Echoes from Hell
Using 1950 census data to attempt to hear the cries of lost girls and women
I originally published this article @medium on 12 May 2022. When the Census Bureau released their data for 1950 this year, I excitedly searched for everyone under the sun, from my own relatives to celebrities and US presidents. While ferreting around some Manhattan Enumeration Districts, looking for legendary writers, philosophers, and actors, I stumbled on this…. You might find some of this article boring (the librarian in me is hungry for details) but I hope the overarching idea will not be lost on you. This article is for the women society tries to break—the women it has been trying to break in all times—the weirdos, the free thinkers, the rebellious, the daring. Yet the feminine spirit prevails, ever challenging us to choose love.
There is some real gold on the 1950 census. Besides the living legends and the long-dead but then alive and kicking legends, the US presidents, and your own forebears, you can find things like the old Jefferson Market Prison in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Where the inmates walked there is now a public garden. The 1950 census is searchable at 1950census.archives.gov and you can find the Jefferson Market inmates in the 49 pages of the Enumeration District 31–86. Page 37 shows you the superintendent, the physician, and the registered nurse at the prison. Ruth E. Collins, the superintendent, is right there. An “outstanding prison administrator,”1 according to a newspaper from 1932, the year she took the job, Ruth was a woman on a mission to rehabilitate her charges. “A jail should be a type of school,” she was quoted as saying. “A school for citizenship,” is how the newspaper article suggested she would run her house of detention.
The census taker, or the “enumerator,” filled out the paperwork on April 1st, 1950. She recorded the name of the facility as “Home of Detention for Women.” Her name was Agnes and she noted especially: “These sheets are numbered as 1A thru 5A, to distinguish between permanent and transient. These sheets affixed with ‘A’ are transient guests.” I’m not a sociologist, just a writer and researcher, but even I, without my advanced degree, recognize the value of these sheets to the field of sociology. It’s not only sociologists, I’m sure, who will find them fascinating. Here is a snapshot in time, a window to a piece of history that only haunts us today in ghost form. “Inmates” from all over the country, and even abroad, spanning every age from 20 to 70…. What was Eleanor Cooke’s story? 25 years old from New Jersey, recorded on line 26 on Sheet 1A, how did she end up here? There were women locked up here, looking out from confinement on the bustling metropolis, who had come from the Deep South, the midwest, Puerto Rico, and as far as Poland. There was a 28 year old named Clementine from the Virgin Islands. (See line 25 on page 27.) Her race was recorded as Negro. The choices for Race were White, Negro, American Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or Other. Clementine was 28 years old and listed as Mar, for Married, where the only other options were Wd for Widowed, D for Divorced, Sep for Separated, or Nev for Never. But for this sheet on the 1950 census, what evidence is there that Clementine lived? What about Marion McCullogh, 49 years old, married, from Massachusetts? Or Elsie Polick, a 55-year-old widow from Germany? They must have been listed in order as they were housed, one by one. Agnes went down the hall, writing down names, asking each prisoner where she was from. “Jacqueline Le Gard,” 31 years old, Negro. Never married, Ma’am. “I come from California.” Right after Susie from Ohio and Marie from Massachusetts. There was Mary Duffy from Scotland, 47, married. She answered “yes” to whether she was naturalized. What happened to Mary Duffy? What did she “do,” if anything, to land herself in a prison cell in the middle of “the Village” in New York City? And what about Helen March, 33, married, from Kentucky?
The House of Detention for Women had capacity for 450 women. “The majority of them are moral offenders,” said the aforementioned article in 1932. Moral offenders? A woman could be incarcerated there for up to three years for a “moral offense.” Three years was the maximum sentence for this broadly defined type of bad behavior. No one serves only three years for murder. These women were in jail, probably, for displeasing their fathers and husbands. It was up to Ruth Collins to teach them to behave properly, stop talking back so much! But did 20-year-old Marie Pearson really need “fixing,” or was it just that her father’s second or third wife didn’t like her? What, pray tell, was “wrong” with the 62-year-old Jane Reynolds, apart from the fact that she never got married?
