The Jacket Women: When Clothing Became a Mark of Shame

Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, Norfolk — October 2026

Imagine being identified, judged and separated from everyone else simply by the clothing you were made to wear.

Not because you had committed a crime, but because you were an unmarried mother.

This was the reality for women who entered Gressenhall Workhouse in Norfolk during the nineteenth century. They became known as the Jacket Women, and their clothing marked them out from other women within the institution.

On 20 October, I visited Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse to see The Jacket Women: Single Mothers of the Workhouse, an exhibition by Norfolk artist Maria Pavledis.

I had gone particularly interested in the clothing and the stories behind it. As a textile artist, I am fascinated by the ways fabric can communicate identity, status and belonging. But here was clothing being used for something altogether more troubling.

The Yellow Jackets

The women were required to wear distinctive yellow or blue  jackets, identifying them as unmarried mothers.

According to information supplied by Gressenhall, the jackets were yellow and made from the same material as the women's dresses and reached approximately to the hips.

There was nothing particularly elaborate about these garments. Their significance lay not in their construction but in what they represented.

They made the wearer's circumstances immediately visible.

A woman could no longer simply be another resident of the workhouse. Her clothing announced a judgement about her private life.

And it was a judgement imposed by an institution.

The practice of distinguishing unmarried mothers through their clothing continued at Gressenhall long after such treatment had been officially prohibited in the nineteenth century.

That is perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of this history. Even when attitudes and regulations began to change, established practices could continue.

I kept returning to the same question.

What must it have felt like to put on that jacket every morning?

A Life of Rules and Separation

The workhouse was governed by a strict routine.

During my visit, I learned about the early rising, regulated working hours, supervised bathing, compulsory routines and the separation of different groups of residents.

For the Jacket Women, separation carried an additional meaning.

They were not simply poor women requiring assistance. They were women whose circumstances had been singled out for public disapproval.

It is easy to look back at the workhouse system through its regulations, statistics and administrative records. We can discover how many people were admitted, how they were classified and what work they were expected to undertake.

But what do these records tell us about the individuals themselves?

What were their names? What had happened before they entered the workhouse? Did they have family support? What did they fear for their children?

And, perhaps most importantly, what did they think about the way they were treated?

These are the questions that stayed with me as I walked around the exhibition.

Maria Pavledis: Giving Form to Forgotten Lives

Maria Pavledis approaches this difficult history through contemporary art.

Her exhibition includes printmaking and fragile sculptural garments, with techniques including monoprinting, etching, drypoint and eco-printing.

Some of the jackets are created from delicate Japanese mulberry paper.

As someone who works extensively with textiles and experimental surfaces, I found the choice of materials particularly interesting.

A jacket is normally something protective. It surrounds the body, providing warmth and a barrier between ourselves and the outside world.

But these paper garments appear vulnerable.

They suggest fragility rather than protection.

The contrast is powerful.

The original workhouse jackets were intended to identify and distinguish women. Maria's interpretations invite us to consider the human beings who were required to wear them.

There is also something particularly moving about the absence of the body.

The garment remains, but the woman is missing.

We are left to imagine the person who once occupied that space.

The Image That Stayed With Me

Of all the work in the exhibition, one image affected me particularly strongly.

It depicts a woman curled into herself, her body folded into a small, protective shape.

There is a vulnerability about the figure that I found difficult to ignore.

I cannot know exactly what Maria intended us to feel, but to me the image speaks of isolation, fear and a desperate need for comfort.

It also reminded me how easily we can discuss historical suffering without considering the individual people involved.

We talk about unmarried mothers, workhouse inmates and the poor.

These are categories.

They are not identities.

Every woman who entered Gressenhall had a life before she arrived, and a story that extended far beyond the label imposed upon her.

When Clothing Becomes a Judgement

Throughout history, clothing has been used to distinguish one group of people from another.

Uniforms can represent pride, achievement, profession or belonging.

But they can also be used to enforce obedience, demonstrate authority and separate those considered different.

The yellow jacket was not something these women chose to wear.

It was imposed upon them.

That distinction matters.

As textile artists, we often think of clothing and fabric as a means of personal expression. We choose colours, textures, patterns and stitches to communicate something about ourselves.

At Gressenhall, that freedom had been taken away.

The institution decided what these women would wear and what their clothing would say about them.

The garment became a form of control.

Where Are the Women's Own Stories?

One of the things I found most frustrating during my visit was how difficult it was to discover the personal histories of the women themselves.

There is considerable information about the workhouse system, its administration and its routines.

But I wanted to know more about the women.

Not simply what they were required to do, but who they were.

The records that survive often tell us more about the people who administered institutions than those who lived within them.

This is not unique to Gressenhall. It is a recurring difficulty when researching women's history, particularly the lives of poorer women.

Their experiences were recorded by officials, employers and institutions, rather than in their own words.

And yet their lives mattered just as much as those of the people who kept the records.

This is where I think Maria Pavledis's work becomes especially important.

Art cannot replace missing historical evidence. We must be careful not to invent experiences or emotions and present them as facts.

But art can encourage us to ask questions that official documents leave unanswered.

It can make us look again.

Looking Beyond the Jacket

Since visiting Gressenhall, I have been in correspondence with the museum about the surviving historical evidence and the work undertaken by women within the institution.

There is considerably more to explore.

Women worked in areas including laundry, cleaning and nursing, while earlier records relating to Gressenhall's history as a House of Industry provide fascinating evidence of textile production.

These subjects deserve proper attention, and I intend to return to them in separate articles.

For this story, however, I wanted to concentrate on the jackets themselves.

Because sometimes a single garment can tell us an extraordinary amount about the society in which it was worn.

Not through its beauty or the skill of its maker, but through the meaning forced upon it.

More Than a Yellow Jacket

I left Gressenhall thinking about the women who had worn those jackets.

We may never know the full circumstances of every woman who entered the workhouse.

We may never discover what they thought as they dressed each morning or how they felt about being separated from others.

But we can question the system that judged them.

And we can recognise that the label Jacket Woman tells us very little about the woman herself.

Maria Pavledis has taken a painful aspect of Norfolk's history and used art to encourage us to look beyond that label.

For me, that is the strength of the exhibition.

A jacket was used to define these women. It should never be allowed to become all that we remember about them.

Exhibition information

The Jacket Women: Single Mothers of the Workhouse by Maria Pavledis is at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, Norfolk, until 1 November 2026.

Exhibition artwork by Maria Pavledis. Historical object displays curated by Charlotte Kirklin.

My thanks to Rachel Kidd and the Gressenhall team for their assistance with historical research and photographic permissions.

Photographs: Eau Brink Studio, taken during my visit on 20 October 2026. Artwork reproduced with permission of Maria Pavledis.

Coming next in my Gressenhall research: the everyday lives and work of women within the workhouse, followed by the history of flax, spinning and linen production in Norfolk.