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.

This chapter presents a detailed picture of the prosecution and conviction of female perpetrators of common assault during the last few decades of nineteenth-century Stafford, a medium-sized market town in central England. The analysis shows that the most likely picture for female criminality in England at this time was one of working-class, middle-aged women convicted for drunken and anti-social behaviour, and common assault. In theory, women were expected to be honest, sober and chaste. In practice, the women of Stafford were not passive and played a prominent role in the street culture of working-class neighbourhoods. By the turn of the century however, female offenders of common assault largely ‘vanished’ from the court records. This chapter suggests that it may not only have something to do with the increasing importance of policemen in resolving disputes before they turned violent, but also with the changes in the built environment. The emerging social housing replaced communal living with separate housing, restricting the conditions that formerly brought women into conflict with each other.