genuinely rehabilitative, in short, the prison must work in tandem with the domestic world rather than opposing it. Only in such circumstances can the female inmate avoid becoming masculinized.

It is tempting to read such episodes as a criticism that the all-female discipline of the women's prison is too "interior," as Foucault would put it--too focused on specifically feminine vulnerabilities and therefore apt to result in the family's destruction. But it really comes down to the sex of the disciplinarian. Women cannot effect a cure for other women, nor can they effect it for themselves. The successful "educational" discourse of the prison world underlines what constitutes the only allowable community, insofar as the prison doctor or chaplain inevitably has greater insight into women's needs than they do themselves. Thus when Mrs. Johnson of Girls in Prison asserts to Reverend Fulton that he may know more about God but she knows more about girls, he contradicts her. He explains that contemporary chaplains (unlike prison wardens or matrons, who exist in an artificial, single-gendered world) are taught about "real life." Men, in other words, understand both God and girls; women understand neither. Lacking powerful and virtuous men, women's prisons permit women to corrupt each other or themselves. Female prisoners become unhinged in quarantine; they cannot stand the enforced confrontation with femininity's emptiness.[ 6] And the emotional overrichness of prison life is as devoid of therapeutic value as the vacuum of the isolation cell. Despite the jail argot--which seeks to describe the experience of living only with other women in socially acceptable terms--a community composed exclusively of women cannot take the place of the family. Thus although the prison is called a "campus" or one's group of friends a "sorority" (both examples are drawn from Women's Prison), an innocent, family-minded inmate is properly horrified at the thought of being cooped up with women. That this problem is not simply one of class differences is clear because working-class Marie in Caged and middle-class Helene in Women's Prison have the same reaction to their initiation to prison life. In Caged, Benton, at least, recognizes that she cannot manage the curative aspects of prison by herself. She requests, but does not get from the state administrators, a full-time psychiatrist and teachers, an innovation that would doubtless introduce more caring men into the system. Aware of the educational shortcomings of her institution, Benton comforts Marie with the thought that there is no "punishment" to be endured; being incarcerated with women is punishment (or, in Foucauldian terms, discipline) enough.[ 7] She hints at the hazards of an all-female community: "No prison is a normal place. . . . Every large institution must have rules and the matrons are here to see that they are obeyed. . . . Unfortunately [first offenders] have to be crowded in with [more hardened] women." Benton urges Marie to choose her friends carefully, to select only appropriate "outlet[s] for affection," but while Marie avoids homosexual liaisons, she falls into the hands of the shoplifting recruiters. The final message here is that crime is what is learned in prison--Marie observes lessons in shoplifting and demonstrates that she is a natural. That crime is directly opposed to domesticity and maternity is suggested by a "lifer's" advice to Marie, "Get a good guy and have a kid. What I'd give for a sinkful of dirty dishes." As she leaves, Marie's take on the whole enterprise is that of a graduate looking hock: "For that 40 bucks I heisted, I certainly got myself an education." From the standpoint of the prison, Marie's education is a failure. She will not leave prison to tackle her sinkful of dirty dishes. But she will engage in an interesting parody of the wifely task of shopping. Rather than contributing her husband's income to the retail economy, Marie becomes a shoplifter (also known as a "booster," in an ironic twist on Chamber of Commerce terminology) will labor on behalf of "the boys" to defraud that economy. No longer feminine,

