JOAN SANGSTER

Reforming Women’s Reformatories: Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State, 1950–1970
Asserting that ‘women don’t belong in cages,’ a contemporary Elizabeth Fry poster goes on to declare that ‘prisons are the real problem.’1 With this statement, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, a resolutely feminist organization, ventures close to a radical abolitionist view of prisons. While this platform has emerged naturally over the past fifty years of Elizabeth Fry’s existence, the initial founders of this penal reform organization (now known by the shorter epithet, E. Fry) in Canada were of a different world view, accepting the existence of reformatories and avoiding the self-designation of ‘feminist.’ Even if the current organization embraces a feminist and social democratic critique of women’s criminalization, it has not completely escaped some of the dilemmas faced by E. Fry’s founders: What are the possibilities of meaningful penal reform in a liberal capitalist state? What is the relationship between more privileged staff/volunteers and criminalized women from marginalized backgrounds? How can those offering rehabilitative aid to offenders avoid becoming one more layer of oppressive surveillance and control in women’s lives? This article explores the early years of the Toronto Elizabeth Fry Society (EFT) as a means of examining broader questions about female penal reformers’ relationship to the law and the state, focusing on EFT’s responses to three key issues during the 1950s and 1960s: their analysis of women’s criminality; their efforts to obtain legal and social reform, particularly for First Nations women; and their role in a public inquiry into the Mercer Reformatory for women. These issues in turn raise questions about E. Fry’s reform ideology, including its use of maternalism as an initial organizing rhetoric, its analysis of gender, race, and criminality, and its changing relationship with the state, which over time combined cooperation with critique, an ambivalent posture that remains a troubling contradiction in women’s penal reform today. 1 People for Justice Alliance, ‘Women Don’t Belong in Cages’ (Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies), poster. The Canadian Historical Review 85, 2, June 2004 © University of Toronto Press Incorporated

228 The Canadian Historical Review The relations of well-intentioned reformers – both with the lessprivileged women they hoped to aid, and with the corrections bureaucracy they hoped to transform – were shaped by the social relations of class, the dominant ideologies of femininity and race, and alternative political perspectives on criminality developed by penal reformers themselves. Whether the last invoked a rhetoric of maternalism, or later of feminism, they were often constrained by the overwhelming influence of reigning expert criminology and the tenacious control of the state of the correctional agenda – even if Elizabeth Fry reformers’ keenest desire was to transform the definitions of crime and the strategies of punishment that prevailed in Canadian society. ORIGINS

Elizabeth Fry Societies emerged later in Canada than in Britain, where the original inspiration lay in nineteenth-century Quaker devotion, middle-class philanthropy, and notions of feminine, maternal compassion for the poor and criminalized of the same sex.2 The first Canadian Elizabeth Fry Society was established in 1939 in Vancouver. In 1950 and 1952, Kingston (home to the only women’s federal prison) and Toronto (home to the provincial Mercer Reformatory for women), followed suit. Along with an Ottawa branch, Kingston and Toronto were the larger, most active E. Fry societies in Ontario for some years.3 Elizabeth Fry Societies represented both rupture and continuity in Canadian women’s history. Penal issues had been a concern of some earlier female reformers, and of charitable and religious organizations, with the former often inspired by maternalist ideologies and the latter committed to prisoner rehabilitation and religious salvation.4 Nonethe2 Annemieke van Drenth and Francisca de Haan, The Rise of Caring Power: Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); J. Kent, Elizabeth Fry (New York: Arco Publishing, 1962); E.R. Pitman, Elizabeth Fry (New York: Greenwood, 1969); L. Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 3 Most discussion of Canadian female prison reformers focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two exceptions are Lee Stewart, Women Who Volunteer To Go to Prison: A History of the Elizabeth Fry Society of British Columbia, 1939–89 (Victoria: Orca Books, 1993) and Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Punishment in Disguise: Penal Governance and Federal Imprisonment of Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 4 Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Amanda Glasbeek, ‘Maternalism Meets the Criminal Law: The Case of the Toronto Women’s Court,’ Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 10, 2 (1998): 480; Michael D. Whittingham, ‘The

