1Convicted British women were imprisoned across the full range of criminal offences in the twentieth century, but many of them served time for property crime, much of it comparatively trivial. Most women prisoners at mid-century were first offenders often serving short sentences,2 despite a significant minority of repeat offenders on prostitution or drunk and disorderly charges.3

2Men far outnumbered the women’s prison population. In 1901 the daily average prison population of sentenced and unsentenced prisoners was 14,459 male and 2,976 female.4 In 1930 there were around 7,500 women in local prisons compared to 70,000 men and 60 women convicts compared to 2,000 men.5 Including borstals there was a daily average of 10,561 males in prisons and 785 females. Between the wars the women’s prison population actually declined, though this trend was reversed in the early 1940s. The daily average adult and juvenile prison population in 1946 was 14,556 males and 1,233 women. The upward trend continued in the postwar decades, though the steepest increases came later in the century; the 1960 totals were still only 26,198 males and 901 women.6

3In the interwar period, apart from women serving short sentences or on remand in small, segregated groups at regional local prisons,7 the majority of women prisoners were housed at Aylesbury or at Holloway8 in uncomfortable and generally poorly maintained Victorian institutions. Because women prisoners have been few, the women’s estate has frequently lacked the facilities possible for male prisoners.9 The material conditions of men’s prisons were not that much better, but they were often able to serve their sentences nearer home and (it was argued) to be placed under a prison regime more suitable to their particular abilities and situation.

Rehabilitation and the woman offender

4Feminist criminologists such as Carol Smart and Frances Heindensohn have argued that the criminal justice system has viewed both women offenders and women victims of crime, as being of diminished capability compared with the men it has had to deal with.10 It has been debated whether and in what ways this resulted in harsher or more lenient treatment for women offenders,11 but irrespective of this, it is clear that its judicial and institutional responses to the woman offender have been markedly gendered.

5Progressive opinion on prison reform came by the 1930s to favour the segregation of “star” (as opposed to recidivist) prisoners for the directed application of rehabilitative training in a non-secure setting. For male prisoners such progressive establishments often modelled themselves on US and continental prison “camps”. Columns of men or boys literally marched out of closed institutions and built their own open camps in the countryside, staying under canvas the meantime. Wakefield prison had its own camp from 1933. “Work in the woods clearing or cultivating the land” was understood to be rehabilitative, inculcating, it appears, normative and conformist brands of masculinity.12 Such models were not considered appropriate for women and girls. As Winifred Elkin commented in the 1950s:

“There are few of the women prisoners who can profit from vocational training of an industrial type. Apart from any question of capacity, their sentences are generally too short for the purpose, and whilst most of the older women are no longer industrially employed, the younger women regard industrial employment only as a stop-gap prior to marriage. But domestic training has a value for nearly all of them. Many of them are ignorant even of the rudiments of domesticity or markedly incompetent. They will wear a stocking in holes until it has to be thrown away, with no thought of darning it.”13

6Her justifications move between analysis of working-class women’s labour market position, normative reproductive lifecycle, intellect and social behaviour. Women prisoners are constructed as lacking in domestic skills, as imperfect workers and as slatternly and degenerate in one brief paragraph. By 1937 the Prison Commissioners had drawn up plans for an open women’s prison in the countryside, “organised on a cottage-home system” as well as a girl’s borstal, but the war delayed their implementation.14 It took till late 1946 for the opening of the open girls’ borstal at East Sutton Park, Kent. Askham Grange open prison first admitted prisoners in January 1947. Askham Grange offered its inmates a 9 month programme of “training” in housekeeping, laundry and cookery. Its first governor, Mary Size, had spent a long and successful career in the women’s prison service, organising training at Holloway. Askham was located not in the rugged moors or forest but in a picturesque village in the Vale of York. Women were not to be accommodated in self-built huts but in a late-Victorian mansion, complete with ballroom. Askham Grange was born into Beveridge’s post-war world of austerity combined with faith in reconstruction through planning, welfare and social improvement.15 The ethos of the institution was marked by a combination of thrift, self sufficiency and progress, self discipline and cheerfulness. My discussion here is about how the institution saw itself and my main sources are institutional reports, records and minutes, plus the published memoirs of the first governor, Mary Size.

