Cambridge Quakers honour Elizabeth Fry
'The 1823 Gaol Act, which Elizabeth Fry was involved in, mandated sex-segregation of prisons and female warders for female inmates to protect them from sexual abuse and harassment.'
Cambridge Quakers hosted a talk about Elizabeth Fry, the Victorian prison reformer, to hear about the legacy of her work.
Kirsten Lavers, warden at Jesus Lane Meeting House, told the Friend that the talk was delivered by Magdalen Evans, an art and architecture historian, who has researched Elizabeth Fry and works in prison arts education. ‘Magdalen is doing a series of talks in promotion of the 200th anniversary of the Gaol Act,’ said Kirsten Lavers. ‘She approached us earlier in the year and, because we always take part in Open Cambridge, and the talks are very popular, we decided to include it in our programme of events.’
Elizabeth Fry, born in 1780, was a Quaker minister and social reformer who made ‘a seminal impact on the treatment of convicts in Victorian Britain’, according to the website for Open Cambridge, an annual city-wide festival held from 8 September to 17 September.
The 1823 Gaol Act, which Elizabeth Fry was involved in, mandated sex-segregation of prisons and female warders for female inmates to protect them from sexual abuse and harassment. Last month was its 200th anniversary.
Kirsten Lavers told the Friend that the talk included details of ‘legacy art projects’ in the tradition of Elizabeth Fry’s work. These included Fine Cell Work, a charity which trains and pays prisoners and prison leavers to stitch ‘exquisite needlework to create beautiful products for sale’. The aim is to support people in and leaving prison to gain work skills, money, self-belief and access to employment. The charity said there are currently over 80,000 people in the UK prison system, many of whom ‘become trapped within a devastating cycle of reoffending and repeated imprisonment’.
Kirsten Lavers said that its work mirrors how ‘Elizabeth Fry gave bags to female prisoners before boarding ships overseas, so they had sewing work to sell when they arrived’. Another art project brought a portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century painter, into prisons, with talks from art historians. In 2019 a £3.6 million painting by the artist was loaned to a women’s prison by the National Gallery depicting the torture of Catherine of Alexandria in the fourth century.
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