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 229 less, E. Fry was the first non-denominational women’s organization dedicated entirely to criminalized women and committed to using public advocacy to transform both the correctional system and inequalities in the criminal justice system. The relatively late establishment of Elizabeth Fry in Canada may have been due to the presence of existing religious and philanthropic services, to the lack of interest, even by reformers, in this unpopular cause, and to the general public disdain for criminalized women. As one founding EFT member recalls, when she told some acquaintances of her visits to the Mercer Reformatory, they responded incredulously, ‘“Why would you want to be bothered with those women?” ... as if they had some social disease.’5 The initial Toronto Elizabeth Fry Society drew on the political sentiments, traditions, and personnel of women’s organizations active in the interwar and post–Second World War period, which ranged from liberal reformism to feminist-socialism in their sympathies. On the one hand, a well-educated group coordinated through the Toronto University Women’s Club had sponsored a Joint Committee on Penal Reform in the late 1940s in order to study and make recommendations to the government on the female offender. Their efforts were then augmented by a second group of Unitarian women, who, inspired by former CCF MP and prison reformer Agnes Macphail, organized the original E. Fry Toronto group in 1951, giving it a constitution and public face in 1952, seeking out funds from other voluntary, social-service, and government sources, and hiring its first social worker, later executive director, Phyllis Haslam, in 1953.6 The attempt of the early members to be ‘inclusionary’ centred on drawing in female members from diverse religious backgrounds, and their commitment to prison reform encompassed motivations ranging from a humanitarian or Christian wish to aid less fortunate women to a more radical desire to alter an unjust, patriarchal legal system. Haslam symbolized the linkage of such impulses, combining strong social gospel and reform ideals, a belief in the power of feminine compassion, and a personal investment in ‘scientific’ social work training. ‘Our dream,’ remembers one founder, was from the beginning ‘an accredited agency, Role of Reformers and Volunteers in the Advance of Correctional Reform in Canada, since Confederation’ (working paper, Solicitor General of Canada, 1984–70). 5 E.A, in interview with the author, 29 Jan. 1998. 6 There were a few visible CCF women in this initial group: Anne Park, Gwenyth Grube, and Helen Tracy. The EFT remained part of the joint committee, though later there were some tensions between the two. In her initial address to the Unitarian women, Macphail urged them to be more political, not ‘like the University Women’s Club,’ only ‘studying this for four years.’ E.A. in interview.

230 The Canadian Historical Review with social workers’; the presence of such professionals would ensure that they would be able to ‘help shape the future’ of penal reform.7 The first constitution of EFT declared a commitment to aid women’s post-incarceration rehabilitation, to promote the study of crime and the treatment of offenders, and to publicize the need for penal and legal reform. One of its initial objectives, recommending policy changes to the government, was removed from the constitution when government bureaucrats overseeing the EFT incorporation suggested it was overreaching its proper place.8 At this point, E. Fry acquiesced, though never losing its optimistic view that its use of rational argument could secure gradual change. Badly run prisons were, in its view, an irrational anachronism that could be transformed, not a necessary ideological component of liberal capitalism, private property, and state power, as more radical abolitionists later argued. Volunteers for EFT also made personal contact with incarcerated women, visiting, offering social events, books, and gifts, while both paid staff and volunteers oversaw the provision of supportive counselling, post-discharge life planning, employment advice, and later, post-release housing for women. Even those engaged only in prison visiting saw an important link between empathy for prisoners and public advocacy on their behalf: a linking of praxis with politics. As one founder pointed out, it was EFT women’s contact with Mercer inmates that raised their ire over the arbitrary use of the Ontario Female Refuges Act (FRA), which was employed in a draconian manner to incarcerate marginalized women for their unmanageable, ‘idle and dissolute’ behaviour, with this vague wording often a synonym for women’s supposed sexual promiscuity.9 As a result, an EFT volunteer ‘went off to Osgoode Hall, armed with her steno pad to research the law,’ and report back to EFT so it could mount a case against continued use of the act.10 Although deeply involved in volunteer work and fundraising, founders also distanced themselves from more traditional feminine philanthropy. When an international academic congress on corrections was held in Toronto, E. Fry was asked to serve tea to the wives of visitors; the members tactfully declined, noting that they would be listening to the 7 Newsletter, June 1972, Elizabeth Fry Society of Toronto Archives (hereafter EFTA). 8 President’s Report, 1963, EFTA; Hedley Basher, deputy minister, to Elizabeth Fry Society of Toronto, 21 July 1952, file John Howard, container J 26, Department of Reform Institutions, RG 20-16-2, Archives of Ontario (hereafter AO). 9 Joan Sangster, ‘Incarcerating “Bad” Girls: The Regulation of Sexuality through the Female Refuges Act in Ontario, 1920–45,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, 2 (Fall 1996): 239–75. 10 E.A. in interview.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 231 speeches.11 Another E. Fry newsletter noted that ‘we are not the kind of organization that requires you to sell tickets or bake cookies: we work directly with those we would help.’12 We were not ‘do-gooder, bleeding heart’ types, remembers one member; when we met the minister of reform institutions, he initially assumed we must be one more group of ‘good Christian ladies who wanted to preach Jesus saves’ to the inmates – but ‘that was not what we had in mind!’13 Initial members were, not surprisingly, white, well-educated, and predominantly middle class; the organization reflected an alliance of professional women and homemakers, with the latter often balancing child rearing with their EFT commitments. Women also saw volunteer labour as an opportunity for meaningful work in an era when some middle-class mothers still felt the pressure to abandon education and salaried work. One volunteer who had to relocate from British Columbia to Ontario because of her husband’s job, later recalled that the move and three small children meant she had to give up her hopes for post-graduate education; her volunteer work at EFT – especially on a new pre-release program that helped prisoners readjust to the ‘outside’ with day passes – gave her back a sense of social contribution and self-worth.14 Many early volunteers, contends another member, had ‘some connection to the world of work, sometimes part-time work, as women were moving towards more employment.’ She herself worked as a writer, while raising her small sons, and her antipathy to the image of the 1950s as a time of women’s apolitical domesticity reveals much about the self-concept of EFT founders: ‘I am quite irritated with the image of the 1950s, the idea we should go back to those lovely domestic women who stayed home with their sweet little children. Because that was not the fifties [I knew].’15 Like more traditional philanthropy, however, this volunteer work also affected the volunteer’s sense of self: women claimed their consciousness was altered as they made direct contact with the cruel physical regime of incarceration, the humiliating pettiness of prison life. One early volunteer, called on to intervene with an angry inmate, was horrified to find that the woman was protesting the fact that she was never given a photo of her son – as promised – when she gave him up for adoption: ‘That was all she wanted ... I had two sons at home and so I [felt terrible] ... I just tried to talk to her. We both had a good cry ... but it 11 12 13 14 15