Categorisation and selection

7Although from the outset Askham did contain some long sentence prisoners, it was designed primarily to receive “star” first offenders, often towards the end of their sentences, to prepare them for release and to prevent their re-offending. Both the men’s and women’s [but particularly the women’s] penal estates over the twentieth century were frequently under-staffed, under-funded and faced with adapting to changes in the law. Furthermore, the broadly rehabilitative impulses of the Prison Commissioners and those who ran (though not necessarily all who staffed) the penal system could be at odds with the sentencing practices of the courts. Courts were not necessarily in accord with dominant psychological explanations of criminal motivation, could be reluctant to commission social or medical reports on offenders and could be inconsistent in sentencing. The separate system with its subsequent modifications sought always to classify the offender and mete out “appropriate treatment”. Prisons were, they claimed, repeatedly faced with offenders that they either considered to have been wrongly classified or who seemed to occupy borderlands between categories, thus frustrating any “scientific” treatment or training regime. Of course, this is also to do with the ways that the prison itself [and the knowledges, penal, medical and everyday which circulated within it] produced the identities of the women who were imprisoned.

8Because of the 9-month training period, Askham did not accommodate prisoners on very short sentences. Only prisoners “suitable for training” were admitted; “free from infectious disease, and both mentally and physically fit”.16 What this actually amounted to was apparently worked out in practice through the exclusion of 5-10 % of women in each of the first 3 years, as “unsuitable for training” through “mental or physical defects”17 The prison may have been open, but the Governor and her staff were vigilant in maintaining boundaries between Askham and the rest of the prison system.

9Askham resisted the inclusion of Corrective Trainees in 1950, following the passage of the 1948 Criminal Justice Act. An offender liable for a sentence of 2 years or more and who already had 2 previous convictions on indictment since they were 17, could be made the subject of an order for 2-4 years corrective training.18 Askham received 16 Corrective Trainees in 1950, three of whom escaped that year. Hitherto, Askham had prided itself on its zero record of escapes. Although some CT’s “made good”, over half were thought of as very unpromising material, particularly women who were “ex-Approved School and Borstal cases who have abused all they help they have received from these institutions and are unlikely to benefit from anything that can be done for them at this establishment.”19 Prison records distinguish between “women” and the CTs, thought of as having poor mental abilities.20 The supportive Board of Visitors requested a protest meeting with Molly Mellanby, the Prison Commissioner in charge of the women’s and girls’ estates. Although the Corrective Trainees remained, their numbers were carefully limited.21

10So, although somewhat at the mercy of decisions made elsewhere in the penal system, a key part of the success of Askham Grange in its early years was due to the careful selection of inmates. In 1955 the then Governor, Joanna Kelley described Askham’s inmates as “over half... housewives, and most of the rest are unskilled workers”22. During the first year the average age on reception was 33.5 years and 65 % were described as "housewives”,23 though of course this designation doubtless disguised women’s casual or intermittent wage earning. There were successful attempts to limit the intake of very young women.24 Consequently, the early prison population was selected strongly from women in their late 20s and older, whose offence could often be linked to the strains of working-class family and community life during the war or in immediate post-war austerity. After completing their sentences, a large proportion of prisoners were “discharged to their own homes.”25 Askham inmates were selected from those most likely to find relevance in its domestic training programme and unhampered (we are told) by severe physical or psychological problems, had a reasonable chance of successful normalisation within the prison regime.

Training and domesticity

11Askham’s programme combined training and examination in cookery, housewifery, laundry work and needlework. The institutional records frequently complain that most prisoners lacked such skills on admission. That they had not even “attempted to assemble a garment previously” was a matter of concern and even incomprehension. A major early triumph was, with the assistance of a woman prisoner, by occupation a dressmaker, to teach the women to cut out and assemble a shirt. These shirts were destined to be worn by inmates of men’s prisons, and there was symbolic importance in the assembly of a man’s garment. By 1949 the workroom was producing 5,500 shirts along with a total of 46,694 other items including prison clothing, mailbags and pillow cases. Handicraft work and dressmaking was done in evening classes where there were also lectures on first aid, infant welfare and personal hygiene. During the early years, painting and decorating were other key activities.26

