Challenging Confinement: Feminist Activism and Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Women in Detroit

Bonnie Ernst, University of Florida

From Michigan’s only women’s prison, incarcerated women launched the nation’s first major lawsuit aimed at securing gender equality in prison programs. Filed in federal court, the lawsuit was the result of women’s grassroots interpretations of gender-based discrimination. In the 1970s, incarcerated women learned how incarcerated men had access to high school and college courses, vocational training, and the courts. In contrast, women’s prisons offered minimal rehabilitative programming. Incarcerated women, through their correspondence with boyfriends, husbands, and relatives, realized that gender-based discrimination defined their punishment. At the same time women were being thrown into prison in large numbers, women were also graduating from law schools at higher rates. Young lawyers believed that the gender discrimination in prison amounted to violations of women’s constitutional rights. The convergence of these factors forged new paths for prison reform. In 1977, female prisoners filed a class action lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Corrections in yet another attempt to achieve access to the courts, education, vocational training, and humane prison conditions. With Glover v. Johnson, 478 F. Supp. 1075 (E.D. Mich. 1979), women in the Detroit House of Correction launched the first class action lawsuit brought by prisoners arguing for gender equality. This paper examines the history of feminist activism and the legal advocacy movement in Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper examines how radical feminism played a part in this movement and the larger landscape of feminist politics in the Midwest and the nation. Mapping the intellectual exchanges among radical feminism, legal advocacy, and the prisoners’ rights movement for women reinforces the appalling ways in which the state and federal government restricted prisoners’ rights and connects this history to structural changes that corralled protest pathways in prisons. The paper relies on interviews, federal court documents, Michigan archives, and private collections.

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 Presented in Session 234. Gender, Race and Immigration