Criminal Women and Bad Girls: Regulation and Punishment in Montreal, 1890-1930

Society’s attitudes toward criminal offenders changed dramatically over the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the system of handling offenders in Montreal was highly institutionalized and based on sex- and age-specific treatment involving the Catholic Church, civic and legal authorities, and Protestant reform organizations. The author explores the gender-specific treatment of female offenders in the new institutions created ostensibly to rescue them from their “criminal” ways: the Fullum Street Prison for Women, the École de Reforme, the Girls’ Cottage Industrial School, the Juvenile Delinquents’ Court and female officers on the police force.

PhD dissertation

McGill University

Montreal

1996

x-318p.

en