Marie serves in this capacity not as a consumer but as a producer, and while she thinks she produces for herself ("From now on what's in it for me is all that matters"), in fact she will steal for the benefit of men. This parody of shopping, which inverts the terms of consumption and production, is important because of what it ultimately says about maternity. As long as Marie is a "working woman" (and all female criminals and administrators might be so termed within the logic of these films), she cannot be producing babies, which is her real use value. As a wife and mother, she would have the right to consume in order to carry on the reproduction of the family-and not so incidentally, the American economy. Marie labors instead, and, although she falls into the hands of one male economic arrangement (the syndicate), she thwarts another (marriage). In either event, a male institution retools her for the benefit of other males. Consider the transactions that result in the release of a genuinely rehabilitated woman such as Women's Prison's Helene Jensen, restored to her husband by the prison doctor. Helene might be described as the vector for their correspondence. Erica of House of Women is likewise a pawn in a relationship that primarily involves two men, namely the prison warden and the male con who defrauded him of his wife.[ 8] That women are only produced and exchanged among men and not for their own or each other's enjoyment-lesbianism is an issue only in Girls in Prison, where it is raised and dismissed almost simultaneously--explains why the female-dominated institution of Caged ultimately fails in its educational goals. Women have no value for themselves (they fall apart in "isolation") or for each other (heroines reject fellow inmates as vulgar or corrupt). But in their masculinized form, they can be integrated into parodic families such as the syndicate or the prison. Luce Irigaray has commented on the phenomenon of "hom(m)osexuality," in which "the exchanges on which patriarchal societies are based take place exclusively among men" (192). The basis of this economy is that "women's bodies--through their use, consumption, and circulation--provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown 'infrastructure' of the elaboration of that social life and culture" (171). Valueless to themselves and to each other, women are the nexus of exchange among men or patriarchal institutions. Ann Carson, heroine of Girls in Prison, has assisted in the theft of $38,000, which she has hidden from the state, her male partner, and her father. Her cellmates get wind of the money and break out of prison with her during an earthquake to retrieve it. But as women, they are unable to capture the money--all but Ann are killed in the attempt. Ann herself is convinced by the chaplain to turn the money over to the state, despite her cry that "it's mine-I'm paying for it. . . . What'll I have to show for five years of my life?" Ann wants to reject the marriage economy, in which a woman works without earning. As she says, what she wants most of all is "to take a relief check and tear it in a hundred pieces and throw it in the social worker's face." Ann objects to charity, or earned compensation presented as charity, and consequently views the stolen money as earned because she is paying five years of her life for it. Of course, once the Reverend Fulton convinces her to return the money, Ann will leave prison having done the typical housewife's tasks without the compensation she hoped for. One might add that her years of caring for her shiftless father do not constitute the excuse to consume that a baby might. The state would argue that Ann is not entitled to consume until she is properly integrated into a family where she can produce children. While her father is a kind of child substitute, he is obviously unworthy of her attention and thus does not qualify her for the money.

That prison is the site of obsessive economic exchange between inmates and of inmates (to each other and to the system) has been extensively commented on in sociological studies of both male and female institutions (see, for example, Williams and Fish or Heffernan). The films exploit this frenzy of production and consumption in a number of ways. For example, Ann is "sold" by an errand runner who delivers her to two inmates who want to intimidate her into revealing where she has hidden the stolen money. In Caged, Marie resists the blandishments of the "boosters" for most of her sentence, even returning a lipstick that their leader had given her. At the film's end, however, convinced that no economic life outside of crime is possible for her because parole officers do not really line up jobs for inmates (and there is no leaving prison without one), Marie retrieves the lipstick and aggressively puts it on. What catalyzes this moment, not so incidentally, is the presence of several women in fur coats, who have come slumming to look at the inmates. Made determines to have what they have, though she will have to produce, rather than consume, to get it. But not everything has value in Marie's new economy--when she checks out, she throws her wedding ring away. Similarly, the queen of the boosters shops (turns in) a rival to Harper, the evil matron. Harper herself is the center of most economic exchange, trying to incorporate Made into her cash nexus. But as someone who wants to take care of things (such as babies or a kitten, which is killed in a riot), Marie does not yet have any use-value because she is in the wrong institution: prison rather than marriage. Harper takes her measure by saying, You like the stuff in here [Harper's unofficial store], huh? Just little presents from my girls for taking good care of them. . . . You're going to find out that a lot of things are tough to get in here. This is just a little personal service of my own, on the side, sort of, understand? But having no money, Marie cannot participate in this economy. Prison films tell us that women are important because they reproduce the real agents of economic importance, namely men. (The event that sets off the riot in House of Women is the death of an inmate's little boy.) But women also have access to the symbolic, as Julia Kristeva would have it, only through pregnancy. That is, if a woman wishes to be a speaking subject, the only route open to her for this purpose is pregnancy: The symbolic paternal facet relieves feminine aphasia present within the desire to bear the father's child. It is an appeasement that turns into melancholy as soon as the child becomes an object, a gift to others, neither self nor part of the self, an object destined to be a subject, an other. (239,emphasis in original) Similarly, a woman can be an economic subject only through her role as mother, which is simultaneously the mark of her role as "producer" of the family and the sign of her right to consume in aid of that role. When Made becomes a "productive" member of the economy after her release, it is as a thoroughly masculinized woman, cigarette-smoking, short-haired, and swaggering. To function as a woman, she would need a sinkful of dirty dishes and the baby whom prison took away.

