Linda Mahood - Policing Gender, Class and Family in Britain, 1800-1945

General Editor
June Purvis
Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth

Published
Carol Dyhouse
No distinction of sex? Women in British universities, 18701939

Bridget Hill
Women, work and sexual politics in eighteenth-century England

Linda Mahood
Policing gender, class & family: Britain, 18501940

June Purvis (editor)
Womens history: Britain, 18501945

Forthcoming
Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey (editors)
Gender relations in German history

Shani DCruze
Sex, violence and working women in Victorian and Edwardian England

jay Dixon
The romantic fiction of Mills & Boon, 190995

Ralph Gibson
Women, faith and liberation: female religious orders in
nineteenthcentury France

Wendy Webster
Women in the 1950s

Barbara Winslow
Sylvia Pankhurst: a political biography

Linda Mahood, 1995

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.

First published in 1995 by Routledge

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The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 13-978-1-85728-188-0 (hbk)

Typeset in Sabon.

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

To my father
Douglas Rupert Mahood

To the memory of my grandmother
Nancy Mahood (190489)

In May 1992, following a request that I had placed in a local Scottish newspaper for information about reformatories and industrial schools, I received a letter from a 78 year old person, who chose to comment on the documentary about girls homes that I had worked on with BBC Scotland some months earlier. The letter warned: If you are going to write stories and make films, try and get your facts right first. Your filmwas disgusting, all lies [It] did not upset people who know the facts Try and do something useful with your talent. My first piece of hate mail disturbed me for a number of fairly obvious reasons. What it confirmed, though, was that there continues to be a wide range of emotions and contested interpretations surrounding these particular institutions of the social. I would like to begin, therefore, by expressing my sincere gratitude to the women and men who graciously permitted me to interview them for this book.

The research was supported by a number of sources that enabled it to grow from a thesis into a book. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, the Committee of the Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom Overseas Research Scholarship and the University of Glasgow Postgraduate Scholarship supported it during its dissertation phase. In the summer of 1990 a grant from the University of Saskatchewan allowed me to do some additional interviews and to present some early results at the International Sociological Association World Congress in Madrid. Financial assistance from the Dean of the College of Arts and Science and the University of Lethbridge Research Fund enabled me to participate in the BBC Scotland documentary, Washing away the stain, to extend my study of homes for girls and women called magdalene asylums into the twentieth century, and to examine some newly discovered documents. The material in My interpretation of the material has benefited significantly by collaboration with Barbara Littlewood on this and other projects.

Many people supported me during my period in Glasgow, where I arrived in 1985. At Glasgow University, John Eldridge, Paul Littlewood, Ruth Madigan, David Frisby, Bob Miles and Eleanor Gordon gave me early support, but, most especially, my deepest appreciation goes to Barbara Littlewood, whose example and encouragement opened up the possibility for me to pursue an academic career. I am also very grateful to Janet Nobel and Hugh Corrigan, who always made room and time for me while I was collecting data in London.

On the other side of the Atlantic there are also a number of people who I met while an undergraduate and later an instructor at the University of Saskatchewan (some have since scattered) who continue to help me in various ways: B.Singh Bolaria, Terry Wotherspoon, Bernard Schissel, Nancy Poon, Kathy Kendall, Kiran Bolaria (an excellent research assistant) and Vic Satzewich, who has read and commented on every draft. At Lethbridge University, I would like to thank Carol Tomomitsu for her secretarial assistance with this manuscript and various faculty and students, especially Dr Patricia Chuchryk, Dave Brown and Diane Clark, Robin Bright, Ann Moritz, Jeff Ross and Natasha Cabrera, who became good friends. This book would not exist without the patience and support of my entire family, especially Lucy (born during the literature review) and Jack (born during the conclusion). Olga Satzewichs devotion to her grandchildren continues to enable me to interchange domestic responsibilities and academic commitments without worry. But it is Vics strength, commitment to scholarship and gentle prodding that enables me to do it at all.

Linda Mahood
University of Guelph, Canada

The memories of women and men who were inmates of Scottish juvenile reformatories and industrial schools in the early twentieth century reveal a range of confusing and bitter experiences. Such accounts suggest that the historical investigation of youth allows us to examine children as both the subjects of culturally constructed definitions and the clients of institutional practices. The late-nineteenth-century child-saving movement was part of a massive intervention into private life whose strategies, institutions and consequences are still being debated by historians and social scientists. Then, as now, children were frequently the targets of theories and practices aimed at the wider regulation of family life. The current public outrage over issues such as domestic violence and child abuse, juvenile crime, homelessness and well-publicized cases of the apparent failure of child protection agencies has its roots in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century child-welfare ideologies and institutional regimes.