Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 30

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composed by the imprisoned women but official, functional accounts written about
female prisoners and for the attention of the governing institutional committees.23
Therefore the content and aims of the documents were written with an institutional
bias; omitting the experiences, voices and motives of women and further silencing,
marginalising and subjugating them. A large tension thus exists between who
composed the data, the intended reader and their purpose; all of which however,
facilitate in the uncovering of hierarchies of knowledge and credibility in operation
within the semi-penal institutions. It was also vital in my reading and interpretation of
the documentary evidence to know what class of document they belonged to: ‘rulebook, public statement, official record of a meeting, personal account based on
recall, public speech, letter, private diary and so forth’.24 In the main, the qualitative
archival data within the archives were rich and unique research materials that were
‘re-analysed, reworked and compared with contemporary data’, yet so frequently
they remain unexploited.25
Employing gendered application of Collingwood’s methodology in this research
allowed for the reclamation of a more humanist element of Foucault, whilst
simultaneously recognising the gendered tensions and limitations of Collingwood’s
approach. From the mid-1930’s onwards, historian R.G. Collingwood developed a
theory of interpretation, ‘applying it to archaeology and history, anthropology,
aesthetics and art history’.26 Collingwood believed that:
One can capture the historical agent’s thoughts and, therefore, assigned
this task to the historian: the historian must be able to think over again for
himself (sic) the thought whose expression he (sic) is trying to
interpret....the important point here is that the historian of a certain thought
must think for himself (sic) that very same thought, not another like it.27

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Alana Barton explores the use of this kind of source material further in “A Woman’s Place:
Uncovering Maternalistic Forms of Governance in the Nineteenth Century Reformatory,” Family and
Community History, 12. 2 (2011): 93.
24
Catherine Hakim, Research Design (London: Routledge, 2000), 52.
25
Louise Corti, Andreas Witzel and Libby Bishop, “On the potentials and problems of secondary
analysis,” Forum Qualitative Social Research 6.1 (2005): 1.
26
Kobayashi and Marion, 2011, 84.
27
Collingwood, 1939.