Women's Prison Association
Abigail Hopper Gibbons became involved in a variety of social reform movements. For twelve years in New York, she was also president of a German industrial school for street children.
In 1845, she and her father founded the Women's Prison Association (WPA) of New York City. She lobbied the city government for improvements in the city's prisons, advocated the hiring of police matrons, and urged the construction of separate prisons for women, as they were housed in the same facilities as men. She frequently visited the various prisons in and about New York.
Under her leadership, in 1853 the Women's Prison Association separated from its parent, the Prison Association, and Gibbons obtained a New York State charter for her group. She led an aggressive program of legislative lobbying at the city and state level to improve prison conditions for women. She protested jail overcrowding and demanded that women prisoners be searched only by female matrons.
Read more about this topic: Abigail Hopper Gibbons
Famous quotes containing the words women, prison and/or association:
““... To many women I have said “lie still”
And given everything that a woman needs
A roof, good clothes, passion, love perhaps
But never asked for love, should I ask that
I shall be old indeed.””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man’s despair.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.”
—Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)