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  • (Re)Examining Feminism and Justice
  • Mary Jane Mossman (bio)
Feminized Justice: The Toronto Women's Court 1913-34 By Amanda Glasbeek (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009; paperback edition 2010)

A central contention of this book is that, contradictions and all, the Toronto Women's Court was neither a failure nor, even, a paradox. To the contrary, I argue that the Toronto Women's Court was an ideal reflection of the politics of the middle-class, white feminists of the TLCW [Toronto Local Council of Women] . . . [T]he Toronto Women's Court was a place where . . . very different groups of women met and was a site through which they struggled, as women from very different social locations, with the law.1

Amanda Glasbeek's study of the Toronto Women's Court, from its inception in 1913 to its demise in 1934, documents the complex relationships between women who were charged with offences relating to prostitution, vagrancy, and theft, on the one hand, and the middle-class women who aspired to reform the criminal justice system in the interests of sex equality on the other. The book offers both a detailed picture of women and criminality in early twentieth-century Toronto and also a sustained critique of ideologies of "feminized justice" espoused by the middle-class women whose efforts resulted in the Toronto Women's Court. Foremost among these middle-class women reformers was Margaret Patterson, who served as a magistrate in the Women's Court from 1922. As Glasbeek demonstrates, Patterson's twin goals of serving the interests of the state and of achieving gender-specific legal reform were not always entirely congruent. In this way, the Toronto Women's Court represents "a significant historical example of maternalist moral feminism in action."2

Glasbeek's study begins with an introduction that situates the Women's Court within the system of police courts in the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Women's Court established in Toronto in 1913 was similar to a [End Page 385] number of specialized courts created in American cities in the same period, and it may have influenced the establishment of the Women's Court in Edmonton three years later, in which Emily Murphy served as the first female magistrate in the British Empire. From the beginning of the study, however, Glasbeek argues that the "maternalism" that inspired the creation of the Women's Court in Toronto was not fundamentally about ideas of "family" but, rather, about "the authority of some women and the subordination of others."3 This is a bold claim and one that is substantially supported by Glasbeek's study, but it might also provoke further questioning, which is an issue addressed more fully later in this review.

The study includes six main chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the Toronto Women's Court as an institution from 1913 to 1934, exploring the broader context in which specialized courts were created in the early decades of the twentieth century in North America. Although initially established to focus on criminal offences, the appointment of Margaret Patterson as a magistrate in 1922 resulted in the creation of a "domestic mediations" stream within the court, a move that was entirely consistent with Patterson's ideas about responding to women's needs for justice. However, this initiative ended with the creation of a new Domestic Relations Court in Ontario in 1929. Chapter 2 thus examines the Toronto Local Council of Women (TLCW) and its reformist agenda in relation to criminal law, promoted particularly by means of its Committee for an Equal Moral Standard. As this chapter explains, the TLCW's emphasis on moral equality for women was primarily focused on encouraging male restraint in relation to sexual activity—a "new sexual morality in which men lived by the same ethical precepts as women." As Glasbeek explains, first-wave feminists promoted the goal of sexual equality, as did second-wave feminists later in the twentieth century, but the earlier use of this equality concept was interpreted "not as equal sexual freedom for women [as for men] but as equal sexual restraint for men [as for women]."4

The next three chapters turn to a detailed examination of women and...

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