Manion discusses the ways in which democracy and punishment defined each other at the moment of the nation’s founding. Whether punishment serves to uphold or contradict core democratic principles is the subject of considerable debate. By focusing on the lives of ordinary women who were detained in Philadelphia’s penal institutions from the 1780s – 1830s, Manion highlights the relationship that emerges between philosophical ideals and material realities.

Jen Manion is a social and cultural historian whose work examines the role of gender and sexuality in American life. Manion is the Winkley Professor of History and Political Economy at Amherst College. Manion is author of Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America which received the Mary Kelley Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and Female Husbands: A Trans History which was a finalist for the OAH Lawrence Levine Award for the best book in U.S. cultural history and recipient of the British Association of Victorian Studies best book prize. Jen is co-editor with Nicholas Syrett of a two volume series, The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States (expected 2025), co-editor with Jim Downs of Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism (2004), and has published nearly three dozen essays and reviews in U.S. histories of gender and sexuality, including a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine about historic injustices toward LGBTQ+ people.

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