Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 27

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‘sinner to penitent’ and an equally important social shift from ‘dissolute female to
respectable woman’.5 The degree of interaction between various semi-penal arenas
of moral treatment and religious control was marked in places because of the
“common client group”, resulting in the sharing of disciplinary techniques, procedures
and regimes.6
My wider research, beyond the scope of this article, employs a Foucauldian
feminist revisionist historical viewpoint and aims to write a history from below,
incorporating women’s semi-penal institutions and subsequent punishment into
histories of the philosophy of authority and the exercise of class gendered,
normalising power.7 Current theorisations often overlook gender and the deeply
sexed nature of punishment regimes.8 Therefore it was imperative that my research
employed a critical historical methodology that avoided the pitfalls of conventional
epistemology, even if no specific methods are seen to be particularly feminist or
revisionist.9 The methodology explored within this article engages in a Foucauldian
feminist historiography: a history informed by the principles and ideas of Foucauldian
feminism whilst bridging these values with R.G. Collingwood’s philosophical
historical approach. It then becomes possible to uncover the methods used to
subjugate and normalise ‘deviant’ women within the semi-penal institutions, which
manifested as penal regimes of femininity, domesticity, normalisation, infantilisation
and Christianisation.
History provides perspective on current policy issues by placing matters on a
‘dynamic continuum’ to provide a means of ‘assessing social change to gain
perspective on the cyclical nature of change and to understand the nature of the

philanthropic, charitable arenas that were linked to wider political strategies of social, economic and
gender control. See Alana Barton, Fragile Mortalities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of
Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 17; Frances
Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: A Study of Victorian Prostitutes in York (London: Cox and
Wyman, 1979); Frances Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylums in Ireland (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001). For further discussion, see Kirsty Greenwood, “Semi-Penal
Institutions,” in Companion to State Power, Rights and Liberties, ed. P. Taylor (Bristol: Policy Press,
Forthcoming 2016).
5
Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914 (London: Routledge:
2000), 28.
6
Russell P Dobash and Pat McLaughlin, “The Punishment of Women in Nineteenth Century Scotland:
Prisons and Inebriate Reformatories,” in Spheres of Struggle: The Public and Private Lives of Women
in Scotland, ed. E. Breitenbach and E. Gordon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 29.
7
For an example of such, see Anne Schwann, “Dreadful beyond Description: Mary Carpenter’s Prison
Reform Writings,” European Journal of English Studies, 14.2 (2001): 107-120.
8
Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London: Routledge,
1994).
9
Nicholas Walliman, Social Research Methods (London: Sage, 2006).