Thus if prison fails to discipline women into their proper feminine role, it turns them out as ersatz men. While these four films laud the feminine woman, they expose prison as a place that is run by men, for men (it produces women for the benefit of the male criminal world), and to make more men--and all this through the agency of hard women who might as well be men themselves. Although there is a final, intractable contradiction inherent in the idea that femininity is simultaneously at risk from men and awaiting salvation from men, this sticking point is circumvented by the notion of the "good man": the doctor, chaplain, or husband who alone can redeem the mother or wife at risk and save her from the consequences of shirking her maternal duty. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I wish to thank Mary Desjardins and the anonymous readers of this article in manuscript for their helpful comments. NOTES 1. As Foucault observes, this is a penological usage that dates back to pre-Enlightenment days. 2. With each passing year, as Betty Friedan would note, the "feminine mystique" had had longer to condemn women in professional roles. Friedan argues that women were accorded more respect for work performed outside the home during the twenties and thirties than during the fifties (38-43). 3. Harper ("harpy"?) is wholly masculinized--indeed, on her night off she constitutes a kind of parody of femininity, with her picture hat and splashy flower-print dress; as one inmate remarks of her "new look": "If that's what dames are wearing now, I'm glad I'm in here." 4. There was considerable cultural feeling during this period that power corrupts women. Degler notes the popularity of one 1947 text, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham's Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, that "contend[ed] that women were unrealized and unfulfilled because feminist ideology--although almost none was to be seen--had tried to make them into men" (440). Clearly this masculinizing process has been applied to Van Zandt and her ilk. 5. This description is founded on historical fact; as Freedman records, in turn-of-the-century women's prisons, children could stay with their mothers until age two. She quotes a prison doctor's claim from 1895 on the efficacy of such systems: "'I can't let you go home [Dr. Lucy Hall informed a stir-crazy inmate], but how would you like to help take care of the babies?' I took her to the nursery, and in 24 hours that insane look of misery had left her face. . . . I fully believe I saved her from insanity" (96). As films such as House of Women make clear, the converse is also true: institutions can drive prisoners insane by depriving them of their babies. 6. According to one prison account found in Esther Heffernan's Making It in Prison, isolation or solitary confinement is called "the hole," making it equivalent to genital femininity.

7. Likewise, Ann Carson in Girls in Prison comments with disgust, "Can you imagine what this place looks like to me? These women!. . . I'll become like them--it's contagious." To which Reverend Fulton responds, "If you become like them, you'll spoil what I'm trying to do." 8. Ann Carson constitutes a similar pawn in a bargain between God and the Reverend Fulton, who seeks to reclaim her for her heavenly father, as it were. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Without a male facilitator to aid her, the heroine of Caged cannot make the transition to the domestic sphere. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): In House of Women, there is a riot after one of the prisoners is denied parole and her child is taken away. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): In Women's Prison, although one's group of friends is called a "sorority," inmates are horrified at the thought of being cooped up with women. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): In Caged, the treatment of inmate pregnancy both underscores the institution's brutality (because children have no place in it) and illustrates prison's antidomesticity. WORKS CITED Bryan, Helen. Inside. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Freedman, Estelle B. Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1981. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell, 1983. Heffernan, Esther. Making It in Prison: The Square, the Cool, and the Life. New York: Wiley, 1972. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Walker, Janet. Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Williams, Vergil L., and Mary Fish. Convicts, Codes, and Contraband: The Prison Life of Men and Women. Cambridge: Ballinger, 1974. ~~~~~~~~ By Anne Morey