It cost the city of Manhattan $2 million to build the House of Detention for Women. It was a prison in theory, but no one called it a prison, and the women who temporarily had housing there were in fact deliberately called inmates instead of prisoners. The New York Times in 1932 called it a “prison without bars” and a “luxury jail for women.” It had bulletproof glass on the window casements and door panels. They made it sound pretty mild in those days. Decades after the 1950 census, though, other stories began to emerge…. Social worker Sara Harris was shocked by what she saw inside the prison, so much so that she titled the book, Hellhole. It was published by E.P. Dutton in 1967.
The House of Detention had a roach problem, according to the account given by onetime inmate Angela Davis. A rodent problem too. But for Angela, the psychological trauma was felt even after her release. She was an inmate for 16 months, and then she had to relearn how to be around people. “I often found myself wanting to go back to my cell where I could be by myself,” she said.2 Among the famous and infamous inmates, there were Ethel Rosenberg and Grace Paley. Andrea Dworkin was incarcerated in the House of Detention at the age of 16 for the audacity of protesting the Vietnam War. She was violently assaulted,3 and no doubt would have agreed with the “hellhole” description applied by Sara Harris. The correctional facility closed forever in 1974. Good riddance! Ten years from now, we will see who was incarcerated in the Hellhole in April 1960, and then we’ll have one left, the census of 1970, to show us the names of women with unimaginable horrors in their untold stories. The quote from Andre Lorde is priceless: He said the Hellhole was “a defiant pocket of female resistance, ever-present as a reminder of possibility, as well as punishment.”4 The possibility of surrender and reformation, or defiance and punishment! (This whole pitiful chapter in human history reminds me of the story of my seventh great-grandmother. Anne Françoise Rolland was one of the “patients” (inmates) at the Salpétrière Hospital in Paris; she was put on a sloop with 20 other girls, and the sloop, ironically named to translate as “The Saucy Wench,” sailed from Le Havre to Louisiana. Anne’s only “crime” was — well, we don’t know for sure, but she either displeased her father with her “wayward” behavior or irritated her new stepmother. I imagine that there are stories from the Jefferson Market prison which echo the tribulations experienced by the girls of “La Salpétrière.” I wrote about my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, lol, in my genealogy book, The Ira David Schneider Family.)5
What has become of the building that once housed New York’s “correctional facility” for wayward females? The spot where it stood is a beautiful garden, over which looms the Jefferson Market Library, a branch of the New York Public Library system. All around this historical spot, the life and lustre of Greenwich Village! We know that this “House of Detention” existed, and we know a little something about the famous and infamous inmates, but without the census of 1940 and the census of 1950, we would have no inkling, no trace of thousands of women who passed through those halls, who slept in those cells — those cells that had no bars were still rooms of confinement and punishment, of interrogation and torture to these women, simply for the audacity to be and think rebelliously.
Blanshard, Julia. “Modern Skyscraper Prison.” The Meriden Daily Journal via Google News. 9 January 1932. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=RrpIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=jwENAAAAIBAJ&dq=new%20york%20women%27s%20house%20of%20detention%20ruth%20e%20collins&pg=913%2C792505.
Via Newsbank via The Internet Archive:
Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek - September 27, 1998 - A35 Contra Costa
ANGELA DAVIS TAPS PAST FOR PASSION Angela Davis remembers life as a prisoner well. The roaches that tumbled into her coffee. The mice that skulked in the shadows of her cell. The silence. Even after her 16 months in jail ended, she found it hard to shake the ghosts of incarceration. "Just being around people I had to relearn how to be sociable. I often found myself wanting to go back to my cell where I could be by myself. This was the psychological impact of 16 months….”
Jeffery, Simon. “Feminist icon Andrea Dworkin dies.” The Guardian (UK). 11 April 2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20130829042528/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/11/books.booksnews.
“The House of D: A Panel on the Women’s House of Detention.” https://www.villagepreservation.org/event/the-house-of-d/. Archived: http://archive.today/t8TtM.
Rovira, Ashley, and Louise Coco Schneider. The Ira David Schneider Family: Researched and Compiled by his Daughter.” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LQNKQKY.