The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience
The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience provides an overview of the history of the site as well as the stories of the women and children that spent time here. Most of the structures and buildings that made up the Cascades Female Factory have been removed or lost with time. Today, you can take your time as you wander through the space and listen to true tales of the courage, resourcefulness and resilience of the women lived, worked and aspired to a better life outside these same walls. The audio experience fills in the space between then and now.
The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience
Chapter 13: Yard Three - The Separate Apartments (Location: Yard 3)
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The building of Separate Apartments helped enforce a strict regime of silence and separation.
If at Cascades Female Factory, we recommend you listen to this chapter at the Separate Apartments (stop 13).
Here in Yard Three you will find the Separate Apartments. One superintendent described these apartments as ‘roomy’ but as you can see from the markings on the ground and the steel reconstruction, they were anything but. Even the word ‘apartment’ seems far too kind a description for these spaces.
However, they were called apartments because the space was divided in two. There was a sleeping section at the back - an inner door would be bolted shut at night leaving the women in total darkness. The section at the front, with a locked outer door, had an opening with bars which allowed enough light through for the women to work at sewing or picking oakum.
Women would be confined for 23 hours a day for up to 12 months. They would eat, sleep and work within the apartment.
There were two narrow, double storey blocks of separate apartments in Yard Three. Each block had 28 cells per floor – 112 separate apartments in total filled this space. Exercise yards ran the length of the cell blocks, on either side, paved in stone. These yards were divided with a high wall so women exercised directly in front of their own doors. They exercised for only an hour a day. This time outdoors was spent walking up and down, up and down, in silence, under constant supervision and separate from other convicts. They were not allowed to come within four feet of any other woman.
Women convicts were strictly prohibited from communicating with one another by any means. No words. No signs.
Minimising any potential contact among the convicts was of the utmost importance in this Yard. The separate apartments were a response to the fear that convicts in groups contaminated each other. Keeping them apart was crucial to institutional discipline and individual reform.
It was a way to break up the Flash Mob.
It was a way to force the women to reflect.
Silence and separation.
Any woman caught breaking the silence, even within her own apartment, could be punished.