They saw sunlight just
once a year on July Fourth
Home was once an attic for Joliet's first female convicts
"As they are now located,
they never touch their feet
to terra firma, except once
a year, on the Fourth of July..."
(Illinois Penitentiary Commission report, 1894)
For more than a quarter century, women convicts in Joliet were confined
to the attic-like quarters on the fourth floor of a prison building.
They worked there, ate there and slept there.
And only once a year on the nation's birthday were they allowed to come
downstairs and walk outside into the summer sun.
When the old prison on Collins Street was built just before the Civil War,
it included 100 cells for women prisoners. But there were only a few female
convicts then.
As the men's cells became overcrowded, the women's cells were needed. Besides
that, the prison chaplain and physician had written reports that the women
needed to be removed from the men's prison.
"It is the bane, in fact, of morality among our men," the chaplain
wrote.
"At any cost the female prison should be removed from the premises,"
the doctor warned.
In 1870, women convicts were moved to the fourth story of the prison administration
center, right above the warden's quarters. The doors were locked. They were
completely cut off from the male population.
During the day, they would sit in a long neat row of chairs facing windows
with large piles of socks in their laps. They would repair the socks with
darning needles.
"It is terrible monotonous work, a dreary routine, a truly penitential
task," a prison report stated. "If the outside scenes remind them
of the freedom they have lost, they don't show it in their repressed and
stolid faces."
Their hair styles were limited to brushed back and secured in a knot. Each
woman wore a blue and white gingham dress. They slept in rooms with 10 cots.
Sometimes a baby was born from a newly entered convict mother. The child
was allowed to stay with its mother until age 4.
Discipline was strong in the Spartan atmosphere of the attic quarters.
"The dormitories and work shops in the female prison are the whitest
and cleanest spots of the whole length and breadth of this state,"
the warden reported in 1890. "It is the subject of much favorable comment."
But the joys there were limited to small things. Maybe making some rouge
for cheeks from the red dye used in yarn. Perhaps gaining shiny hair by
using fat skimmed from soup as hair oil.
And of course, the annual Fourth of July trip down the stairs and out into
the prison yard was the highlight of the year.
The 1890 warden's report to the state warned of a potential danger. If there
was a fire, the report said, all of the women convicts would be burned to
death.
Four years later the warden was pleading for a new women's prison because
of overcrowding in the attic.
"It is unfair, unjust and inhumane to confine the large number of female
convicts in the space provided for them," he wrote.
That same year, the warden started allowing the women out once a week. On
Sunday, they were allowed to attend church services and spend a few hours
in the prison yard.
In 1895, the state Legislature approved building a separate prison across
the street. Construction started the following spring with convict labor.
The new women's prison, using quarried stone, was built as a smaller replica
of the men's prison.
And on Nov. 26, 1896, 66 women prisoners marched across Collins Street to
the new prison.
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