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Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus

Tamara Myers’ new book was published late last year by the University of Toronto Press and is just starting to get the recognition it deserves. So even though hardly anyone reads this site yet, I thought I’d post something about it here in anticipation of new readers.

This book is part of a wave of new juvenile justice scholarship that is pushing the field in exciting new directions: chronologically, geographically, and methodologically.

American scholars could learn a lot from this book.

Quoting from a review in the Spring 2007 issue of _Canadian Literature_:

“Myers looks at les jeunes filles modernes in Montreal and situates their construction by and treatment in the juvenile justice system, itself a nexus of class, race, gender, culture, and national imagination. She begins with the inauguration of the Montreal Juvenile Delinquents’ Court in 1869 and walks through the Juvenile Delinquency Act, the interference from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religions, and the practical gendered matters of the courts (among others). She concludes with a chapter on reform schools (the Girls’ Cottage Industrial School), the most interesting section of which notes its geography (set in nature to reinforce perception of women’s innate innocence and delicateness) and architecture (different cottages for those with venereal disease, those who were immoral but without disease, and those who were incorrigible). Here the interior space of the reform schools mimicked the imagined (defiled) interior spaces of these young women.

“Myers is careful to document instances where young female delinquents weren’t just victims, or acted upon.“

Read the whole review: http://www.canlit.ca/reviews-review.php?id=13401

By William Bush, Thu, September 20, 2007 - 4:40 pm
Categories: Research