Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020
Isabel Davis was born in Warren, Vermont April 24, 1849. She became a teacher at age 14. Isabel moved to Minneapolis in 1870 and taught there. She married Chester Gross Higbee in January 1876.
Isabel spoke out for the needs of women and children, the poor, and the downtrodden. “There was a time when individual effort was sufficient to meet social needs, but life was grown so complex that organization is absolutely necessary.”
In 1908, with the help of Isabel, the State of Minnesota constructed a separate school for delinquent girls (the Minnesota Home School for Girls) in Sauk Centre.
But for twenty years, Isabel and others tried to provide humane treatment for women convicted of crimes, but lawmakers did not support it.
On March 4, 1915, Isabel and fifty other women went to the capitol, and Isabel decided to testify at the meeting.
That same day, a bill to allow women to vote was turned down. Again. It would be another five years before women got the right to vote (and only if you were white).
Isabel was not happy. But Isabel had a plan.
She stood and faced the men (who were the only ones allowed to vote) and told them they should have a women’s reformatory. There was no place in Minnesota for women in trouble. She faced the men in the committee room, across the gulf that custom, law, and privilege had created.
And she spoke.
She said women should not be housed in Stillwater Prison. Women needed to have a place, a place to provide a humane and healthy environment that would help them return to society as contributing members.
Isabel pled for establishment of a reformatory for women. She argued in favor of a new institution where female offenders would neither be incarcerated with male inmates nor with teenage girls. At the time, most women lawbreakers were found guilty of prostitution and were usually fined and sent home or committed to the workhouse for a short term. Others were sent to the state prison, the state reformatory, or the girls’ school. The superintendent at the reformatory took female inmates into his home or placed them in the local jail.
“We must give the women fresh air, God’s glorious sunshine, and as much freedom as is consistent with discipline…I shall trust your judgement to accord us a women’s reformatory,” said Isabel Davis Higbee.
When she sat down at the capitol, Isabel coughed.
Then Isabel fell over…dead!
People were shocked, and they started thinking about what she had to say. One woman said, “…no man can refuse us the reformatory when it is realized that women are willing to give up their lives for it.”
The legislature finally responded.
Because of her work, the bill to create a women’s prison in Shakopee finally happened. They purchased 167 acres of land what was then at the edge of Shakopee.
The women’s reformatory began in Shakopee, Minnesota in 1920.
Isabel Davis Higbee had died March 4, 1915. She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Maplewood, Minnesota.
Even though she never lived in Shakopee, her memory is here, in the hall and plaque that notes the grateful appreciation for Isabel for the good of the women in Shakopee and the state of Minnesota!