Board Minutes, 20 May 1953, EFTA. Newsletter, April 1958, EFTA. E.A. in interview. Newsletter, March 1977, EFTA. E.A. in interview.

232 The Canadian Historical Review [the Mercer] was just so rough on these young women.’16 Volunteers recognized that their more privileged, secure, and comfortable lives separated them from female prisoners, but they also wanted to believe that the gulf separating them might be diminished because of shared experiences. Indeed, both EFT social work staff and the volunteers embraced a similar world view in this regard, seeing feminine and maternal sensibility as one ingredient cementing the penal reform project.17 Maternalism is a flexible and fluid ideological concept that underpins and justifies a wide variety of political and social agendas. While some historians see feminism and maternalism as distinct, others contend that the two could overlap in goals and strategies.18 The latter characterization applies to EFT reformers, who saw women’s familial roles as ‘essential to 16 E.A. in interview. Emphasis in her speech. 17 Some key works include Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State (New York: Routledge, 1993); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Clapp, Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Journal of Women’s History 5, 2 (Fall 1992); Wayne Roberts, ‘Rocking the Cradle for the World: The New Woman and Maternal Feminism, Toronto, 1874–1914,’ in A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880s–1920s, ed. Linda Kealey (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1979); Carol Bacchi, Liberation Deferred: The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Carolyn Strange, ‘The Criminal and Fallen of Their Sex: The Establishment of Canada’s First Women’s Prison, 1874– 1901,’ Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 1, 1 (1985): 79–92; Peter Oliver, ‘To Govern by Kindness: The First Two Decades of the Mercer Reformatory for Women,’ in Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Crime and Criminal Justice, ed. Jim Phillips et al. (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1994); Joan Sangster, Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002); Tamara Myers, ‘Women Policing Women: A Patrol Woman in Montreal in the 1910s,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 4 (1992): 229–45. On earlier American prison reformers, Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Nicole Hann Rahfter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800–1935 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985). 18 For the former view, see Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, for the latter, Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. For some sympathetic views of the politics of maternalism in Canada: Veronica Strong-Boag, ‘Ever a Crusader: Nellie McClung, First Wave Feminist,’ in Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, ed. V. Strong-Boag and Anita Clair Fellman (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1986), 308–21; John Manley, ‘Women on the Left in the 1930s: The Case of the Toronto CCF Women’s Joint Committee,’ Atlantis 5 (Spring 1980): 100–17; Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–60 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 233 the social order’ and believed their socialization as women and mothers gave them ‘special insights in reform campaigns directed at women.’ At the same time, they also laid claim to goals of female autonomy, independence, and equality.19 The maternalism of prison reformers was never of one piece, chronologically or thematically,20 nor was this the only rationale underpinning E. Fry work. While maternalism was used as a rhetorical, mobilizing strategy, staff and volunteers also placed immense stock in the expert guidance provided by criminologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Given current Foucauldian debates about the changing modes of regulating female prisoners, it is important not to dichotomize these two kinds of knowledge and reform strategies. While some criminologists see earlier maternalist, non-expert, or lay knowledge of reformers replaced increasingly over the twentieth century by that of trained professionals,21 these modes of regulation could also become entangled. Women’s lay knowledge was the product of their formal education and informal socialization, both of which were shaped, in this period, by the ideological assumptions that domesticity must be learned, professionalized, and perfected, and forms of expert knowledge drew on suppositions about women’s character that assumed that nurturing, passivity, and heterosexuality were at the core of women’s character. Indeed, social work experts like Haslam – more often the front-line workers with criminalized women – were part of a feminized profession in which maternal compassion and scientific training might presumably coexist. ANALYZING WOMEN’S CRIMINALITY

This investment of the EFT in new expert knowledge was made clear in its analysis of the causes of criminality. While EFT writers on women’s crime, particularly Phyllis Haslam, pushed against boundaries of 1950s criminology, it did not break free of its major suppositions, accepting its positivist claims and patriarchal suppositions that female crime was

19 This draws on Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, 55. 20 Even EFT founders did not use maternalist rhetoric in exactly the same way: some saw themselves in a ‘motherly role towards the poor,’ as Linda Gordon puts it, while others did not. Their views were different from earlier maternalists described by Carolyn Strange, though there may have been ideological overlap between Phyllis Haslam and American prison reformer Miriam van Walters, in part because of their social gospel inclinations. Estelle Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 21 Hannah-Moffat, Punishment in Disguise, chap. 4.

