GENDER AND SOUTHERN PUNISHMENT AFTER THE CIVIL-WAR

Recent scholarship raises two questions about the historical relations hip between gender and official responses to criminality. First, to wh at extent has the formal social control of women changed in the past t wo centuries? Second, to what extent can changes in the presence of wo men within the criminal justice system be traced to the same factors t hat account for the changing presence of men? To address these questio ns, I focus on women incarcerated for felonies in a southern state (Ge orgia) between 1870 and 1940. Along with a comparable sample of male o fferers, this population forms the basis of a time-series analysis tha t compares, and seeks to account for, trends in admission rates. The a nalysis yields little evidence that women disappeared from formal syst ems of punishment. Instead, there were gender similarities in punishme nt trends and in explanations for those trends. Concluding the paper i s a discussion of its implications for further research on gender diff erences in punishment.