12The training programme privileged the traits of bourgeois mid-twentieth century femininity. These included ‘professionalised’ housework that was valorised as the servant population declined and which, rooted in the development of ‘home economics’, became generalised to a broad middle class – and arguably also to a respectable and aspiring upper working class.27 The Local Education Authority examiner in laundrywork in April 1950 commented that “Far better results would have been obtained by the majority of the candidates if they had been more careful and thorough with their work, particularly with ironing”.28 The Cookery candidates had “[...] rushed through the work paying insufficient attention to good method and finish”. However, in January 1951 she commended the Cookery candidates who “worked with orderly and neat method.”29 The desirable qualities were careful organization, the completion of written plans and ’thorough and painstaking’ practical work.30 This approach to household management born out of industrial and “scientific” methods, positioned the housewife as a quasi-industrial worker in her own home. The purpose of such efficiency was the creation of a modern domestic environment, capable of producing both the companionate marriage and the modern citizen. Of course the mid-century companionate marriage remained one underpinned by unequal gender power relations, a male breadwinner wage and by limited opportunities for working women in paid employment.31 Nevertheless, it could arguably delineate a purposeful, if subordinated, role for the "modern” housewife.

13Askham Grange recognised that low incomes contributed to the criminal motivation of many prisoners. Hence, it rationalised, better domestic skills and management would improve chances of domestic stability and prevent criminal behaviour. Whilst their lack of these skills brought the prisoners’ femininity: in fact their very identities as women, into question, it was nevertheless possible for prisoners to acquire competence in a matter of months. One ex-prisoner wrote of how she used a timetable for her household chores based on what she had learned at Askham.32 By the mid-50s rising standards of living made this a rather easier task and perhaps something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. To the extent that rigorous domestic management could go some way to balancing out the unevenness of working-class household economies, and indeed to attaching ex-prisoners more firmly to domestic cultures that could be associated with (limited) social mobility, the Askham training may have had some positive practical effect.

14Of course, a key feature of women’s paid work in the post-war period, was the growth of part-time and semi skilled employment for married women. The Askham training may have prioritised domestic skills, but it did not ignore the importance of working women’s earnings. The prison was aware that, for some inmates at least, domestic poverty had been caused by an absent or poorly providing breadwinner. Equipping the workroom with industrial treadle or power machines provided training for industrial work.33 The bond between prisoners and their children was key to institutional thinking and culture; women should be willing and able to earn money if necessary for the good of their household. Even toy and glove making in the handicrafts class could enable women to augment household consumption by the purchase of, for example, “linoleum for her living room, curtains for her son’s bedroom, and several gadgets for the kitchen...”34 This was low paid, often menial work, but was celebrated as providing material underpinnings for most and a springboard for further personal advancement for a few.

The house and its family

15Askham had its own multi-layered domestic economy, evidenced in the careful accounting of the flow of cash and workroom output and positioned between the market, the internal exchanges of the prison system and the personal sub-market economies of the prisoners who saved their earnings for a cinema trip or to buy sweets for their children. It has indeed often presented itself as a “house.”35 The notion of “house” played to a certain extent to the imposing late-Victorian architecture, but was called upon to do far more work around the idea of Askham Grange as a “family”. In the feminised institutional space of the prison, relationships of authority were cast through such discourses, reinforced spatially by the attention paid to decoration and domestic arrangements. As Mary Size put it; “Our plan was to live together as a family and behave in every way as a decent family should.”36 A key function of prison visitors was to discuss family matters with the prisoners.37 From 1949 the Askham family included some prisoners’ babies.38

16The ideal rehabilitative trajectory of the woman prisoners was thus from the status of “children” in the family of Askham Grange to that of adult mothers in their own families after release. The dormitory accommodation and shared meals, the lack of personal privacy, the construction of prisoners as “trainees” the communal social activities, the supervised visits out and the prison uniform, all reinforced the infantilization of women prisoners. This was underpinned by their (mostly) lower class position and poor educational background. The pained disappointment of the institution at resistance, disorder or escapes underlined its stance as a benevolent rather than punitive “parent”.

17The productive side of this institutional relationship was that the training programme was designed to produce “citizens”. This kind of cheerful, purposeful female citizen can be related to Alison Light’s constructions of the conservative modernity of interwar middle-class culture, reinforced by the experience of the Second World War and post-war reconstruction. Developments in housing along with rising living standards broadened the social constituency of those who could attach themselves to such cultures in the 1950s. A planned, progressive society required rooting in the conformist well-being of the suburban companionate family.39 Because the preferred destination of the Askham prisoners was to their own “families” arguably the aspiration was simply to transfer them from one position of dependence in the prison to another in their own homes. However, the notion of citizenship, the valorisation of household skills as “domestic science” and the appreciation of the need for many working-class women to be wage earners (albeit for the good of their households) necessarily modifies this view.

