Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869–1945 (review)

In Caught, Tamara Myers contributes an innovative, nuanced, and richly insightful study of Montreal’s jeunes filles modernes (modern girls) whose personal lives and identities drew the ire and consternation of a host of juvenile justice “experts” anxious to safeguard young womanhood against the perils and dangers of the city. Caught will strike a familiar chord with readers acquainted with this expanding literature, beginning with Anthony M. Platt’s 1969 study, The Child Savers: The Invention of Juvenile Delinquency.¹ Like Platt, Myers traces how the creation of juvenile courts considerably expanded state intervention into the lives of working-class girls and young women.

Beginning in 1869, Caught examines the significant shifts, and ensuing tensions, between a technology of care rooted in the religious, pastoral, and pronatalist ideals of the Catholic Church, specifically, the convent reform school operated by the Soeurs du bon pasteur, and the secular, scientifically grounded therapeutic reform model championed by the Protestant elite. Myers deftly draws out the cultural and religious tensions that so closely informed the context in which the juvenile justice infrastructure developed while at the same time demonstrating the impact of competing nationalisms in the gendering of juvenile justice. Whether Franco-Catholic, Anglo-Protestant, or Jewish, elites were anxious that errant girls not bring disapprobation upon their community and thus disrupt the goal of assimilation; such competing ideologies, ethnicities, and religious and class-based interests each sought to assert a distinct conception of social order, femininity, and domesticity—all against the disruptive force of the modern girl.

The conservative Catholic Church maintained a virtual monopoly on restorative interventions, safeguarding abandoned and wayward girls as part of its acknowledged role in maintaining social order among its largely French parishioners, if not the entire population of Quebec. In 1911, nonetheless, Anglo-Protestants opened the Girl’s Cottage Industrial School, by the 1940s the most modern facility of its kind in the province. Where Catholic girls were directed into an institutional apparatus based on the principles of reform through submission and silence, Protestant girls were drawn into a training school system informed by a model of readjustment and rehabilitation, with vocational and limited academic instruction. Class interests pervaded both systems, to be sure, although the Protestant system sought to instill a middle-class ideal of bourgeois domesticity within the architecture of a carceral facility. Straddling the line between these systems was the Montreal Juvenile Delinquent Court, which first opened its doors in a private home setting in 1912. The court similarly eschewed the grim architecture of state courts, at least at the outset, opting instead to symbolize the ideal of scientific child saving.

This study draws on a wealth of archival sources, not least the detailed case histories developed for the Montreal Juvenile Delinquent Court by female probation officers under the prevailing influence of maternal-based moral and sexual regulatory practice. Many of the thousand case records reveal the use to which parents put the court to achieve their own objective of familial control over potentially wayward daughters. Parents turned to the court when exasperated by their daughter’s refusal to conform to the dictates of feminine subordination within the patriarchal family. The litany of parental complaints against their daughters concerned a range of daytime, nighttime, and dating delinquencies, for example, daughters who objected to contributing their wages toward the family economy, or took up with men in the ubiquitous practice of joyriding, or cavorted through the abundant palaces of amusements. As Myers suggests, so-called rebellious girls found themselves consigned to the uncertain justice of Montreal’s juvenile court, caught within an increasingly sophisticated network of scientifically grounded penal practices that all centered upon the sexualized body of the girl delinquent. Working up new social knowledges about apparent female delinquency, expert practitioners created the category of the female delinquent as a sexualized identity that would continue to inform the treatment of young girls and women by the criminal justice system...