234 The Canadian Historical Review masked and often caused by marred familial relations.22 Even though a structural analysis of material deprivation and a lack of social services for women were cited as reasons for women’s conflicts with the law, emphasis was still placed on the need to save the emotionally and psychically damaged individual. Bad mothers, broken homes, and marred selfimages were often listed as the causes of criminality, along with an inability to embrace healthy heterosexuality. While critical of the ubiquitous sexual double standard that condemned pregnant girls and not their boyfriends, Haslam also criticized mothers who did not offer daughters healthy role models as affectionate wives and mothers (once even blaming working mothers),23 asserting that ‘anger and a lack of love’24 often lay at the heart of women’s criminality. Drawing on prevailing criminology, E. Fry examined women’s damaged self-concept and argued, in a maternalist vein as well, that criminalized women were ‘more emotionally disturbed than men ... more concerned about love, affection, having a home,’ and that society should provide ‘treatment of the mother, or potential mother’s emotional problems.’25 While the intent was to provide sympathetic aid to women, these methods might suggest limited solutions of individual and family self-help, or what current writers refer to as ‘responsibilization’; that is, the state’s indirect and subtle attempts to reshape behaviour by ‘activating corrective action by non-state organizations and actors.’26 On one hand, E. Fry was extremely critical of vagrancy laws that criminalized ‘the destitute ... [and the] teenager who has run away from home’; it tried to redefine alcohol and drug offences as medical prob22 Shelley Gavigan, ‘Women’s Crime: New Perspectives and Old Theories,’ in Too Few To Count: Canadian Women in Conflict with the Law, ed. Ellen Adelberg and Claudia Currie (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1987), 47–66; see, for example, Otto Pollak and Alfred Friedman, eds., Female Sexual Delinquency (Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books, 1969). 23 Haslam argued that the typical female offender ‘often doesn’t have a relationship with her parents ... [and perhaps] her mother works, believing financial security is more important than her daughter.’ Phyllis Haslam, ‘The Damaged Girl in a Distorted Society,’ n.d., vol. 15, Dorothy Flaherty Papers [hereinafter Flaherty papers], MG 31 K25, National Archives of Canada [hereinafter NA]. 24 Phyllis Haslam, ‘The Woman Offender,’ 1970, vol. 15, Flaherty papers, NA. 25 Margaret Benson (an E. Fry researcher), ‘Workshop Report: Special Problems Relating to the Adult Female Offender,’ Canadian Journal of Corrections 10 (1968): 208. 26 David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 124; Hannah-Moffat, Punishment in Disguise, 165. See also David Garland, ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society,’ British Journal of Criminology 36, 4 (1996): 445–71.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 235 lems; and it did allude to problems of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Haslam noted that many young women in conflict with the law were ‘driven from home’ as victims of ‘sexual perversion,’27 yet at the same time, such offenders were described with reference to their individual maladjustment. She ‘seeks to destroy herself,’ her ‘sense of worthlessness’ may lead to ‘promiscuity’; she often has experienced ‘breakdown in relationships with her family’; she may transfer her hostility to women, have a poor concept of men, and ‘lesbianism may also be a problem’ were some of the phrases used.28 Discussions of prostitution, though they addressed economic issues and were deeply critical of Canada’s arbitrary and discriminatory laws, also referred to young prostitutes as ‘acting out their sense of worthlessness and hatred against people.’29 E. Fry activists saw prostitution as an unfortunate and disdained life, rather than as a choice (admittedly among limited choices) of work made by women.30 The image EFT presented of the released prostitute in need of aid, for instance, was a woman facing moral choices. In an NFB movie, The Street, made with E. Fry’s input in the late 1950s, images of temptation and backsliding – a woman in a cocktail bar, alone, attired suggestively, looking for a pickup – are the visual tropes of women falling off the wagon of rehabilitation. Public examples of rehabilitated offenders – the social work success story – often included a good marriage in the tale, with women settling down to more stable family life.31 However, it is important to concede that this was not the only story: there were examples proffered of women who broke free of families that could not be easily fixed,32 and when asked why women ended up in the Mercer, one early volunteer replied, with no recourse to individual blame, ‘[They had] no power: they had no money, no education, no 27 Haslam, ‘The Damaged Girl in a Distorted Society.’ 28 Brief to the Canadian Committee on Corrections from the Elizabeth Fry Society of Toronto, 1967, 12–13, EFTA. 29 Report of Executive Director, 1963, EFTA. EFT was very critical of the ‘Vag C’ clause in the vagrancy statute that criminalized women for the status offence of being a ‘common prostitute or night walker.’ This clause was deleted in 1972. 30 By portraying prostitution as a moral issue, stressing the psychologically scarred backgrounds of prostitutes, they were precariously close to earlier maternalists whose reform work was bound up with judgmental ‘moralization’ of working-class women. See Glasbeek, ‘Maternalism Meets the Criminal Law’; Frances Shaver, ‘The Regulation of Prostitution: Avoiding the Morality Trap,’ Canadian Journal of Law and Society 9, 1 (1994): 123–46. 31 Karen Tice, Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 32 Annual Executive Director’s Report, May 1958, EFTA.