18Amongst the staff, while marriage remained an ideal destination for at least some of the more junior officers, senior staff were single. Thus, the women who ran the prison were single career women who constructed their own middle and lower middle class professional feminine identities through an ethic of service to the Askham “family”. Model prisoners, Size argues, looked upon the junior officers as “older sisters.”40 Officers escorted prisoners on country walks, bike rides and occasional visits to the cinema, joined with them in concert parties, sports, country dancing and entertainments. They donated prizes for prisoners’ whist drives and gave their free time to social activities in and around the prison. “Work” is a recurrent theme in Size’s reports and is always vocational although the term embraces activities from potato lifting through embroidery to spiritual ministry: “the religious side of the work.”41 What was a waged “job” for male officers, was represented as a profession by career women. As in Louise Jackson’s analysis of the women police, a class difference between officers and “clients” was an important dynamic in resocialisation of prisoners – elevating them into aspects of (quasi) middle-class feminine culture and demeanour.42

19Displays of “intelligence”, “patience” and “tact” by prisoners were positive but also classed and gendered markers of rehabilitation. Sexuality (which has been argued as a preoccupation of Holloway prison culture43) is heavily masked in these sources; hinted at only regarding motherhood or when officers leave to marry. “Deviant” sexuality was not tolerated. In 1952 “two women who were found to be behaving immorally were removed as soon as this was discovered.”44 “Improvement” in prisoners was institutionally judged in terms of “manners, appearance, industry and co-operation”. The desired “appearance” was cast in discourses of health [the good diet, the exercise and the benefits of the National Health Service] but also in terms of the bodily performance of femininity. A new prison dress in 1949 which prisoners could make themselves in a variety of colours and approved styles was much praised. Prison whist drives had prizes of shampoo powders and hair slides. Morally inflected criteria of femininity and domesticity together were the yardsticks by which the resocialisation of the prisoners was measured.

20Of course, not all prisoners were successfully normalised by the Askham regime. The prison records and the governors’ memoirs seek to present the most positive narrative possible, but lesbianism, the comments about uncooperative prisoners, the recalcitrance of the Corrective Trainees each provide indications of prisoner resistance. The most spectacular instance in the first year, when a prisoner was abusive and violent to both other inmates and staff was however turned to positive account in the prison’s self-representation. Other prisoners, apparently incensed by this woman’s disruptiveness and (it seems) concerned that the comparative benefits of Askham over a closed prison would be lost, rounded on her and tipped her bodily into the lake. It was, of course, the resistant prisoner who was disciplined, not the rest whose violence was constructed as being in defence of Askham and all it stood for.45

The Pastoral

21The prison opened amid the winter snows of 1946/7. There were fuel and petrol shortages. The Grange had been badly maintained and had stood empty. Its grounds had been neglected. Once they had domesticated the interior of the building, the staff and inmates tackled the domestication of a hostile outside environment, with a faulty chlorination system that required shinning up a rickety ladder in icy conditions to keep working, dangerous and fallen trees, weed choked lake and overgrown paths. Sometimes male interventions from engineers or work-parties from Wakefield gaol were required, but much of the work was done by Askham prisoners, who dug, planted and grew vegetables and then flowers. Within a year the prison was selling eggs from its own poultry.

22In penal terms the rural location certainly made escape more difficult. However, the rehabilitative potential of the rural context was also important. The prisoners were mostly town dwellers; a product not of urban sophistication but poverty. Their comparative unfamiliarity with the countryside was associated with ignorance and deprivation. Sources present a middle-class view of the countryside as the site of the wonders of nature rather than the poor housing and amenities that still typified life for many working-class rural dwellers at mid century, or of healthy physical exercise rather than unremitting manual toil. Prisoners went for country walks, gathered blackberries or listened appreciatively to birdsong. Such a pastoral Englishness has been argued to have been established within national culture by the 1920s; at Askham the rural environment was itself made to re-insert the rehabilitated prisoner into available dominant national cultural identities.46

The prison and the village

23The picturesque cottages of Askham Richard group closely around a village green and pond and the Grange dominates the scene; its front door a few hundred yards away from other village houses, up an open drive. The house had been a military hospital in both World Wars. Its previous owners the Wailes-Fairbairn family had inherited the wealth of a Victorian industrialist, but later generations had become gentrified. Commander Wailes Fairbairn had died in a riding accident in 1939; his widow removed to the dower house but remained a substantial landowner in the village. She became a patron of the prison and sat on the Board of Visitors. The location, architecture and history of the building meant that Askham Grange from the outset carried upon it the traces of both hospital and country house; already established as a site for local philanthropy and a key locus of community identity. After some initial hostility, the relationship between prison and village became one of reciprocity.

