Too Pretty for Prison
A young white murderess underscored Virginia’s penal and media disparities.
“The heavy iron gates of the Virginia Penitentiary closed August 11, 1892 on perhaps the prettiest prisoner who has over been confined in the institution,” cooed the Washington Post on the admittance to the penitentiary of 19-year-old Octavia Hodges. The Rocky Mount woman was sentenced to six years for killing a sewing machine salesman named R. J. Cunningham. “[Hodges] is tall, well-formed, has black hair and eyes, and is quite pretty.”
Octavia Hodges was certainly an anomaly — when she was admitted to the Penitentiary on Richmond’s Spring Street that broiling summer of 1892, she was the only white woman in the entire institution. Her story is one of disturbing racial and gender disparity not only among females in Virginia’s criminal justice system, but also of the media’s treatment of them, as well as their backhanded sexist assumption that attractive white women were simply not considered physically or emotionally capable of committing murder. And if they did, their sentences, paroles and pardons were dictated by their degree of physical beauty.
A history of unworthiness
Women were a minority in prisons from colonial days. Since most black women at this time were former slaves, and white…
