Bridget Donnelly. Charlotte Reveille. Kate Slattery. Emily Boyle. Until now, these were nothing but names marked down in the admittance registers and punishment reports of Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s most notorious prison.

In this shocking and heartbreaking book, Ted McCoy tell these women’s stories of incarceration and resistance in poignant detail. The four women served sentences at different times between 1835 and 1935, but they shared experiences that illuminate how those most marginalized in society – the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged – reckoned with poverty and crime and grappled with the constraints placed on them by shifting notions of punishment and reform.

The inhumanity they suffered while locked away from male prisoners in dark basement wards – from starvation and corporal punishment to sexual abuse and neglect – stands as profoundly disturbing evidence of the hidden costs of isolation, punishment, and mass incarceration.

Ted McCoy is an associate professor in Sociology at the University of Calgary. He is a historian of punishment and has published on penitentiaries in Canada’s nineteenth century. His books include Hard Time (2012) and Four Unruly Women (2019).

Ted McCoy's profile page

Although Ted McCoy’s Four Unruly Women is a short and accessibly written text—and, therefore, an excellent teaching resource!—it also offers a meticulously researched and multilayered analysis of four women, all imprisoned at the notorious Kingston Penitentiary (KP) at different times, for a revealing glimpse into the gendered pains of imprisonment over the course of a century (1838–1934).

Histoire social/Social History

This book honours Bridget Donnelly, Charlotte Reveille, Kate Slattery and Emily Boyle by bringing their disturbing stories to light.

Herizons

"Four Unruly Women: Stories of Incarceration and Resistance from Canada’s Most Notorious Prison provides an in-depth understanding of women’s resistance in Canada and the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples in Canada."

Canadian Journal of Law and Society