236 The Canadian Historical Review power.’33 Haslam’s counselling experience may well have encouraged her conclusion that criminalized women, especially victims of violence, suffered from damaged and traumatized psyches. The question was whether these then became identified as the causes of crime, rather than the outcome of criminalization, with the latter shaped more profoundly by familial and social relations of inequality. A belief in the value of criminology, medical diagnosis, and social work practice, along with volunteers’ maternalist/feminine sensibilities, also shaped EFT’s ambivalent relationship to the state. The EFT was almost immediately bound to the state both by deference and financial reliance. Not only did E. Fry receive a yearly government grant to operate, but it also had respect for the experts increasingly utilized by the state, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, or criminology professors tied to universities. In 1956 it re-affirmed its decision not to take ‘a public stand’ on prison issues but rather work with ‘friends’ in the ministry.34 Some members’ early forays into prisons almost took on the aura of naive tourist travel; initially, they seldom questioned the guided tours of the Mercer Reformatory in which the superintendent exhibited her ‘spotless hallways and the new home ec. room.’35 The EFT also became a provider of services, such as counselling and post-release housing, on behalf of the state. The latter was an ambitious project, entailing fundraising to buy a house, furnish it, and keep it running for women who needed a temporary place to stay. Nowhere was the union of expert and non-expert care more visible than in the house project. Presented to the membership and the public as a ‘home not a house,’ this halfway house was to combine maternal care with social work counselling. Its staff included house ‘mothers’ who were to be ‘friendly, though not too inquisitive, kind, not indulgent, firm, but not dictatorial, who will provide a clean, comfortable home with good meals.’36 This ideal mother figure was repeatedly used as a means of explaining the feminine distinctiveness of EFT’s rehabilitation project, just as other E. Frys drew on similar familial/maternal analogies to describe their post-release work.37

33 E.A. in interview. 34 Annual Report, 1956, EFTA. 35 For example, ‘I’m sorry we didn’t have time to see the alcoholics at Mimico.’ E. Fry president to St Virgin, director of reform institutions, 23 November 1952, container J 26, RG 20-16-2, AO. 36 Brief to Canadian Committee on Corrections, 1967, EFTA. 37 Speech by Sylvia Gayle Kirby, ‘The Elizabeth Fry Family: When Is a House a Home?’ vol. 10, Flaherty Papers, NA.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 237 The EFT also made distinctions between the professional advice of its hired staff (social workers, by and large) and the volunteer care of unpaid workers, even though the maternal house mother was a hired staff member. Similarly, the ‘valuable assistance’ of the volunteers who had originally founded the organization was distinguished from the crucial diagnostic role played by the paid staff, trained in the ‘social sciences ... competent, professional women more readily able to discern the causes’ of, and therefore solution for, women’s criminality. Such distinctions between expert and lay advice did not cause friction, because ultimately staff and volunteers embraced a view of experts as those with unique skills, superior knowledge, and better ability to handle offenders and corrections issues.38 Non-expert and expert care thus remained entangled, sometimes joined by the maternal metaphor.39 Rehabilitation services such as the halfway house symbolized E. Fry’s role as an ally of the government while simultaneously exposing the ongoing contradiction of providing ‘maternal’ care that was both nurturing and disciplinary, involving kindness and surveillance. After all, the house mother imposed curfews and rules, and residents could be removed for liquor, drug, or sexual infractions. Because E. Fry was stepping in to fill a void left by the state in its provision of probationrelated social services, and because of its ideological investment in the criminology of the time, it inevitably assumed some of the same powers of surveillance as the state’s correctional bureaucracy. Penal reformers could inadvertently take on a disciplinary role in their attempt to refashion criminalized women into normal women, who were expected in turn to assume their own self-regulation and self-governance as part of their program of reform.40 ADVOCATING FOR REFORM: NATIVE WOMEN AND CRIMINALIZATION

Shortly after it was founded, however, E. Fry also became involved in a number of issues that led to criticisms of the government, even if its 38 When Agnes Macphail died, E. Fry established a scholarship in her name for a student in University of Toronto’s School of Social Work, an indication of its strong investment in the social sciences and in social work. 39 It is significant that Haslam was praised for both her innovative work as executive director and her religious and feminine qualities of ‘compassion, selfless devotion, warmth, caring, generosity.’ Special newsletter on Phyllis Haslam’s retirement, 1978, EFTA. 40 I draw here on the ideas of both moral regulation and governmentality theorists. See Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

