Mary Louisa Gordon (1861 − 1941) was a British physician, prison inspector and writer. After graduating from the London School of Medicine for Women in 1890, Gordon worked at the East London Hospital for Children, the Evelina London Children's Hospital, and later had a private practice in Harley Street. While working as a physician, she made a number of public addresses and wrote publications on topics including the effects of prostitution and alcohol dependence on women.
Gordon was appointed as the first British female prison inspector in 1908. During her time as prison inspector, she enacted a number of improvements including prison work allocation. She also supported the British suffragette movement, and secretly communicated with the Women's Social and Political Union about conditions in prisons. After retirement in 1921, she wrote the book Penal Discipline (1922), which advocated for reforms to the prison system, and the historical novel Chase of the Wild Goose (1936), based on the Ladies of Llangollen.
Early life
Gordon was born on 15 August 1861 in Seaforth, Lancashire, to James Gordon and his second wife Mary Emily Carter. Her father sold hide and tallow. She had six sisters and three brothers. Gordon also had an older stepsister and stepbrother, their mother Anne Barnsley Shaw had died from consumption in 1855. Gordon studied at the London School of Medicine for Women, and qualified as a doctor with the Triple Qualification in 1890.
Career
Physician
After graduation, she worked part-time as the librarian and curator of the school. She later worked as a clinical assistant at the East London Hospital for Children and at the Evelina London Children's Hospital. Gordon joined the Association of Registered Medical Women (ARMW), a precursor to the Medical Women's Federation, in 1891. She also later worked as a physician in Harley Street, London.
During this time, she contributed a number of publications and public addresses regarding a variety of topics including the effects of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), prostitution, and alcohol dependence on women. This included writing a letter which had been signed by 73 members of the ARMW in 1898 to Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, to criticise measures enacted in the previous year to combat the spread of STDs in the British Army stationed there. The measures included the mandatory medical examinations of women suspected of carrying an STD living near a military building, if they refused they would be expelled from their homes.
Prison reformer
In March 1908, Gordon was appointed as a prison inspector. She was the first woman to hold the position. Her role involved the inspection of the female wings of 47 prisons, and the training of female prison officers. She had no formal training prior to being appointed therefore Gordon visited prisons in Europe in order to learn best practice. She soon identified that the majority of female prisoners had short sentences with high rates of recidivism. Gordon supported a rehabilitative approach in prisons to combat this. She organised the prison labour so that menial tasks such as cleaning were assigned to short-term inmates, while more productive roles were given to long-term inmates such as training for jobs when released. Gordon is also credited with physical improvements in conditions in British prisons, such as better lighting in jail cells with the use of clear glass in windows, and introducing notebooks to HM Prison Holloway.
She was a supporter of the British suffragette movement, and secretly communicated with Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) about the state of prisons, and reached out to incarcerated leaders such as Emmeline Pankhurst. When the WSPU headquarters was raided by the police on 23 May 1914, this correspondence was discovered and she was asked by the Home Office to renounce her association with the movement, which she refused to do so. During the First World War, she served from July to December 1916 with the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service in Macedonia. By the end of her career, she was marginalised and isolated for her association with the suffragette movement and her "feminist" approach to her role. When she asked for an increase in her salary in 1919, an official replied by describing her appointment as a "sop to feminism" and that any further increase would be "a concession to the claims of feminism". She retired in 1921.