Homes for Fallen Women
For the Forgotten Women Friday held on 8 November 2024, the focus is on women who can be found in a variety of homes for ‘fallen women’. As these women tend to be elusive, we are not attempting to cover all the inhabitants of a single institution but instead, are selecting some individuals from several homes, which also enables us to cover women from more than one county. We are researching both staff and inmates. Their stories can be found here.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a proliferation of these homes, or ‘refuges’ were set up across Britain. The most notorious were the Magdalen Laundries, run under the auspices of the Catholic Church, to reform those who had not conformed to the moral code. As well as government founded refuges, there were also charitable bodies who established institutions with the aim of rehabilitating ‘fallen women’. The various regional branches of the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society were a major provider, funding the homes from public subscriptions, supplemented by what the institutions could generate from providing laundry or needlework services. What was the purpose of these refuges and who exactly were these ‘fallen women’, some of whom were as young as twelve?
‘Refuge’ is a word that has benign connotations, a place of safety for those in physical, mental or moral danger. In Victorian times, although the motives for setting up these homes might be seen as philanthropic, for the most part, refuges were far from being a place of safety, conditions were harsh and inmates were unlikely to be there voluntarily. Dr Jo Turner and Dr Helen Johnson, who studied the aftercare of women released from Stafford prison, described the aim of these institutions.
“The role of carceral institutions was to return deviant, criminal or ‘fallen’ women to appropriate femininity and womanhood, through institutional support that was based on domesticity, religion, examples of virtue and propriety as well as discipline and regulation……. At the same time the refuges were typical of much Victorian philanthropy. They offered moral and religious guidance and support, underpinned by typically feminine labour and domestic chores, to women who were serving a sentence of penal servitude, but they only offered this opportunity once. Similar to other institutions for wayward women and girls, they were not interested in those women who had ‘fallen too far’, or who were thought ‘irreclaimable.’”[i]
Susan Mumm’s article, 'Not worse than other girls': the convent-based rehabilitation of fallen women in Victorian Britain’, begins with the words “The Victorians were both fascinated by deviance and obsessed with its control”[ii] and this sums up the attitude to those whose behaviour was regarded as being at odds with the social mores of the times. Although Victorian women made up only 20-25% of those indicted for criminal offences, women were more likely than men to be repeat offenders, raising concerns about the need for rehabilitation. Women were also potentially mothers, with an influence over the moral well-being of subsequent generations, so the attitudes towards women who transgressed against the legal or moral codes were very different to those towards male wrongdoers.
The purpose of the refuge was rehabilitation and reform; transforming the fallen into respectable women who could play a meaningful part in society. Thus, only women who were regarded as capable of redemption were accepted, leaving those who were labelled as the most dissolute and depraved without refuge. Some of the inmates of these homes were society’s casualties, rather than ‘sinners’. Victims of rape and incest, those with learning difficulties and girls who whose home life might put them in moral danger, were institutionalised alongside the criminals and prostitutes.
The term ‘fallen women’ is often seen as a euphemism for prostitute and a number of the women in the homes may have engaged in prostitution on an occasional or more regular basis. This is not to imply that all the inmates had been prostitutes. The term ‘prostitute’ is also an elastic one and in the nineteenth century, was not confined to women who provided sexual favours in return for money, or recompense in kind. ‘Prostitute’ might be used to encompass a woman who had had an illegitimate child, or was living with a man as if she was his wife, without the benefits of a marriage ceremony.
Berry Chevasco summarises the Victorian attitude to The Great Social Evil, as Victorian prostitution was termed.
“Prostitutes came to symbolize the whole spectrum of social ills which to middle class Victorian minds threatened the fabric of society; sexual immorality of course, but also destitution, drunkenness, disintegration of the family, disease, ignorance, and so on.”[iii]
The article goes on to point out that, The
“Victorians often classified women as prostitutes in ways which we would now no longer accept. Thus women co-habiting with men but not married to them were deemed to be prostitutes, as were destitute women without evidence of other support, such as parents or other family, and thus potentially vagrant. Indeed vagrancy was one of the charges used to arrest women thought to be prostitutes.”
One of the homes whose women we are investigating is The County Industrial Home in Stafford, which was also known as ‘The Staffordshire County Industrial Home for Discharged Female Ex-Prisoners and Friendless Women’. It was founded in 1878 by the North and South Staffordshire Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Societies, from public subscriptions, with the specific aim of providing for up to forty women who had been discharged from Stafford prison, so that they could remain within the county. The inmates included women who had been released from prison on a licence that required them to serve the latter part of their sentence in refuge but not all the inmates were former convicts. The women were expected to stay for two years and the intention was that they should be found employment in domestic service afterwards. Many of the women were trained in the Home’s laundry, which also generated additional income for the institution; others worked as needlewomen. Any woman who remained in post for at least a year after leaving the home, working to the satisfaction of their employer, was given a set of clothes and one guinea.
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As insufficient prisoners from Staffordshire were transferred to the home, others were admitted from further afield. In 1891, there were forty inmates, eight of whom had been born outside Staffordshire. An appeal for funds for the Staffordshire home in 1890 stated that £500 was needed annually to run the home whose
“great purpose was to relieve girls who have fallen into crime or sin, or who need to be saved from surrounding danger, by bringing them under good influence and training them for domestic service.”[iv]
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The women from Staffordshire Prison, including some who ended up in the refuge, form part of textile artist Ruth Singer’s project ‘Criminal Quilts’. She has also written a book of the same name. You can find out more about this and other homes on Peter Higginbotham’s excellent Children’s Homes website and also on the Staffordshire Past Track website.
