3 Mothering in a carceral space

Abstract

In her 1864 work Our Convicts, educational and penal reformer Mary Carpenter wrote at length about the incalculable benefit of a good mother's influence upon her child's development. However, she warned, 'no one can estimate the evil which is caused to society, both directly and indirectly, by a wicked one'. 1 When the modern prison system was created in the mid-nineteenth century, motherhood had emerged as a dominant social construct and concern in Victorian England, with the question of what made a 'good mother' prompting debate and scrutiny within medical, social and government discourse. Using the prison as its setting, this chapter advances our understanding of the shifting views about, and expectations placed upon, mothers between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. It uncovers the efforts made to educate female prisoners in domesticity and mothercraft and to use this instruction as a reformative tool.Throughout this period, women, particularly mothers, who committed crimes were subject to especial censure. Female criminality was believed to be symptomatic of a woman's lack of domesticity and their straying beyond the bounds of ideal femininity, but was also posited as a threat to the fabric of family life. The opening section of this chapter explores debates about using prison as a place to address these issues. Zedner highlighted the contradictions with regard to how broader societal views about female criminals impacted upon their treatment in prison, and stated that 'women were described as being both incapable of moral judgement and yet at the same time as morally degraded, as being shameless and yet desperate for self-respect'. 2 Late nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury periodicals and commentaries on crime, its causes and its suppression were saturated with tales of fallen women, and of children