Elizabeth Fry

English social reformer

• Born: May 21, 1780
• Birthplace: Norwich, Norfolk, England
• Died: October 12, 1845
• Place of death: Ramsgate, Kent, England

Living during a time when prison convicts were generally assumed incorrigible, Fry believed that prisoners could and should be rehabilitated and treated humanely. Her work led to substantial prison reforms—especially for women, throughout Great Britain and abroad. She also worked to improve hospitals, nursing, and the treatment of the insane.

Early Life

Elizabeth Fry was born Elizabeth Gurney, the fourth of twelve children of John Gurney and Catherine Bell, who both came from old Quaker families. She spent her first years in Norwich, England, until her family moved to nearby Earlham Hall in 1786. One of her great-grandfathers was the well-known Quaker apologist Robert Barclay. She herself became a devout believer, but the wealthy banker John Gurney raised his children to be skeptical of the strict teachings of the Quakers’ Society of Friends. When she was twelve, her mother died.

Many members of Elizabeth’s family became Anglicans, but in 1789, Elizabeth was so influenced by a speech delivered by the American William Savery that she chose to embrace traditional Quaker beliefs. Following a meeting with her cousin, the devout Quaker Priscilla Gurney, Elizabeth began to wear the black hood associated with strict Quakers and started to use “thou” and “thee” in place of “you” in ordinary speech. Her conversion was both complete and permanent. Inspired by her faith, she distributed clothing to the poor and opened a Sunday school in her home for local children. She remained actively involved in the service of the Society of Friends for the rest of her life.

Life’s Work

On August 19, 1800, at the age of twenty, Elizabeth married Joseph Fry, a merchant who came from a Quaker family much more orthodox than her own. Her personal diary entries suggest that despite the fact that she wore traditional Quaker garb and earnestly professed her faith, her husband and his family saw her polished social manners unbefitting a sincere Quaker. Her refinement also caused some of her detractors to question her sincerity after she became a public figure. However, whatever disagreements Elizabeth and Joseph may have had about their religion, they raised a large family in London and in East Ham after 1809. By 1816 they had ten children, and by 1828 they had eleven.

Even as a mother of a large family, Elizabeth Fry remained active in her church and worked to improve her community. In 1811, she was declared a Quaker minister. Besides providing education for the poor, she ran a soup kitchen out of a barn at Plashet House in East Ham. Prompted by family friend Stephen Grellet, she visited the women’s section of London’s Newgate Prison in 1813.

At Newgate, Fry saw hardened female criminals crammed together with women awaiting trial; some of the women had children with them. They all slept packed together on hard cell floors, and many were nearly naked. In 1816, Fry began to make regular visits to Newgate. After establishing a school for the prison children, she introduced a system of supervision and classification of prisoners, in which only women supervised other women. She believed that society should strive both to save prisoners’ souls and to reform their behavior by providing them with religious and secular education, clothing, and gainful employment so that those who were released or transported to Australia could enter society with a sense of self-worth and some skills. Also, prisoners destined for the gallows could at least be saved spiritually.

Reading the Bible to prison inmates and providing other religious instruction was as integral a part of Fry’s plan as the more materially apparent improvements. To ensure the continuance of these reforms, she created the Ladies’ Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners at Newgate in 1817. By 1821, this body had become the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners. It was the first national organization for women in England.

Even before her brother-in-law Thomas Fowell Buxton championed her cause in a speech to the House of Commons in 1818, Fry had begun to garner some fame. She herself addressed Parliament soon afterward. However, her methods and her strong stance against capital punishment conflicted with the views of many members of Parliament, including the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, who publicly declared that Fry’s actions were helping to keep criminals from fearing the law.

Sidmouth’s successor as home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, was more amenable to Elizabeth Fry’s petitions. His reforms included the Gaols Act of 1823, and under his tenure, prison guards received regular salaries so they would no longer have to rely on bribes from prisoners for their income. Regular visits from caregivers of various kinds were also instituted. Although many legislators and prison professionals saw Fry as an amateur, her correspondence with dignitaries and officials at home and abroad helped confirm her status as an expert. In 1827, she published Observations on the Visiting, Superintendence, and Government, of Female Prisoners .

