Some of these petticoat prisoners may have been a threat to society: Eliza "Big Jack" Stewart shot a man in the neck at a dance; Anna Bruce baked poison into her father's plum pie; Minnie Snyder and her husband killed a man in a shootout with neighbors. 
Many of these women's crimes might draw our sympathy-- like that of Stella Gatlin whose kleptomania didn't mix with her work as a postmistress or Anna Trout who abandonded her baby grand-child in a train depot or Annie Groves who shot at, but missed, a man who had given her an infectious disease. 
These twenty-three women, wearing frills, lace, adn their best bonnets, became guests at the Gray Bar Hotel.