Since the publication in 1936 of Blake McKelvey’s American Prisons (1972), social historians have developed a sizeable body of work that traces, and in some cases tries to explain, the evolution of U.S. penal institutions. These studies are important for what they tell us about perceptions of social problems in the past. They also have policy implications, indicating the historical roots of current dilemmas and alternative approaches to penal problems. Nearly all of these studies are limited, however, by their blindness to gender differences between prisons for men and women. Written mainly by men, prison histories have focused nearly exclusively on male prisoners. Perhaps their authors would argue that this bias is natural and insignificant since over time the vast majority of prisoners have been male. But by overlooking the variable of gender, prison historians have ignored an important influence on the nature and development of penal institutions.

Contract Labor played a critical role both in financing European trans-Atlantic migration and in providing a hirable labor force to work the estates of the New World. During the seventeenth century at least three-quarters of the Chesapeake colonists arrived under some form of short term contract (Walsh, 1977: 111). By the American Revolution, a majority of English, German, and southern Irish emigrants still used servant contracts to finance their migration to Pennsylvania (Grubb, 1985). For the year 1773, 61% of the 387 southern Irish immigrants, 18% of the 1,420 Ulster immigrants, 25% of the 382 Scotch immigrants, and 52% of the 174 English immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude. For the years 1771–1773, out of 747 German adult male immigrants to Pennsylvania 58% entered servitude. For 1785–1804, 45% of the 7,837 German immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude.

The Rapid increase in public spending for white schools that occurred in North Carolina after the turn of the century led to a large racial disparity in the amount spent per child by 1910. Previous scholars have attributed this racial difference in school spending to the disfranchisement of the black voter (Margo, 1982). It was argued that once blacks were prevented from voting, the white members of the school boards were able to divert the public funds which were initially allocated for the education of black children. The most widely accepted version of this theory is credited to Horace Mann Bond (1934) who studied education expenditures for black children in Alabama. Bond argued that the governmental level at which schools were financed was important in determining the racial division of public school funds since the white members of the county school boards were particularly inclined to divert the funds allocated by the state government. The state funds which were allocated to the local school boards in Alabama were not required to be shared equally between black and white students. After blacks had been disfranchised, the county school boards responded by allocating a disproportionate share of these state funds for the education of white children.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the United States was undergoing an intense period of rapid industrialization which produced dramatic effects on many social institutions. One such institution was the family. The roles and behaviors of the family members were being redefined in response to the changes that were occurring in the family’s economic environment. In particular the family was called on to devise new income producing strategies through the allocation of its household labor resources. The utilization of such supplemental income sources as wives, children, and/or boarders was common during this period.

This article addresses recent revisionist literature concerning nineteenth-century French economic history, and in particular Cameron’s and Freedeman’s “French Economic Growth; a Radical Revision” (1983, see also Roehl, 1976 and O’Brien and Keyder, 1978 and the critical response of Locke, 1981 and Crafts, 1984). It questions the latter’s criteria for the perception of economic development or retardation and challenges revisionist affirmations concerning the role of entrepreneurial attitudes in the achievement of industrialization in France. The problems raised by the revisionist interpretation appear clearly with respect to the history of the French steel industry. The principal steel producers’ dynamism and technically progressive attitudes, which the authors cite to demonstrate the irrelevance of sociocultural hypotheses concerning French industrial retardation, represented only one component of the ferrous industrial scene. Sociocultural factors beyond the steel firms’ control, together with poor financial conditions and the economic geography of France outweighed entrepreneurial dynamism as determinants of the industry’s overall performance in the later nineteenth century, chiefly by their inhibiting effect on per capita steel consumption.