Abigail Hopper Gibbons

• Abigail Gibbons
• Born: December 7, 1801
• Died: January 16, 1893

Active in many reforms, is noted especially for her work with female prisoners. She was born in Philadelphia, the third child and second of six daughters of Sarah (Tatum) Hopper and Isaac Tatum Hopper. Her parents were Hicksite Quakers and supporters of abolition; her father, a tailor, is also remembered for his contributions to prison reform.

Like her nine siblings, Abigail Hopper was educated at local Friends’ schools. In 1821 she opened her own school for the children of Friends, which she ran for nearly ten years. Her father and stepmother (her mother died in 1822) moved to New York in 1829; she followed in 1830, and there became the head of a Friends’ school. In 1833 she married James Sloan Gibbons of Philadelphia, a partner in her brother-in-law’s dry-goods business and later a banker; they settled permanently in New York City in 1835.

The couple had six children: William, Sarah Hopper, Julia, Lucy, Isaac, and James. (The last two died in childhood.) James Gibbons, a Quaker and active abolitionist, encouraged his wife’s reform efforts and supported her comfortably with his business income.

Abigail Gibbons cast her reformer’s net widely. In 1859, for example, she founded—and for the next twelve years directed—the German Industrial School, to aid homeless children of that nationality in New York City. During the Civil War, accompanied by her daughter Sarah, she worked as a volunteer military nurse; after the war she organized the short-lived Labor and Aid Society to help veterans find work and to employ war widows and orphans. In 1873 she cofounded the New York Diet Kitchen Association, which furnished food for the sick and poor. For several years she was head of the New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice, which opposed licensed prostitution.

Gibbons’s most important work, however, was the rehabilitation of female offenders. The mid-nineteenth century saw the first small, local efforts to help prisoners in the difficult transition from incarceration to life in the outside world. Her father had been a founding member of the Prison Association of New York, established in 1845. In the formation of this body, Isaac Hopper had obtained passage of a motion that created a Female Department. Abigail Gibbons, a member of this department, helped manage “The Home” (later the Isaac T. Hopper Home)—a halfway house with a school that provided instruction in sewing and laundry work. (Residents were sent out as domestic workers to homes in the surrounding area.) In 1853 the Female Department was restructured as the independent Women’s Prison Association and Home. Abigail Gibbons presided over the association from 1877 until her death.

Gibbons expanded her prison work during the 1850s to include weekly visits to the Tombs, the city’s largest prison, and support for the Randalls Island infant asylum. In 1890, after years of patient lobbying, she succeeded in having the state legislature pass a law requiring the employment of matrons to care for women in custody at police stations. Two years later the legislature, again at her urging, passed a law creating a state women’s reformatory.

Gibbons died of pneumonia at ninety-one years of age, in her New York City home, three months after her husband’s death. She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Abigail Hopper Gibbons worked at a pivotal moment in American prison reform. During the first half of the nineteenth century, society tended to treat the female offender with special severity, that is, as one who had betrayed the purity of her sex. Gibbons, however, argued that such a woman was not a sinner but the victim of circumstances, who could be redeemed and live a good life if given the chance. Along with those of her coworkers Sarah P. H. Doremus and Catharine M. Sedgwick, Gibbons’s early efforts contributed to a major shift in attitude about female offenders, and this set the stage for reform of women’s prisons in the later nineteenth century.

Gibbons’s selected letters, compiled by her daughter S. H. Emerson, form the basis for Life of Abby Hopper Gibbers. Told Chiefly through Her Correspondence, 2 vols.(1897). The best recent account is the sketch in Notable American. Women (1971). The significance of her work in prison reform is discussed by E. B. Freedman in “Their Sisters’ Keepers: An Historical Perspective on Female Correctional Institutions in the United States, 1870-1900,” Feminist Studies, 1974, and in Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (1981). See also The dictionary of American Biography (1931). An obituary appeared. in The New York Times, January 18, 1893.