Last fall NPR aired a series of investigative stories about the treatment of incarcerated women in prisons across the United States. The report found that female inmates are “disciplined more often and more harshly than men for low-level violations.” The report also found that some institutions rationed “basic hygienic supplies,” which makes the Seinfeld episode that found Elaine in a theater restroom stall without toilet paper asking the women in the next stall for some and the women replies, “I can’t spare a square,” not so funny. It is truly ironic that in the year that finds the most women serving in the United States Congress, the treatment of women in other American institutions sounds like a Dickens’ tale.
While the first separate state correctional facility for women in the United States was established in Indiana in October 1873, a private Catholic institution, the Home of the Good Shepherd, had been established in Louisville, Kentucky in 1842 by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd to receive incorrigible and delinquent young women. The religious community had been founded a few years earlier in France by Sister Mary Euphrasia who had a “burning zeal for the young women who were marginalized.” The order quickly grew, and homes soon appeared in other countries. The chief work done by young women in the Homes of the Good Shepherd was “public washing” performed in what became known as Magdalene Laundries.
The Sisters of the Good Shepherd accepted the invitation of Msgr. Auguste Bessonies, pastor of St. John’s Church, to establish a home for delinquent girls in Indianapolis, and America’s sixteenth Home of the Good Shepherd opened its doors on March 31, 1873 in a brick house at the southeast corner of Tennessee (Capitol Ave.) and Maryland Street with the mission to “protect and furnish work for the penitent class, girls over seventeen years of age” who were incorrigibles placed in the home by parents and guardians or young women sentenced to the home by Marion County courts. The sisters also provided refuge to orphan children and “Magdalenes,” women who had graduated from the penitent class and wished to stay in the Home.
Within five years, the Indianapolis Home of the Good Shepherd had moved to 111 W. Raymond St., a spacious 27-acre piece of land on a high bluff overlooking the White River. The sisters and the women and children lived in a cloistered community, the convent, chapel, dormitories, school, laundry, and grounds enclosed within a high white wall. As in other Homes of the Good Shepherd, a “great deal of public washing” in the laundry provided the chief work in which the penitents were engaged. Commercial laundries often believed this placed them at a disadvantage since the Homes paid no wages or taxes. Garment manufacturing and needlework was important work done by the Magdalenes. “Walls within walls and gratings within gratings” kept the children from contact with the penitents and the penitents from contact with the Magdalenes. When the young women entered the Home of the Good Shepherd they were given new names and forbidden to “tell their sorrows.” The average stay in the Home was a year to eighteen months.
The Home of the Good Shepherd was a private prison. During its first 20 years, the institution “cared for 1,766 wayward women and girls” receiving payment from the city for boarding female inmates. The Home was among the institutions visited annually by the Marion County Board of Charities & Correction whose reports noted “cheer throughout the entire building” and “the care of these young girls and misses is certainly a responsible one, and to bring them up to lives of usefulness and honest living is an effort worthy of receiving the pecuniary aid which is afforded the institution.” Others, however, had a different perspective.
Over the years, some former inmates told stories of cruelty at the Home of the Good Shepherd that included whippings “with a strap on the naked flesh,” confinement in a “dungeon-like basement,” and other punishments like those found “in other prisons and asylums.” At least one woman successfully brought a court case of ill treatment against the Society of the Good Shepherd and was awarded damages.
Fortunately, changing ideas in juvenile justice and correctional care influenced the Home of the Good Shepherd and other penal institutions. In 1935, the Marydale School and Diagnostic Center was established at the Home. Teen-age girls suffering from “emotional and environmental problems” continued to be sent to the southside facility by Indiana juvenile courts and county welfare agencies to insure “protection from themselves, from relatives and from the community” where they received schooling in traditional subjects and training in sewing, cooking, needlework, and housekeeping. The girls also performed institutional chores in the kitchen and dormitory.
In the fall of 1948, the Marydale Guild was organized to aid in the work of the eighteen Sisters and four lay teachers at the school. Open houses were held so the general public could see inside the walls and inmate advocacy groups like PACE (Prisoners Aid by Citizens’ Effort) made visits. Remodeling added classrooms to the old laundry and new construction added a swimming pool and gymnasium. However, as the Society of the Good Shepherd celebrated its ninety-fourth year in Indianapolis, it was announced that the Convent of the Good Shepherd and the Marydale School would close in the spring of 1968 because of a “shortage of sister personnel.” Shortly before the doors of Marydale School closed, a Purdue University research study found that 77 percent of the young women interviewed who had attended the school “had no further difficulties with school officials, juvenile authorities, police, etc., and yet many of these girls had been chronic offenders against society prior to attending Marydale.”
Today, there are no physical remains of the Home of the Good Shepherd and Marydale School, but in the memories of troubled young women who had their lives forever changed it may not have been the answer to all their problems, but for many it was their “first experience in receiving as well as giving love.”