238 The Canadian Historical Review initial lobbying was done quite privately: EFT’s attempts to secure legal and penal changes to aid Native women provide one example of such lobbying. In 1957–8, the EFT repeatedly urged an unsympathetic Ontario government to remove the section of the Female Refuges Act that criminalized the ‘idle and dissolute’ woman, knowing that this statute was increasingly used against Native women.41 While successful in persuading the government to drop this section of the FRA, the more widespread problem of the escalating arrests and incarceration of Native women was far more difficult for EFT to grapple with. When discussing this ‘Indian problem,’ as it was termed at the time, the EFT generally looked to mainstream social work paradigms, which in this era called for the more effective integration of Indians into the social and educational benefits of the welfare state, ‘thus effecting their full assimilation ... to Canadian life.’42 Even some First Nations spokespersons appearing before parliamentary committees employed a similar language, urging ‘incorporation and integration’ of Indians into ‘full citizenship.’43 E. Fry’s prescriptions relied heavily on the research and thinking of social work practitioners, bureaucrats in the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), churches working with Indians, and the IndianEskimo Association of Canada, a non-Native voluntary association dedicated to better understanding of Native issues. They also consulted anthropologists and sent one staff member to Red Lake and Sioux Lookout to find out why so many women from this northern area ended up in the Mercer. This E. Fry worker did consult Native elders about how to tackle this problem, but in general, E. Fry’s approach relied more heavily on non-Native experts, and they often worked in concert with Indian 41 Joan Sangster, ‘Defining Sexual “Promiscuity”: “Race,” Gender and Class in the Operation of Female Refuges Act, 1930–60,’ in Crimes of Colour: Racialization and the Criminal Justice System in Canada, ed. Wendy Chan and Kiran Mirchandani (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 45–66. 42 For example, Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs, quoted in H.B. Hawthorne, A Survey of the Indians of Canada (Ottawa: Indian Affairs Branch, 1967), pt. 1, 326; Maysie Rogers, ‘Indian Affairs,’ Canadian Welfare (March 1951): 18; Joan Sangster, ‘She Is Hostile to Our Ways: First Nations Girls Sentenced to Ontario Training Schools for Girls, 1933–60,’ Law and History Review 20, 1 (Spring 2002): 67–9. New social work paradigms appeared by the mid-1960s, especially in Canadian Welfare, with an emphasis on community development and protection of Indian identity, though community development initiatives were not unproblematic: see Hugh Shewell, ‘“Bitterness Behind Every Smiling Face”: Community Development and Canada’s First Nations,’ Canadian Historical Review 83, 1 (March 2002): 82–4. 43 Elliott Moses, Oshwegan Nation, Minutes 1960, Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs, Canada, 307–8.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 239 Affairs bureaucrats on projects such as employment and post-release programs for Indian women. Still, by the late 1950s, EFT was developing a critical stance on the state’s treatment of First Nations women. It decried the ‘deplorable conditions’ on reserves, lobbied the federal government to provide better ‘education, health services and housing’ to Native peoples, criticized the lack of rights and services for Métis women, and condemned Native women’s loss of status on marriage to non-Natives, pointing to the negative consequences of this discrimination for their children.44 E. Fry’s analysis was made clear in its 1955 brief to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs. It decried the government’s inattention to the growing incarceration of Indian women on vagrancy and alcohol charges, and condemned discriminatory sentencing based on race: ‘the non-Indian girl receives ten days for an offence the Indian girl is getting three months for ... when she is sentenced – in a northern community – she is given as long a term as possible to get her out of the way and possibly out of town.’45 Identifying ‘social decay’ in northern communities as a cause of crime, much as social workers lamented the ‘culture of poverty’ in the underclass, it called for immediate material improvements for Natives: ‘living conditions are so unsatisfactory and primitive in these northern areas ... that the inhabitants seem to lack purpose in life or any sense of belonging. This, with the fact that the Indian girl has received no training for a job ... little education and no explanation of the cultural differences of Indian and non-Indian [means] ... that her delinquency is the direct result.’46 Once incarcerated, it concluded, Native women were further disadvantaged by the bankruptcy of the Mercer Reformatory’s rehabilitative program in which female prisoners learned the discipline of washing floors but received little education, job training, or aid reintegrating into society. While stressing the economic and social marginalization of First Nations women, EFT was less attuned to persisting cultural and social strengths in Native communities, or to the intense linguistic and cultural alienation of Native women in prison. Like other social work writing of this period, its approach created an unfortunate image of a somewhat backward people: ‘the Indian girl may be happy in her jail surroundings since sometimes for the first time in her life she has been introduced to ... sheets on her bed, modern plumbing and warm buildings ... In many 44 Newsletter, 1959, EFTA. 45 Brief to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs, 1955, EFTA. Though undated, this appears to be 1955. 46 Brief, 1955, EFTA.

240 The Canadian Historical Review cases there is no stigma attached to a jail sentence for the Indian girl since there is a higher standard of living in the institution than she ever had at home.’47 Ultimately, its proposed solutions involved the provision of special social services for Indian women by white experts, such as specially trained social workers and probation officers, though it also recommended better duty counsel, travelling magistrates, and separation of police work and legal prosecution in the North. The EFT’s critique, then, indicated a deeply felt sense of injustice about the legacies of colonialism, though its solutions endorsed a liberal, reformist faith in the power of the welfare state to provide equal opportunity and services as means of integrating Indians into the benefits of Canadian ‘progress.’ Indeed, E. Fry sometimes spoke the same language as the state, even if it chided governments for not doing enough to promote equality; this was apparent in an exchange of letters with Indian Affairs Minister Ellen Fairclough over the government’s failure to provide adequate ‘education and guidance’ to Indian women.48 Like some provincial officials, EFT also urged the integration of Native children in white schools, assuming that segregated services for Natives were inferior – even though it was concerned about the resulting racism children encountered.49 The EFT ultimately reflected the prevailing bureaucratic and social work views of Native communities as damaged, decayed, even backward, with outsiders providing the helping hand that Indians needed.50 However well-intentioned EFT’s embrace of this liberal, integrative model was, the goal of full integration into Canadian society carried with it historical baggage of assimilation, for Native peoples a concept inseparable from white paternalism and racism. Within a few years, by the end of the 1960s, this solution was being publicly repudiated by Native peoples, symbolized by their rejection of the 1969 white paper.

