6 - ‘Find the Lady’

Summary

More than seventy years of England and Wales census data is available to search electronically. This chapter uses the digitized census data on London’s penal, semi-penal and voluntary institutions on census night 1881 to explore the social composition of incarcerated women. The census data shows that the prison population only counts a very specific category of female ‘deviants’, as they were predominantly young, unmarried and had low-status, unskilled and insecure occupation. Women in their mid-thirties and older, the married and widowed on the other hand only constituted a small minority of the prison population. This chapter argues that these women can be found in much greater numbers among other major state institutions like the workhouse and the public asylums. While men may have faced the brunt of penal discipline, deviant women were more often taken care of by semi-penal institutions, before but also sometimes after their conviction.