| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Joan Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920–1960 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001)

IN 2001, 99 per cent of spousal abuse victims were women and 80 per cent of sexually abused children were young girls (Statistics Canada). As Joan Sangster reveals in Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920–1960, things were hardly different in mid-20th century Ontario. In this thematic study of incest, wife assault, prostitution, and delinquency, Sangster explores the legal regulation of women, sexuality, and the family. Her purpose is twofold: first, to examine how the legal system, swathed by comforting words like protection, assessed criminality using dominant race, sexuality, class, and gender norms; and, to explore "... the everyday, particular, lived experiences of the law in women's lives." (195)	1
Sangster uses penal records, Family Court files, reports from reformatories and training schools, social work journals, and government documents. Much as in the scholarship of Steven Maynard, Carolyn Strange, and Marianna Valverde, she applies more than one methodology to answer the questions she poses about women and the law. "Due to feminist proclivities," (3) Sangster remains committed to understanding the gender-specific supervision of girls and women, yet she also draws upon Foucault's triumvirate, power/ knowledge/ body, to explore the construction and deployment of the law between 1920 and 1960 in Ontario.	2
As a materialist feminist, Sangster must grapple with the issues raised most famously in the Joan Scott-Linda Gordon debate (Signs, 1990): how can scholars reconcile a deconstruction of discourse and power with the lived reality of abuse? Siding with Gordon, who asserts that scholars, irrespective of theoretical leanings, can not ignore the emotional and physical scars of violence, Sangster recognizes the actuality of abuse. Rejecting the idea that domination in law, family, and society was ever complete, she emphasizes women's agency. What emerges is a study that provides an empirical reconstruction of women's experiences and highlights the "plurality of meanings" that result from the dynamic relationship between society and the law. (194)	3
Regulating Girls and Women builds on other feminist studies (most notably, the scholarship of Constance Backhouse, Judith Fingard, and Margaret Hillyard Little) that examine women's resistance to and regulation through governmental and legal systems. However, as Sangster points out, existing scholarship focuses on either the Progressive Era, or late 20th century sociological and criminological issues. This leaves an historiographical gap in the mid-20th century when changes occurred in the relationship between society and the law, that had distinct ramifications for women.	4
In particular, these decades witnessed the rise of state and professionally run regulatory bodies, including the Toronto Juvenile and Family Court, the Mercer Reformatory for Women, and the Children's Aid Society, which employed social workers, doctors, and psychologists to define and treat behaviour deemed unacceptable. The family is an important prism through which to understand women's experiences of the law. For even as eugenics gave way to Freudian explanations for victimization and deviance, the overall goal of experts persisted: to maintain the strength of the heterosexual family and uplift, mould, and fashion working-class women into chaste, honest daughters and mothers.	5
For victims of incest and wife assault, the family was a site of contradiction: it symbolized both violence and redemption. As wives, women used the legal system to stop the abuse of their husbands; as mothers, they were blamed for failing to provide safe home environments for their children; and as defendants, they learned that heralding the heterosexual family encouraged leniency and that returning to one's rightful place as wife or daughter aided recovery.	6
Ultimately, the law, though designed to protect women, rarely achieved its goal. Rather it regulated incest and assault by normalizing the behaviour of some women and pathologizing the behaviour of others. A gendered analysis reveals that absorbing appropriate feminine attributes, like chastity, legitimized violent responses from women who were defending their honour, while the authoritarian language of masculinity justified male violence. These were contradictory messages that conveyed an unwillingness to recognize the crucial issues of power and control at the heart of incest and wife beating.	7
In prostitution and delinquency cases women were characterized as perpetrators of crime. The reaction of Ontario's court system, the Children's Aid Society, and the Mercer Reformatory for Women reveals a great deal about the discursive construction of good and bad girls. Women and girls found themselves in conflict with the law for a variety of reasons, but most often because they had not absorbed the proper characteristics of femininity. Using bawdy-house laws, vagrancy provisions, and the Ontario Female Refugees Act, officials claimed prostitutes were abnormal, feeble-minded women who threatened the family by undermining dominant religious and cultural values. Morally charged discourse regulated prostitution informally; a woman guarded her "good" reputation through honest labour and by embracing middle-class, heterosexual, female attributes. Delinquents also had their family lives scrutinized. For instance, families that were materially deprived, lacked a male breadwinner, or an appropriate religious affiliation, were likely to find themselves targeted as encouraging delinquency.	8
In her most important chapter, Sangster focuses on the experiences of Native women. Here important differences among women emerge that reveal the centrality of race to women's experiences of the law. Prostitution and delinquency case files suggest that White women of British descent were incarcerated less often and for shorter periods than Native women. Sangster provides an important socio-cultural explanation for the sexual regulation of Native women. She underscores systemic racism, and the colonization of Native peoples by the Canadian state. Moreover, Native women contended with an additional layer of surveillance provided by the insidious power of the Indian agent.	9
The greatest strength of this study rests in Sangster's commitment to unite questions from social theory about the construction of law and the discursive power of norms rooted in categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality with materialist feminist queries about women's experiences. She demonstrates that these methodologies, though often juxtaposed, can provide important tools for the assessment of regulation and resistance.	10
Incest, wife assault, prostitution, and delinquency raise difficult issues about surveillance and protection. Certainly, the courtroom statements of incest victims suggest that regulation, however feeble it may be, is important. But, the question of how to protect women is harder to answer. In wife assault cases, women tended to use the law to regulate rather than escape male violence; prostitution continued, as did female delinquency. Sangster suggests that women's resistance, conveyed in their use of the legal system to punish transgressions, their denials and frank quips in the courtroom, their use of family need to explain prostitution, and their defiance of Christian western ideals and cultural continuity, provides an important dimension to our understanding of women's experience of the law.	11
Indeed, this aspect of Sangster's study is particularly important. Thus, it is surprising that she does not use oral histories. Certainly, Sangster examines highly sensitive issues. But, as Marlene Epp has recently shown, memories can reveal important direct and indirect clues about women's experiences of violence. Moreover, interviews with those who wielded the law, including judges, lawyers, police, and YWCA leaders, might have provided important answers to questions about how historical actors perceived prostitution, incest, and wife abuse. Such queries might also have provided further insight into why poor, working class, and Native women continue to experience greater legal regulation than other women in Canadian society.	12
Nevertheless, these criticisms are small in comparison with the broader importance of this study. On the anniversary of the 1929 Person's Case, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson observed: "It is appalling that Canadian women are still the most vulnerable in society and face discrimination and violence." (Toronto Star, 19 October 2002) There can be no greater indicator of the continued need for sensitive studies like Regulating Girls and Women.	13
Katrina Srigley University of Toronto

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