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TIL that 2023 is 200 years since the Gaols Act 1823 created single sex prisons across the British Empire, and about Elizabeth Fry, social reformer, who was a driving force behind female only prisons.
Next year is the 200 year anniversary of the Gaols Act 1823 which:
mandated sex-segregation of prisons and female warders for female inmates to protect them from sexual exploitation. Fry kept extensive diaries in which the need to protect female prisoners from rape and sexual exploitation is explicit.
Elizabeth Fry was a social reformer who campaigned against the slave trade, & for prison reform. She also opened a training school for nurses which inspired Florence Nightingale. Fry was the first women to present evidence in the British parliament.
Fry petitioned the authorities to improve the conditions of deported women & girls after she was told that deported women were simply abandonded when they arrived in Botany Bay. She worked to ensure womens barracks were built & auitable transport was provided for them. Fry also provided transported women with care packages that included essentials like knives & forks, & sewing kits.
Fry also created a prison school for children imprisoned with thier mothers, & promoted rehabilitiation through training in needlework & knitting for women prisoners.
Elizabeth Fry was a remarkable woman who deicated her life trying to improve the lives of the most vulnerable women in society.
it was 2016 that the new £5 note was released into circulation with the image of Winston Churchill on the reverse, replacing the previous £5 note that featured the image of Elizabeth Fry, that alone amazes me about how quickly we forget.
Ah right... I'd forgotten... When Fry was replaced by Churchill on the fiver, that was when there were no woman on any UK bank notes apart from the queen. That was when the campaign started to get notable women represented on bank notes.
Fry is my hero. I learnt about her as a child as I went to a Quaker school, and was so disappointed when she was removed from the £5 note.
Shes a feminist hero, and yet another example of how history overlooks women who have changed the shape of the modern world.
Everyone is out here fawning over Elon Musk and a million other undeserving silver-spoon moids, while women can literally revolutionise the way we do things and 99% of people couldn't name them.
women can literally revolutionise the way we do things and 99% of people couldn't name them
So much truth!
Its so shameful that we've gone so far backwards in such a short period of time.
all the more an outrage that the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies has turned its back on women...as exposed by the formidable Heather Mason https://twitter.com/Mason134211f/status/1400130437595475975
Just started the the prison mockumentary Hard Cell on Netflix. Catherine Tate gives a shout out to Elizabeth Fry in the first episode!
i'd like to say that I hope that by the 200th anniversary we will have achieved enough to make prisons actually single sex again but I fear that the more realistic option is that by 2023 there will be even more men in women's prisons than ever. :( at least elizabeth isn't around to see the destruction of her life's work. RIP shero
Thanks for the history lesson. She was a really remarkable woman. It is a little chilling to think what it was like for imprisoned women before the changes she insisted be made. Brrr.
Kinda like New Jersey . . .