Retorts, Runaways and Riots: Patterns of Resistance in Canadian Reform Schools for Girls, 1930-60

This article examines female adolescents' experience of Canadian reform school for girls between 1930 and 1960. Myers and Sangster challenge the prevailing characterization of delinquent girls as submissive to authority and docile while in custody. A study of girls' individual and collective resistance, this article brings together research on Ontario and Quebec reform schools and reveals that girls engaged in a variety of rebellious activities including verbal retorts, passive resistance, running away, and rioting. Following girls through the juvenile justice system, the authors illustrate the key moments--from court appearance to parole--when girls were likely to rebel against authority. The authors argue that while these acts of resistance may appear to us as spontaneous and uncoordinated, girls' protests and violent behaviour were often clearly directed at being labelled "delinquent" and at being subjected to regimes that emphasized domestic labour, sexual purity and passive femininity.

[1]  R. Uitti.  Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Indian Reality , 1993 .

[2]  D. Flaherty,et al.  Challenging Times: The Women's Movement in Canada and the United States , 1992 .

[3]  James C. Scott,et al.  Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. , 1985, The Journal of Asian Studies.

[4]  J. C. Oates.  Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang , 1993 .

[5]  Tamara Myers,et al.  The Voluntary Delinquent: Parents, Daughters, and the Montreal Juvenile Delinquents’ Court in 1918 , 1999 .

[6]  K. Wimshurst.  Control and Resistance: Reformatory School Girls in the Late Nineteenth Century South Australia , 1984 .

[7]  S. Cahn.  Spirited Youth or Fiends Incarnate: The Samarcand Arson Case and Female Adolescence in the American South , 1998 .

[8]  G. Dodds,et al.  Dimensions of Childhood: Essays on the History of Children and Youth in Canada , 1992 .

[9]  R. Pazdro,et al.  Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on the History of Women's Work in British Columbia , 1986 .

[10]  R. Dobash,et al.  The Imprisonment of Women , 1986 .

[11]  J. Sangster.  ‘Pardon Tales’ from Magistrate’s Court: Women, Crime, and the Court in Peterborough County, 1920–50 , 1993 .

[12]  Patricia Pearson,et al.  When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence , 1997 .

[13]  Neil Sutherland,et al.  Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus , 1977 .

[14]  M. Adams,et al.  The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality , 1997 .

[15]  Andrew Davies.  'These viragoes are no less cruel than the lads': young women, gangs and violence in late Victorian Manchester and Salford , 1999 .

[16]  E. Freedman.  The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915-1965 , 1996 .

[17]  D. Chunn.  From Punishment to Doing Good: Family Courts and Socialized Justice in Ontario, 1880-1940 , 1992 .

[18]  M. Cale.  Girls and the Perception of Sexual Danger in the Victorian Reformatory System , 1993 .

[19]  Barbara M. Brenzel.  Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1905 , 1983 .

[20]  Karlene Faith.  Unruly Women: The Politics of Confinement and Resistance , 1993 .

[21]  R. M. Alexander.  The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 , 1995 .

[22]  Andrea Campbell.  On the Invisibility of the Female Delinquent Peer Group , 1991 .

[23]  M. C. Gildea.  PSYCHIATRIC PROBLEMS IN TRAINING SCHOOL FOR DELINQUENT GIRLS , 1944 .

[24]  E. Freedman,et al.  The Keepers and the Kept@@@Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930. , 1982 .

[25]  Social Adjustment, Personality and Behaviour in Training Schools in Ontario , 1970 .

[26]  Rupert Ross,et al.  Dancing With a Ghost: Exploring Indian Reality , 1992 .

[27]  Carolyn Strange.  Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930 , 1996 .

[28]  E. Teram,et al.  Normal Bad Boys: Public Policies, Institutions, and the Politics of Client Recruitment , 1992 .

[29]  J. Sangster.  Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920–60 , 1999, Canadian Historical Review.