ABSTRACT
Women's reformatories, in contrast, broke radically with custodialism. Scorning the goal of punishment, leaders of the women's reformatory movement concentrated on rehabilitation. Eschewing traditional architecture, they eliminated walls and cellblocks. The first steps toward designing a new type of prison exclusively for women were taken in the Midwest. The women's reformatory movement was part of a much broader current in prison reform that began not long after the Civil War and produced the penal philosophy known today as the rehabilitation or treatment approach. The heart of the women's reformatory model lay in its assumptions about commitment. The nineteenth-century northeastern reformatories developed commitment policies that differed greatly from earlier prison practice. The nature of social feminism itself, moreover, helps explain the nature of the women's reformatory. Like other reformers of their day and ours, social feminists involved in prison improvement were not inclined to pose deep challenges to prevailing social arrangements.