Women from the 1871 and 1881 censuses for The House of Mercy, Toldish Hall Road, Great Maplestead, Essex have also been chosen. When Mary Gee died, in 1864, she left her fortune to Elizabeth Barter, with whom she had been living. Elizabeth used her inheritance for many philanthropic works, including the building of this home, at a cost of £10,000.[v] The home opened in 1868 and was run by The Sisters of the Name of Jesus on behalf of the Church Penitentiary Association, which had been founded in 1806 for the reclamation of fallen women. The Home was run on very similar lines to the one in Staffordshire, with women staying for two years and the home raising money from needlework and the work that the women did in the laundry. There are records relating to this home in the County Archives for both Essex and Berkshire.
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Some of the women being studied can be found in The Exeter Home for Fallen Women, 44 Bartholomew Street, Exeter, Devon, in the 1891 and 1901 censuses. This is listed by Peter Higginbotham as having been a Magdalen Home.[vi] There is some information about homes for women and girls in Exeter on the website of Devon Family History Society.
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We have also chosen women from The Edgbaston Refuge for Fallen and Destitute Women at 14 Noel Road, Edgbaston, Warwickshire, taken from the 1871 census. In an article entitled “Birmingham Refuge for Fallen Women”, The Birmingham Daily Post of 12 January 1862 reported as follows “In an unostentatious but most effective way, this society is doing an immense amount of good to the poor creatures who are the objects of its care. Since March 1855, between two and three hundred women and girls have been admitted into the Refuge in Noel Road and a large majority of them have given evidence of a reformed life. From March 1855 until September last, 290 persons were under care in the institution and of this number 179 have been placed in service, 61 restored to friends and 3 have married out of the Refuge. Of the remainder, 16 left without satisfactory reasons, 18 absconded and 7 were sent to hospitals or workhouses. Of the whole number, 32 married, 9 died and 7 emigrated. There are now 12 girls still under the care of the institution. [vii]
Taking 281 cases admitted up to the 31st of March last, the expense, including the purchase and furnishing of the premises, incurred during the five years the Refuge had been in operation, amounted to about £1,673, giving an average cost per head of about £5 19s. So anxious, says the committee of the institution, are the fallen women who come into the Refuge to obtain a position of independence of charity, that out of 290 cases not one of them has refused the first opportunity offered her to enter upon a life of honest and virtuous industry.”
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Finally, we have taken women from St. Thomas’ Home for the Destitute and Fallen, Sherborne Road, Basingstoke, Hampshire. The home was established in on the coast in Gosport, in 1864 and moved to Sherborne Road ten years later. It was run on behalf of the Church Penitentiary Association by the Sisters of Charity, which were an Anglican order. There is more information on Peter Higginbotham’s Children’s Homes website.
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Further Reading
Anderson, Amanda Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: the Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture Cornell University Press (1993)
Bartley P, ‘Preventing Prostitution: the ladies association for the care and protection of young girls in Birmingham, 1887-1914’ in Women’s History Review 37 (2006)
Chevasco, Berry Homes of Hope: efforts for the reform of ‘fallen women’ in C19th Bloomsbury Paper delivered for the Bloomsbury Project conference (2008)
Women in nineteenth century Britain Unpublished PhD thesis for Brunel University (1985)
Katumba, Annabelle The Birmingham Ladies Association for the Care of Friendless Girls (2018)
Levine, Philippa Feminist Lives in Victorian England: private roles and public commitment Wiley Blackwell (1990)
Mahood, Linda The Magdalens: prostitution in the nineteenth century Routledge (1990)
Mumm, Susan 'Not worse than other girls': the convent-based rehabilitation of fallen women in Victorian Britain’ in Journal of Social History 29.3 (1996) pp.527–546
Singer, Ruth Criminal Quilts: textiles inspired by the stories of women photographed in Stafford Prison 1877-1916 Independent Publishing Network (2020)
There is a video about Ruth’s work here.
Smith, James M Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment Manchester University Press (2007)
Turner, Dr Jo, and Johnston, Dr Helen, 'Female Prisoners, Aftercare and Release: residential provision and support in late nineteenth century England' in British Journal of Community Justice (2015)
Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: women, class and state Cambridge University Press (1982)
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History: how Ireland turned ‘Fallen Women’ into slaves
History Workshop ‘Fallen Women’ at the Foundling Museum
Peter Higginbotham's Children’s Homes website
Staffordshire Past Track website
Index to Stafford Goal Photo Albums
Homes in Exeter​​
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[i] Turner, Dr Jo, and Johnston, Dr Helen, 'Female Prisoners, Aftercare and Release: residential provision and support in late nineteenth century England' in British Journal of Community Justice (2015) accessed 13 August 2024 https://mmuperu.co.uk/bjcj/articles/female-prisoners-aftercare-and-release-residential-provision-and-support-in-late-nineteenth-century-england/
[ii] Mumm, Susan 'Not worse than other girls': the convent-based rehabilitation of fallen women in Victorian Britain’ in Journal of Social History 29.3 (1996) p.527 accessed 13 August 2024
https://oro.open.ac.uk/82/1/NOT_WORSE_THAN_OTHER_GIRLS.pdf
[iii] Chevasco, Berry Homes of Hope: efforts for the reform of ‘fallen women’ in C19th Bloomsbury Paper delivered for the Bloomsbury Project conference (2008) accessed 13 August 2024 www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project/articles/events/conference2008/chevasco.pdf p.1.
[iv] Walsall Observer 6 December 1890 p.5 col.f.
[v] www.halstead21stcentury.org.uk/news-detail/55/the-generosity-of-mary-gee---a-tale-of-two-benefactors
[vi] www.childrenshomes.org.uk/list/Devon.shtml.
[vii] The Birmingham Daily Post 12 January 1862 p.2 col. g.