47 Ibid. 48 Kathleen Cuffe to Ellen Fairclough, 19 November and 14 January 1958; Ellen Fairclough to Cuffe, 10 December and 22 January 1958, Briefs and Letters, EFTA. 49 Minutes of the Public Action Committee, 23 January 1957, EFTA; EFT Minutes, 13 February 1957, and Newsletter, March 1957. The education minister was wary of segregated education, a term in the 1950s linked to racism, but segregation might also mean the provision of services on reserves guaranteed by treaties. 50 Similar recommendations for family services, improved judicial procedures, the creation of urban Native community centres, and job training characterized their brief to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs in 1960. Calls were also made for the provision of social workers trained to work with Indians. Canada, Joint Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs, Minutes and Proceedings, 1960, 1407–8.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 241 CRITICIZING THE STATE: THE 1964 MERCER INQUIRY

The Toronto E. Fry intervened in a number of political issues, ranging from opposition to some parts of the federal Fauteaux Report on the treatment of prisoners (notably the recommendation to build one central prison for federally sentenced women),51 to harsh criticisms of juvenile detention in the Ontario Training School for Girls. None, however, became the political hot potato that the 1964 Mercer Grand Jury report did: the political fallout revealed deepening tensions between E. Fry and the state, the conflicting claims of various experts to speak on behalf of female prisoners, contradictions between humanitarian and advocacy strategies within E. Fry, and serious problems at the Mercer Reformatory itself. Historically, grand juries in Ontario performed annual inspections of public institutions such as jails and reformatories, though by 1964 this practice of citizen inspection seemed to have become an empty exercise since it was hardly a surprise visit. A former Mercer inmate told the press that such inspections were ‘treated with humour’ as the women were ‘herded’ from one section of the reformatory to the other in new, clean uniforms to pretend they were engaged in some useful activity for the probing eyes of the visitors.52 Breaking with this tradition, a grand jury in 1964, led by its foreman Richard Lyall, visited the Mercer and produced a scathing report, leaked to the media, of incompetence and deficiencies. Perhaps purposely crafted for public exposure, and undoubtedly problematic in its homophobic concerns, Lyall’s report nonetheless exposed pressing problems within the reformatory. It claimed that educational and vocational programs were almost non-existent, indicated by the ‘staged’ typing class, with no teacher, that he witnessed, and that medical and dental care were inadequate, the latter primarily comprising extractions while the doctor was ‘often under the influence of alcohol.’53 The library had few books and a librarian who could not speak English; the home economics classroom was unused; and far worse, detention cells used for solitary confinement were inhumane. Although the superintendent initially kept these cells off the official tour, claiming they were seldom 51 Canada. Committee to Inquire into the Principles and Procedures Followed in the Remission Service of the Department of Justice (Ottawa, 1956). 52 Box 6.2, Exhibits, RG 20 H-1 (Mercer Inquiry), AO. 53 Similar charges surfaced in the legislature: ‘Mercer Inmate Told Nothing Was Wrong, Then Found She Had Cancer,’ Globe and Mail, 18 February 1965.

