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Review of Policing Gender, Class and Family: Britain, 1850-1940
Review Author: Julia P. Kielstra
Linda Mahood's book on the child-saving movement in Scotland (and, to a much lesser extent, England) covers the period 1854 to 1932, respectively the dates of the Youthful Offenders Act -- one of the earliest instances of government intervention in children's discipline -- and the Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Acts, which shifted the administrative responsibilities for the reform institutions from the Home Office to the Scottish Education Department. She aptly includes contextual material pre- and post-dating these Acts, in particular in chapter three, thereby setting her study in a larger historical framework. In addition to her knowledge of contemporary work on the subject, set forth in a concise review of literature, Mahood's main sources of data are archival and oral, both of which provide strong support for her claims.
These claims largely consist of a reassessment of the "conceptual value of the social": Mahood argues that "the emergence of reformatories and industrial schools created a distinct social domain, a new physical space and new knowledge and ideologies about the causes and treatment of juvenile delinquency. It was within this distinct social space that class, gender and sexual ideologies were deployed, negotiated and resisted" (17). Mahood uses theoretical jargon merely as shorthand for the complex structure of relationships between class, gender, and family groupings which she documents and describes.
Mahood begins her book by looking at the social realm, and how the concept of a "normal" family structure came to be generally accepted. After looking in the preceding chapter at the historical context of her study, in chapter four Mahood suggests that the increased professionalization of the reform institutions' administrators influenced the paths the movement would take. Chapter five continues this argument, and shows how the reform programmes were reinforced by discipline. The following chapter suggests that gender differences were also reinforced and normalized by the programmes, recruitment policies, and disciplinary procedures employed in the institutions. The conclusion evaluates the concept of the social and neatly draws together the various strands of Mahood's study.
Mahood's title is sexily theoretical in tone and belies the solid historical groundwork she has thoroughly documented throughout her book and in the three statistical appendices she includes. Michel Foucault's work influences Mahood's approach to the child-saving movement, and informs her investigations into the different treatment afforded to boys and girls in reformatories, ragged schools, and industrial schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, Foucault's suggestion that, during the second half of the nineteenth century the focus of discipline shifted from punishing the body to reforming the mind, shapes Mahood's research and leads her into fascinating areas of historical interpretation. She not only tells us the facts but also why they should be reported, what they tell us about the social milieu in general, and what they may have meant to the people who were involved at all levels in the Scottish disciplinary programmes. Mahood's review of literature concludes that, with some notable exceptions, "Few studies successfully integrate class, gender, sexuality and 'race' in the interpretation of data and the elaboration of theory" (12). Mahood herself, however, admirably unites the different aspects of the child-saving movement. This book should be interesting to a wide range of readers, from historians to literary critics, and is an excellent example of a scholar using theory but not being used by it.
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