Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal's modern girls and the law 1869-1945.

Fitzgerald, Tanya

Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal's modern girls and the law 1869-1945, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. ISBN 13-978-08020-9219-9, 345pp.

This book provides a thematic and chronological examination of the juvenile justice system in Quebec and attempts to define, sanction, rescue and rehabilitate les jeunes filles modernes (young modern girls) in the period 1869-1945. In a period of intense social, cultural and economic upheaval, the modernising city created the necessary pre-conditions for young girls to engage in suspicious modern practices such as working in the city, spending their earnings on leisure activities and material goods, dressing in 'modern' clothes and rebelling against attendance at church. Parents and juvenile justice officials widely understood female delinquency as a modern behaviour that was sexually suspicious and which rendered girls susceptible to and available for exploitation by men. Thus, in an attempt to contain this growing 'problem', the delinquent girl and the delinquent body were simultaneously subjected to the intervention of parents, court officials, medical professionals and the juvenile justice system in an attempt to define, regulate, censure, incarcerate and rehabilitate her. And while the family may have been complicit in narrating and defining what behaviour was unacceptable and consequently warranted a declaration of delinquency, the family subsequently set in motion a public examination of their own dynamics, history and behaviours. Not only then were modern girls 'at risk' from the modern city, they also had to be protected from inadequate parenting that had set the stage for their inevitable delinquency.

As Tamara Myers skilfully outlines in this book, 'modern girls' were not an homogenous group and although their stories, recorded by the various court and medical officials, reverberated concerns about gender, adolescence and the autonomy of girls in urban settings, exigencies of class, religion and ethnicity collided with the construction of 'delinquency' and the 'female delinquent'. Accordingly, both the delinquent girl and delinquent body, unable to be fully and uniformly constructed, catalogued and treated, emerged as a new product of knowledge from the fields of medicine, psychology, jurisprudence and sociology and gave rise to the professionalisation of welfare and the socialisation of justice. This is not to suggest however that these girls were complicit in attempts to rescue, reform and rehabilitate their minds and bodies. The case records consulted by Myers illuminate ways in which these girls attempted to resist their positioning as delinquents and the extent to which they invoked their agency through both compliance and resistance.

This book is comprised of seven core chapters that chart the evolution of the juvenile justice system in Montreal, the complicated relationship between 'modern' girls and the 'modern' city, the emergence of the 'problem' of the delinquent girl who was targeted for sexual regulation, the professionalisation of systems designed to regulate female adolescence and delinquency and the development of girls' reform and training schools as rehabilitation facilities. Myers constantly raises questions concerning the identity of the delinquent girl and the complex interplay between the 'modern' girl, her family, community and church, the juvenile justice system and underpinning assumptions of gendered ideologies concerning the female adolescent and the female delinquent. Although a minor point, while on the one hand Myers examines the discursive construction of the 'modern girl' and gendered assumptions about delinquency, there is not, on the other the same attention paid to terms such as 'girl', 'adolescent', 'youth' and so on that have the potential to infantilise the 'modern girl'.

Through the use of court records (including probation reports, physician's reports, reform school correspondence, statements from a girl and her family as well as depositions), Myers expertly examines how the female delinquent emerged as a twentieth-century 'problem' and ways in which a new court system in Quebec intensified and targeted 'problem' girls, particularly those who were visible and present in the public domain. Myers does not propose any immediate answers to the 'problem' but seeks to uncover the complicated and contested historical, social, political, economic, religious and cultural contexts that gave rise to the modern city and the modern girl who was inevitably drawn away from family, community and church to an increasingly urban and modern world. In this book Myers successfully offers readers an opportunity to understand the extent to which private friction between parents and their daughter(s) was re-constituted as a public responsibility and the modern girl's response to attempts to label and regulate her lives and activities.

TANYA FITZGERALD

Unitec Institute of Technology

New Zealand