24Women prisoners provided agricultural labour for local farmers and the nearby agricultural college. Prison staff lived in the village, drunk in the pub and attended social events. Local visitors attended staff dances in the prison ballroom. Although Anglican prisoners had their own religious services in the prison chapel, they had a rota for cleaning the village church. Catholic prisoners bussed into York for mass but Methodists attended services at the Askham Richard chapel where one prisoner acted as organist. Every Christmas the prison nativity play was given a popular second performance on Twelfth Night for the village. As well as providing suitably reformative recreation for prisoners, the prison had entered into a nexus of local “serious leisure” production.47 The women’s concert party gave periodic entertainments at Bramham Women’s Institute and sang anthems in the church. Prisoners formed a ready audience for Miss Proctor’s musical recitals, entertainments provided by girls from the quaker Mount School, lectures by tutors from adult education or church mission societies and film shows. To quote two instances in more detail:

25The wedding of the then Princess Elizabeth to the Duke of Edinburgh on 20^th November 1947 is recalled by Mary Size as a key turning point in the relationships between prison and village. Many villagers attended a celebratory performance by the prison concert party. Prisoners and villagers listened together to the wedding broadcast on the radio.48 Thus a romantic bride and groom of national and historical significance provided a moment in which the prison could affirm its commitment to citizenship, respectable femininity and to community expressions of serious and patriotic leisure.

26The following autumn:

“Mr Andrew Wailes Fairbairn entertained the women by showing a film of Africa from pictures he had made during his recent visit there, and giving a most interesting account of the places he visited. In addition there was a supporting programme of’Noah’s Ark’ – a comic picture – and ’The Choir of St Michael’ featuring Will Hay and Claude Hulbert. Several of Mr. Wailes Fairbairn’s friends and about 50 of his tenants were present. The antics of Will Hay on the screen caused a great deal of amusement and laughter. Everyone enjoyed the show.”49

27This occasion not only demonstrated the charms of post-war, middlebrow, late-imperialist culture but is also interesting in the mixed categories of prisoners, staff, “friends” and “tenants” who enjoyed the show, overlapping modern institutional and penal relationships with pre-existing patterns of deference and obligation. Askham Grange became incorporated into local society, not simply as an object of charity, but integrated into a network of respectable and improving leisure activity characteristic of middlebrow culture. Prison staff could forge positive professional feminine identities in a social arena wider than that of the prison service. For prisoners the consequences were necessarily rather more mixed. Women prisoners became inserted into village social networks, but they were very particularly positioned. Although clearly familiar and accepted both as a group and doubtless in many cases as individuals, they remained constituted as “other”, marked as distinctive by their prison dress, by and large by their urban, working-class background, voices and speech patterns. Their criminal and personal histories, though officially veiled by discourses of institutionalised professionalism, doubtless also entered in partial and fragmented ways into local social knowledges, both those of “the village” and the wider network of interested middle-class professionals and philanthropists, who through the Board of Visitors, the National Prisoners’ Aid Association, as well as churches, chapels and local education authorities, interacted with the prison and its inmates.

Producing femininities

28Mary Size recalled the first night, when, faced by freezing temperatures and commodity shortages, the enthusiastic and co-ordinated endeavours of newly-arrived prisoners and staff ensured that, “We all had clean, dry beds and warm rooms to sleep in that night, and Askham Grange was making history. It was established as the first non-security prison for women in the United Kingdom. A revolutionary moment in Prison Reform had been reached.”50

29In the late 40s and early 1950s Askham Grange was at the forefront of progressive, rehabilitative penal regimes for women. It was virtually an all-female institution. It acted institutionally to produce multiple and classed femininities; of the professional and often single officer, of the reforming domesticated prisoner as well as the disorderly, deviant or mentally deficient femininities of its less accommodating inmates. Its programme was heavily class-driven, but it was not simply repressive. The rehabilitated prisoner could lay claim to skills and personal attributes, the performance of which could – if the family life she returned to or entered after prison lived up to expectations – enable her to make broader and valorised identifications both in the domestic sphere and as a citizen in a modern post-war world. At Askham Grange the domestic sphere was not separate nor trivial but part of a progressive and optimistic programme of penal reform.