"Regulating Girls and Women"

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews Joan Sangster's book, "Regulating Girls and Women - Sexuality, Family and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960", and describes the strengths and weaknesses of the book. The paper argues that there is room to ask whether or not legal and social realities have changed much with regard to girls and women entering a reformed criminal justice system.

From the Paper:

"Institutionally, all appears to have worked to protect women in Canadian family law that made men responsible for wives and children should they desert them. There were assault laws that seemed to direct high standards in the home and with the interval of 1920 to 1960 seeing the appearance of Toronto's Juvenile and Family Court as seemed to promise that family issues were taken seriously, just as the Children's Aid Society attended to child welfare. The ideal was one of producing 'social' hearings or trials that would reflect social investigation and clinical expertise as promised better family law. (p. 55) However, Sangster is able to show that law was really carried over from before, was not always enforced in ways that protected women, in effect, and that very old-fashioned thinking governed society's ideals for female citizens. The same interval produced the Mercer Reformatory for Women which aimed to make 'honest' or respectable women according to a certain mold from women thought to be immoral, as in convicted prostitutes, or in need of correction through labor."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Joan Sangster's Regulating Girls and Women - Sexuality, Family and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960. (Toronto: UTP, 2001, 288 pp).

More papers on "Regulating Girls and Women":

• Book Review # 132898 : "Regulating Girls and Women" - A Book Review"
• Book Review # 139998 : "Growth and Maturity in "Lives of Girls and Women"
• Analytical Essay # 15881 : "Megan's Law"

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