Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 29

21

of state responses to ‘deviant’ women in Lancashire and Merseyside throughout the
19th century up until 1967, when the final institution formally ceased to operate.
With specific regard to the historical archives, the focus was on female offenders
aged ten years and over who were confined within any of the four identified
institutions, as well as female staff members of any age employed by the institutions
between 1809 and 1967.17
Philosophical methodological approach of R.G. Collingwood
The analysis of archival data employed Collingwood’s philosophical methodological
approach of Collingwood,18 with an underpinning Foucauldian feminist theoretical
methodology. This involved theorising both about women’s socially constructed and
situated knowledge and identifying the processes by which the ‘ideal body of
femininity’; the feminine body-subject, was constructed in order to produce ‘practiced
and subjected’ docile bodies within the semi-penal environment.19

Collingwood

holds the principle that 'the past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a
past which in some sense is still living in the present’.20 He believes that this can
only be achieved by re-thinking past thoughts in order for those historical thought
processes to live on in the present. Collingwood’s theorisation of history can be
summarised as ‘a process of thought’, as ‘living on in the present’ and ‘through rethinking past thoughts’.21
Uncertainty was inevitable throughout the archival research process because
as Collingwood notes, the social historian cannot have certain knowledge of the past
as proof, as such, is unattainable.22 For example, the original source material held
within Liverpool Central Library were not ‘self-reflective narrative’ accounts

17

For further detail on this archival approach see Lyn Z. Bloom, “Deep Sea Diving: Building an
Archive as the basis for composition studies research,” in Working in the Archives, ed. A.E Ramsey et
al. (Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 2010). See also Angela Dale, Sara Arber and Michael Procter,
Doing Secondary Analysis (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1988).
18
As set out in Robin G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939) and Robin
G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946).
19
For more on the theoretical insights behind this approach, see Sandra-Lee Bartky, Femininity and
Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (London: Routledge, 1990), 71; Kristen
Campbell, Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology (London: Routledge, 2004); Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1977).
20
Collingwood, 1946, 47.
21
Ibid., 226.
22
Robin G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). For a
further discussion of uncertainty in archival work, see Adrian Blau, “Uncertainty and the history of
ideas,” History and Theory 50.3 (2011): 358-372.