Prison standards required females to be segregated from males, yet they were usually housed in a wing of an institution predominated by men. Consequently, women were seldom allowed outside their own cell block and ate, slept and worked within their cells where they were subjected to essentially the same kind of discipline as the men -- hard work, plain food and silence.
At the Carleton County Jail women constituted a small proportion of the inmates. Those convicted of serious crimes were sent to Kingston, which was, and still is, the only penitentiary for women in Canada. These women, photographed around 1880, wear the shapeless dresses assigned to women prisoners, and their hair has been cut short to prevent lice. In an age when short hair on women was considered ugly, this also served as a form of punishment. The woman in the foreground holds her tin bowl and the half loaf of bread given at meal time. The basin at the end of the hall was probably for washing. Confined to their cells for most of the day, women prisoners were often required to do needlework or weaving. In the Kingston Penitentiary women were also employed in the laundry.
