‘Houses of Deposit' and the Exclusion of Women in Turnof-the-Century Argentina

Among the widening range of places of isolation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a generic category of ‘houses of deposit’, used throughout Latin America and southern Europe. These institutions, which isolated delinquent and non-delinquent women alike from society, had a long tradition going back at least to the seventeenth century. ¹ In their colonial guises in Latin America, historians have likened them to jails and to shelters for battered women. By the national period in the nineteenth century, houses of deposit had become primarily institutions of female incarceration, in which particularly contradictory rationales unique to the history of state formation and modernism operated.