By: Kelly Hogan
Kelly is a graduate student earning her M.A. in History.
Thanks to the generosity of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, I was awarded funding to travel and research in the Pennsylvania State Archives for my master’s thesis, Illustrated Ladies: the Body, Class, and the Exotic. My thesis is a gender study of tattooed American and British Victorian ladies; I am examining the tattoo on the white female body as a means of literal and symbolic rebellion against strict Victorian morals and proscribed gender roles. This rebellion, I argue, symbolized a need to reclaim agency over one’s body that transcended class lines.
One of the groups of women I am examining is the tattooed prostitute. The tattooed prostitute was subject to examination in European criminal anthologies published throughout the 19th century, but she has received very little academic attention since then. In order to compensate for the lack of available sources, I needed to conduct my own primary source research on the American tattooed prostitute.
Pennsylvania State Archives http://www.phmc.pa.gov/Archives
By travelling to the Pennsylvania State Archives, I was able to examine the criminal population records from the Eastern and Western State Penitentiaries, both of which opened in the early nineteenth century, and housed female criminals until the early twentieth century. The penitentiary system was created to rehabilitate and reform the criminal in an effort to transform them into functioning members of society. The prostitute, who was regarded as the fallen woman and a sexual deviant, was subject to a number of social and systemic reform movements and methods.
Unfortunately, it appears that the prostitute was beyond saving by the standards of both the Eastern and Western State penitentiaries, as I was unable to find any charges for prostitution, solicitation, or vagrancy. I was able to find charges of sodomy, sodomy and buggery, and seduction, but they were largely attributed to men.
Although I ran out of time before finishing my search through the records, I was able to find two women who were described as being tattooed. The first of whom was Amelia Howard, sentenced in December of 1899 for Larceny. Amelia was recorded as a “black” servant from West India, and with having a “heart with H.W. inside, on left forearm”. Although Amelia immigrated (or was imported) from West India, the heart design on her arm is a classic American design, suggesting that she was tattooed in America. The initials in her tattoo are likely those of a lover. The second woman was Laura Smith, sentenced in December of 1865 for larceny. Laura was recorded as a “mulatto” servant from Pennsylvania, and with having “scar on forehead, double heart on right arm”.[1]
My thesis thus far has focuses solely on the tattooed bodies of white women. Tattoos on the bodies of colored women and men carry significantly different social and cultural meanings, and are deserving of their own independent study. The tattoo – a visual image which is painfully applied to the body and representative of corporal/psychical suffering – was a means in which the tattooed individual could reclaim control of their external surroundings by asserting agency over their own body. By researching the tattooed bodies of the lower class as a whole, one may discover that the tattoo reveals a need to maintain control of the body that transcended racial divides. However, the complexities of race and class cannot be covered within a master’s thesis, but is certainly a deserving subject of study for a PhD dissertation.
[1] The descriptions of the tattoos and scars on Amelia Howard and Laura Smith are quoted from the Eastern State Penitentiary Descriptive Registers.