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

Tamara Myers’s Caught might have been titled, less elegantly, ‘Attempts to Catch,’ for this study examines the concerted efforts of the Province of Quebec, through its contracted agents, to tame the spirit of les jeunes filles modernes. The story’s ending is already known: nuns, social workers, juvenile court judges, and parents lost the battle to tame adolescent girls’ search for autonomy and pleasure. Myers provides a compelling account of that battle, the main victims of which, she contends, were the girls whose defiance cost them their freedom and dignity.

The campaign to steer girls from the lure of the street began in Quebec in the mid-nineteenth century. In England, Elizabeth Fry and other advocates of separate prisons for women laboured in a Protestant frame of redemption, as did most other US campaigners for gender-segregated imprisonment governed through maternalistic models of care and control. In Quebec, however, the job of reforming wayward female youth was assigned to a religious order devoted to reclaiming wanton girls. In 1870 the Soeurs de bon Pasteur established the province’s first reform school for females, a convent run by chaste and pious nuns, who ‘indoctrinated the so-called weaker members of the flock and cloistered them from the temptations of the modernizing city and its “foreign influences.”‘Although the École de réforme shifted from its original location in central Montreal and changed its name in 1915, it retained its place in Quebec’s array of correctional institutions until 1946, when a riot prompted the state to wrest control.

This is not a case of nun-ridden corrections in a priest-ridden society, Myers shows. Quebec added a second string to its juvenile justice bow in the early twentieth century, when the province’s Protestant elite, based mainly in Montreal, pressed for two changes: the establishment of a juvenile court and a correctional institution for non-Catholic girls. The passage of the federal Juvenile Delinquents Act in 1908 facilitated these innovations at the provincial level: the Girls Cottage Industrial School (gcis) and the Montreal Juvenile Delinquents Court began to operate in 1912. Run by a female board of directors, the gcis‘s stated aim ‘was to rehabilitate the delinquent girl into “a good woman and a true homemaker.”’ The women who conceived this alternative to the convent model were wary of Catholic indoctrination; more than that, they embraced the latest in progressive penology, and they designed the gcis as a laboratory, not to punish girls but to retrain them for female citizenship.

Case reports generated by court officers and correctional managers provide the bulk of the evidence Myers analyzes from an inmate-centric perspective. Defiance intrigues her over compliance. For instance, we learn that inmates of the École could remain in the convent as madeleines and live with nuns, but the reasons for such decisions are not probed; in contrast Myers provides rich accounts of girls driven to defy family expectations, sample pleasures, and lash out against authorities. Still, she acknowledges that ‘accommodation, feigned or real, characterizes the approach most girls took,’ and adds that some inmates may have preferred the ‘structured environment and regular meals’ of carceral institutions over unhappy home lives. Ultimately this was the greatest ‘catch’: the ‘familial social and power relations’ that trapped adolescent girls, while the temptations of modern urban life were dangled before them.

Caught adds to a clutch of studies that analyzes the place of young women in North American cities who rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century. Rigorously researched and well-written, Myers’s book stands out for its ambitious temporal frame (1869–1945) and its close attention to the persistence of religion in modern corrections. Indeed Canadian correctional services currently incorporate religious programs, including Aboriginal spirituality counselling and ceremonies, into carceral institutions. Perhaps this book will prompt further exploration into religion’s uneasy but enduring association with modernity’s selective secularity.

Was the progressive cgis an advance over the Soeurs’ pious...