Linda Gilbert
Linda Gilbert, likely born in Rochester, New York, was a notable prison reformer with a unique background. She grew up in a Protestant family and attended St. Mary's Convent in Chicago. At a young age, she began her reform efforts by using her inherited money to establish a library for inmates at the Cook County jail, which sparked her ambition to support prison reform more broadly. Gilbert organized a controversial lottery to fund libraries in prisons across Illinois and a home for women in need, though this endeavor attracted significant scandal and backlash.
After moving to New York, she continued her advocacy by providing support to prisoners, such as gifts, job placement assistance, and writing letters on their behalf. Her dedication to prison reform included setting up libraries in several jails and promoting the respect and humane treatment of inmates. Despite facing challenges, including public skepticism and legal troubles, Gilbert's work laid the groundwork for future reform movements. Her personal and public efforts reflect a commitment to social change at a time when prison reform was gaining momentum in American society.
Subject Terms
Linda Gilbert
- Linda Gilbert
- Born: May 13, 1847
- Died: October 24, 1895
Was born probably in Rochester, New York, the daughter of Horace and Zelinda Gilbert, and was named after her mother. Little is known about her family except that her father was, in all likelihood, a hotel barkeeper and that she had a sister, Helen. Despite her family’s Protestantism, Linda Gilbert went to school at St. Mary’s Convent, in Chicago, where the Gilberts had moved when she was five. She sympathized with the prisoners at Cook County jail, which was on her way to school, and she began to bring some of her father’s books to one inmate who had expressed interest in her own school books.
She began her reform career when she was seventeen, using inherited money to carry out a youthful vow to endow a library for the jail. This act widened her ambitions. Hearing about the success of lotteries, she plotted her own, to finance libraries in prisons throughout Illinois and a home for needy women in Chicago. For five dollars she promised admission to a lecture on social reform and a chance to win two hundred thousand dollars to be paid in currency gold, and such luxury items as diamonds and steamboats. The lottery created a scandal that cost her the support of state officeholders whose backing for her welfare projects she had elicited and whose sympathies she had announced in The Chicago Evening Post. Her libel suit against the Post Printing Company, which had called her lottery a swindle, ended in a mistrial.
In 1873 Gilbert continued her personal prison reform campaign, this time in New York, where she had moved after having endured losses in the Chicago fire. Aided by ministerial support, she tried to raise money for the Gilbert Library and prisoners’’ Aid Fund, bypassing the established prison Association and the Women’s Prison Association of New York. She began to bring prisoners gifts like soap and fruit, writing their letters and helping them find jobs, transportation and places to stay when they were released. Some newly released prisoners began to sell books that Gilbert had purchased at half price. They had done work as effective as regular salesmen. Gilbert told an 1876 gathering of the National Prison Association of the United States,of which she was a member.
With an empathy for criminals even before they reached the prison gates, she responded to the burglarizing of her own house by giving the culprit money and food, eliciting cynical comment from the press about the extent of her altruism; the burglar might be more practical and less dreamy than she, said The New York Tribune in 1882. One dream paralleling the somewhat tragic-comic episode of the lottery had been Gilbert’s money-raising “Grand Testimonial Concert” at the Hippodrome in New York in 1875, which offered an orchestra and other kinds of musical accompaniement but which treated a very small audience in a very large hall to a show hampered by poor acoustics. But where her more publicized activities courted trouble, she quietly helped set up libraries in several New York City jails, including the Tombs; in the female section of Sing Sing Prison; in the Chicago House of Detention; in the St. Louis, Missouri, County Jail; and in other detention centers in different states. Her Sketch of the Life and Work of Linda Gilbert (1876) recountered her accomplishments, and argued that inmates should be respected as human beings and given aid in seeking work. The newly incorporated Gilbert Library and Prisoners Aid Society continued her efforts until 1883. Gilbert herself is said to have helped finance her activities by inventing a wire clothespin and other mechanical devices. Her career was an idiosyncratic example of the reform impulse on the threshold of the Progressive era, which would take individualistic altruism as hers and transmute it into causes with organizational cohesion. Prison reform would also gain some popular appeal of the kind she had hoped would result from her concert and lottery, and political impact as well. It is possible that Linda Gilbert, with both her modest, quiet achievements and her eccentric public actions, made some contribution to that larger Progressive social reform.
Notable American Women (1971) contains a bibliography. See F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893); The New York Times, Dec. 1 1880; and obituaries in The New York World, October 26, 1895 and The New York Sun, Oct. 28. 1895. See also B. McKelvey, American Prisons: A Study in American Social History Prior to 1915 (1936).