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Stories

  • Article

Raising a baby in prison

Gary’s second child spent much of her babyhood in a prison mother-and-baby unit, after his wife was given a custodial sentence. Here he explores the family’s experiences of that time.

  • Book extract

Renaissance women and their killer cosmetics

In this extract from ‘How to be a Renaissance Woman’, Jill Burke delves into a complex world of beauty products, poison and patriarchy – and reveals the impossible contradictions of femininity faced by 16th-century women.

  • Article

Disturbed minds and disruptive bodies

Prison officers tried to regulate women’s minds and bodies and maintain a new disciplinary routine in the second half of the 1800s.

  • Long read

Rehab centres and the ‘cure’ for addiction

Guy Stagg takes us on a brief history of rehab centres and their approaches to addiction and recovery.

All stories (19)

Images

  • Woking Convict Invalid Prison: five women prisoners convicted of infanticide. Process print after Paul Renouard, 1889.
  • Woking Convict Invalid Prison: women prisoners working the fire pump. Process print after Paul Renouard, 1889.
  • Shanghai: three Chinese women prisoners locked at the neck into one cangue (portable pillory). Photograph, 18--.
  • Elizabeth Fry is seated at a table in Newgate Prison, London, surrounded by women prisoners listening to her. Etching and aquatint.
  • Elizabeth Fry is seated at a table in Newgate Prison, London, surrounded by women prisoners listening to her. Etching and aquatint.
  • Prisoners behind bars opening on to a yard in Moscow being visited by men and women at Easter. Wood engraving, 1890.
  • Men and women are prisoners in cells, one man is being tortured by having the soles of his feet beaten with a stick. Wood engraving after G. Durand.
  • Men and women are gathered outside a prison in Cairo as prisoners look out from behind the bars, and a child stands on ledge to look through the window. Wood engraving after J.C. Horsley, 1876.
  • An episode in The beggar's opera: the highwayman Macheath in prison, two young women are kneeling in front of two men and begging for his release. Etching after W. Hogarth.
  • China: a woman sentenced to execution by strangulation for murdering her husband. Photograph, 19--.
All images (29)

Catalogue

All works (209)