Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 36

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Although

still

ongoing

this

research,

using

Collingwood’s

philosophical

methodological approach and by drawing on Foucault’s theorisations and methods of
critical research, seeks to ‘weave a pattern’ of the state responses and disciplinary
mechanisms of social control to which ‘deviant’ women were subject to in the North
West of England between 1809 and 1967. This will be achieved by analysing the
innumerable archival data found in Annual Penitentiary Reports, minutes of
meetings, disciplinary records, correspondence and newspaper reports. Rather than
distantly coding the archival documents, the various data sources were
simultaneously deconstructed and re-assessed within the context of a Foucauldian
feminist epistemology and re-thought and located within the social and historical
context of 1809 to 1967. I achieved this by consulting additional primary and
secondary source material on the four identified semi-penal institutions, as well as on
the wider social and economic backdrop of Merseyside. Such an example is local
newspaper reports of ‘deviant’ women admitted to Liverpool’s numerous semi-penal
arenas. Newspaper reports, not produced by state authorities, helped to flesh out the
somewhat guarded information held within official documents, as well as providing a
more rounded perspective of public social life for working-class women in Liverpool.
By utilising both Foucault’s reasoning and theorisations and Collingwood’s
philosophical methodological approach, it was possible to identify the hidden power
mechanisms employed within the female semi-penal arenas to produce ‘docile’
feminine bodies. This also enabled the unpicking and de-silencing of subjugated
female knowledges and marginalised female bodies. Crucially however, this
research begins to fill the large void in existing social historical and criminological
literature on the methods of semi-penal punishment of women, specific to the
geogra X