Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960

Christine Schmidt specializes in law and sociology at Laurentian
University.

Regulating Girls and Women is an in-depth analysis of the dialectic
between women’s bodies and the law from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Writing from a materialist feminist standpoint, the author addresses
contemporary changes in theory, particularly the impact of
poststructuralism on the historical and sociological analyses of
women’s bodies and the law.

The book is divided into seven chapters and touches on incest and
sexual abuse, patriarchy, wife assault, prostitution and “social
pariahs.” The construction and marginalization of wayward female
adolescents, Native women’s bodies and the law, and “reform”
schools are also scrutinized. Sangster addresses not only the tools used
by the state and the law to regulate and punish women but also their
historical connection to the way women’s bodies are seen and theorized
about today.

True to her materialist and feminist framework, Sangster views the
individual cases cited in the book, as well as contemporary women’s
lived experiences not as examples of the power of the state, but rather
as moments of active agency. In this vein, she devotes several pages to
addressing regulation and resistance by women, as well as the
implications of Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking theories of power and
sexuality and how these theories have managed to erase the
centralization and mobilization of power directed toward women.

This well-researched, theoretically sound, and engaging book is a
challenge to poststructuralists who now wish to deny the existence of
external regulation. An essential purchase for students in upper-year
university courses dealing with historical analyses, sociological
theory, sexuality, feminism, or the law.