In 1818, Fry began making journeys through northern England, Ireland, and Scotland to organize women’s service groups and visit local jails. Her records of her journeys reveal the beginnings of her concern for the insane and her opposition to solitary confinement. For example, on the first of these travels she was appalled by the conditions under which a deranged man was kept in Haddington Prison. He had been locked up alone for eighteen months merely for petty vandalism. Her own jottings and those of her younger brother, Joseph Gurney, served as evidence for the need to reform town prisons outside London that were not covered by the national Gaols Act. In 1819, Gurney published Notes on a Visit to Some of the Prisons in Scotland and the North of England in Company with Elizabeth Fry .

Gurney helped Elizabeth’s family financially after his brother-in-law’s bank went bankrupt in 1828—an event that temporarily hurt Elizabeth’s reputation. Her brother’s help allowed her to persevere in championing prison reform and other concerns, which eventually included the improvement of mental asylums, hospitals, nursing, and the abolition of slavery.

Prejudice against Fry’s religion, philosophical differences about how to deal with criminals, and objections to the idea of women with families exercising professional expertise on public matters all brought Fry many enemies throughout her career. Whitworth Russell and William Crawford were assigned to inspect Newgate, and in their 1836 report, they concluded that her religious instruction was a threat to the prison’s state-sanctioned Anglican services, and they strongly objected to her lenient methods.

Although Russell and Crawford’s report seriously weakened Fry’s influence, it did not stop her work at Newgate. Some of her most virulent detractors saw her many meetings with the young Queen Victoria and her 1842 tour of Newgate with the king of Prussia as snobbish self-aggrandizement at the expense of the prisoners. It did not help that she never shed the refined manners to which her husband and in-laws had originally objected. Nevertheless, she remained popular with the public until she died at Ramsgate in Kent on October 12, 1845, at the age of sixty-five. Quakers do not have formal funeral services, but about one thousand people came to witness her silent burial at Barking in Essex.

Significance

Elizabeth Fry’s work dramatically improved the quality of prison conditions in Europe and abroad. Although her opposition to solitary confinement never won out, her insistence that women be in charge of female prisoners is now broadly accepted. In addition to prison reform, she also founded a Servants’ Society, district societies to assist the poor, and London’s Institution for Nursing Sisters in 1840. The latter was a groundbreaking effort to improve nursing in Britain.

Fry’s pioneering enterprise inspired both Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria, and her example, in which officials from the Americas, Russia, and Australia solicited her advice, paved the way for women to take on leadership roles as professional experts and advocates of justice. What began as one woman’s promotion of maternal compassion for women in England occasioned the development of women’s associations of varying concerns and philosophies worldwide, including the Elizabeth Fry Society in Canada, established in Vancouver in 1939, which was the first of twenty-five member societies.

Bibliography

Corder, Suzanna. Life of Elizabeth Fry: Compiled from Her Journal as Edited by Her Daughters, and from Various Other Sources. Philadelphia: H. Longstreth, 1853. This voluminous compilation is an excellent source for a firsthand familiarity with Fry’s journal entries. It is available electronically through some academic institutions.

Kent, John. Elizabeth Fry. London: B. Batsford, 1962. In addition to briefly tracing Fry’s life and work, Kent’s well-indexed book historicizes her religious motivations in context with other religious and ideological currents of her day.

Rose, June. Elizabeth Fry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. This biography chronicles the accomplishments of Fry’s life and portrays a complex personality through a close analysis of her journal entries. Rose closely examines Fry’s struggle between family obligations and public service.

Van Drenth, Annemieke, and Francisca de Haan. The Rise of Caring Power: Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000. This scholarly work traces the rise of the idea of “caring power” as it worked to formulate a political identity for women in society, focusing on both Fry and Butler.

Whitney, Janet. Elizabeth Fry: Quaker Heroine. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936. Whitney’s clear prose pieces together information from various journals to construct an interesting, if somewhat lengthy, biography.