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

A rich literature is developing in Canada that traces the history of youth, and especially young women, sexual and moral regulation, and the law. Tamara Myers’s Caught is a welcome addition to this literature. In Caught, Myers explores the charged, but ever changing, meanings of Montreal’s ‘modern girls’ and the expanding infrastructure and continuum of institutions that were meant to contain, and tame, les jeunes filles modernes. Beginning in 1869 and ending in 1945, Myers maps the important transitions from religious, pastoral care techniques as represented by the Sœurs du Bon Pasteur convent reform school, to the development of juvenile justice infrastructure at both the national and provincial levels, through the evolution of the Montreal Juvenile Delinquents’ Court (mjdc) and, finally, to the decline of this era’s experiment in reformatories, with the closing of the Protestant Training School for Girls, in part because of riots initiated by the young women themselves.

In some ways, the story told by Myers is becoming a familiar one. Middle-class anxieties about young girls’ independence, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century, spawned a host of institutional responses that claimed to protect, but acted to control, girls’ assertion of their agency. In particular, the triangular relationship between the mjdc, young girls in trouble with the law, and their parents who often turned to the courts to help them rein in disobedient daughters, is a common finding in the literature of Progressive-era female justice. This relationship reveals that for young girls the juvenile justice system policed largely domestic struggles over wage work, leisure activities, and dating practices (neatly characterized by Myers as ‘daytime delinquencies,’ ‘night-time delinquencies,’ and ‘dating delinquencies’). In these scenarios, sometimes the only recourse young women had was to run away, only to find themselves ‘caught’ and in front of juvenile justice personnel for their audacity. Similarly familiar is the sexualization of female delinquency: once in court, judges, parole officers, and doctors betrayed a near-pornographic obsession with the sexual activities of young girls. But Montreal’s modern girls also had something to say about these various approaches to their lives and decisions, and these voices come through loudly throughout the book. Myers is to be commended for achieving the difficult task of finding these young women’s voices and, often enough, acts of resistance, through the court and other official documents that recorded their presence.

Moreover, at the same time that the history of Montreal’s legal regulation of the modern girl resonates with developments in other North American jurisdictions, Myers’s history offers a unique perspective by locating both les jeunes filles modernes and the juvenile justice system in relation to the story of Quebec nationalism. As Myers writes, ‘The juvenile court era overlapped with the rise of French-Canadian nationalism; therefore, questions concerning the survival of the French-Canadian “race” echoed in the new institution’ (6). Given the centrality of women’s (hetero)sexuality and reproduction to national identity, the significance of the contests over young women’s daily (and nightly) dalliances becomes much more clear.

Myers also acknowledges that the dichotomy between franco-and anglophone, and between Catholic and Protestant, while a palpable tension in Montreal’s Juvenile Delinquents Court, is insufficient to understand the complexities of her subject. Here lies the real strength of Myers’s scholarship. Refusing to fall into this simplified dichotomy, Myers deftly explores the similarities and differences in care based on religion and ethnicity. Rather than a seamless progression, the chronologically narrated stages in the history of the regulation and incarceration of young women reveals that Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities all had a stake, albeit not always the same stake, in ‘reforming’ troublesome young women, and in offering solutions that were aimed at cultural, as well as gendered, specificity. There is somewhat less space given to other cultural, ethnic, and racial communities and tensions in heterogeneous Montreal, attention to which might have...