Feminist Perspectives on Sociology by Littlewood Barbara;

Author:Littlewood, Barbara; [Littlewood, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The regime, however, only had limited success. Mahood calculates that only 40–50 per cent of inmates were placed in situations more or less acceptable to the directors of the homes after undergoing training and reform. Moreover, the figures do not include the many girls (24 per cent in Glasgow) who were sent to other institutions such as the hospital or insane asylum. But the girls who proved most troublesome were the third who were recorded as having left the home of their own accord or who were dismissed as intractable or insubordinate.

This dismal record, by the standards of the homes, brings us on to the issue of resistance that, Foucault teaches us, is always there when power is exercised. Opposition to the homes and their programmes was always apparent, from a range of groups and movements, including the clergy who preferred to place girls in private homes of good Christian families, some feminists such as Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, who objected to the elements of compulsion in the system, and at least in the first part of the nineteenth century Owenite socialists who regarded the whole question of prostitution as an index of the corruption and exploitative nature of the 'old' moral order. In addition, we can also reinterpret the homes' record not as failure but as resistance on the part of those girls who refused to see themselves as guilty subjects in need of saving:

As we have seen there has been resistance, although unorganised and unarticulated, from all those recalcitrant, saucy and ungrateful girls who refused to submit to the asylums' efforts. . . . Opposition comes now, as then, from all the 'wayward' girls whose struggles evidence their resistance to a bourgeois (and patriarchal) moral code even when they are caught up in its technologies of power.

(Mahood 1990: 166)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.