242 The Canadian Historical Review used, a persistent Lyall and other jurors saw them on a second surprise visit. Constructed in the nineteenth century, the cells measured four by seven feet, had sheet-metal doors, had no toilets or lights, and inmates received ‘different’ diets (i.e., only bread or meatloaf) and were denied reading material. Lyall’s report also revealed a voyeuristic, homophobic fascination with lesbians. He asked the superintendent questions about the separation of such ‘sexual offenders’ (indicating he saw them as one and the same) and claimed that the superintendent had pointed out some ‘butch boys’ on their tour but she added that sexual offenders were not segregated since you could not ‘tell them apart.’54 Lyall’s claim that the toleration of lesbianism was another indication of serious problems at the Mercer revealed his own prejudices, soon mirrored in the media coverage of the grand jury report. Reporters sought out first-hand corroboration of homosexual liaisons from ex-inmates, while the superintendent tried to reassure the press that, when she recognized a lesbian, she ‘segregates [her] from the younger girls,’ thus reaffirming the stereotype of the aggressive and sexually corrupting ‘butch.’55 The grand jury’s recommendation that Mercer might as well be classified a ‘jail’ and that the superintendent, who was ‘not sufficiently qualified,’ be fired, infuriated Allan Grossman, the minister responsible, who had to calm a media frenzy and a storm in the legislature over the report. Because Lyall had met with E. Fry after his first visit to the Mercer, Grossman presumed that they conspired to defame the Mercer, even orchestrating the press scoops of Lyall’s report – a view lacking any concrete evidence. The minister initiated damage control, taking reporters on his own guided tour of Mercer’s spotless hallways, and commissioning his own blue-ribbon inquiry of investigation. While Lyall’s homophobia and use of unsubstantiated rumour were reprehensible, his response to reporters taken in by clean hallways was appropriately scathing: ‘if you have 150 cleaning women in any building it would be clean. I am not interested necessarily in clean and tidy. I am interested in their ability to get an education ... [As for detention,] so what [if they broke the law,] we are supposed to be interested in rehabilitation and this building was condemned 44 yr ago!’56 Sidelining calls from E. Fry and opposition critics for a truly independent inquiry, the minister set up an inquiry staffed with appoint54 Globe and Mail, 6 November 1964. 55 Toronto Telegram, 5 November 1964. 56 Transcript of CBLT radio interview with Lyall, box 5, RG 20 H-1 (Mercer Inquiry), AO.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 243 ments ranging from apparently neutral judges to experts with obvious ties to the government, sometimes even government employees. However well qualified, this group was more likely to endorse than critique the overall aims of corrections.57 Their much longer, detailed, and betterresearched report did expose problems with Lyall’s hastily written charges: the library certainly had some books and did have a part-time librarian, and the Mercer had advertised for a typing teacher, so it could argue that it did offer typing classes (though E. Fry’s doubt about such educational provision was based on its own observations).58 Inquiry members were anxious to defend the reputation of a fellow professional, the doctor, rejecting claims that one woman had died because of inadequate treatment, directly refuting inmates’ claims that she bled, unattended, during a miscarriage. But their report strained to defend the institution at any cost. For example, their own dental statistics in an appendix indicated that extractions did outpace fillings by 10 to 1, and despite their defence of the doctor, it is revealing that EFT’s private minutes had long noted reports that the doctor ‘was invariably under the influence of alcohol.’ The EFT pressed to have another woman present for gynecological exams,59 a concern that they repeated, along with other instances of inadequate medical care, to the minister just before the scandal erupted.60 Suffusing the inquiry was the claim that the citizens of the grand jury had ‘no special training or knowledge in matters of penology and criminology,’61 resulting in a misguided analysis; the inquiry’s expert opinions were juxtaposed to citizens’ lay and ignorant ones. At the same time, inquiry members defended Mercer Superintendent Jean Burrows (a nurse who lacked ‘expert’ training) as thoroughly competent, and they were not averse to securing medical information that should have been 57 The head of the government’s appointed advisory council on corrections, Rev. Martin Pinker, also on the inquiry, offered his motto on prisons: ‘Penology shows us to make haste slowly.’ File History of MACTO (Mercer Inquiry), box 5, RG 20 H1, AO. 58 A volunteer wrote to the publisher of the Toronto Star criticizing the use of a photo of Mercer women, backs to the camera, in typing class. Many E. Fry volunteers believed it was staged and misleading: ‘[We knew] those typewriters were dusty, never used.’ E.A. in interview. 59 Board Minutes, 8 April 1959, EFTA. 60 Box 5, RG 20 H-1 (Mercer Inquiry), AO. E. Fry had already submitted a long list of the Mercer’s medical problems, including the fact that the doctor prescribed only laxatives and aspirin, had women work up until their due date (or as some volunteers claimed, until they went into labour), made a woman with a neck brace remove it in order to work, and so on. 61 Box 5, Inquiry Transcript, 50, RG 20 H-1 (Mercer Inquiry), AO.

244 The Canadian Historical Review confidential,62 or leaking letters of protest written by inmates – as long as they justified their own defence of the Mercer. In the case of lesbianism, the inquiry’s invocation of expert opinion had contradictory results. The government inquiry rejected Lyall’s objectionable equation of sex offenders with lesbians, but then went on to pathologize lesbianism as a shameful illness. Ministry experts, including their leading researcher and University of Toronto professor Tadeusz Grygier, stressed that lesbianism was far from ‘condoned’ in the Mercer and was often ‘temporary, the result of confinement and emotional deprivation,’ a momentary lapse into ‘abnormality.’ The Mercer psychiatrist agreed it was ‘a problem’ that had to be ‘controlled’ by separating some women, but reassured the public that the government had these lesbians (or such ‘perversion,’ as the press said) under restraint.63 Replicating the prevailing medical views of prison lesbians in the United States, these experts thus pathologized even as they ‘excused’ the existence of lesbianism.64 The inquiry was hard pressed not to admit that the physical facilities of the aged Mercer were decent, but they refused to call for an end to the use of detention cells, allowing only that their use might not lead to a ‘positive’ approach to reform. Some members even ventured that detention was actually an advance from corporal punishment. Detention was excused as a form of useful ‘disassociation’65 for difficult or violent inmates by some inquiry experts, language that masked the fact that this was clearly a form of de-humanizing punishment intended to break the inmate’s will since she had to profess her ‘regret’ before she was let out.66 Moreover, some ministry officials had long admitted, in private, that physical conditions in the Mercer, including these cells, were terrible; seven years before, one bureaucrat urged the Mercer’s closure, noting that most citizens saw it as decrepit place in which ‘felons [were] housed in filth, squalor and idleness.’ Failure to obtain a new building, Gross62 An inmate who had complained to E. Fry about her inadequate medical treatment was targeted as an unreliable hypochondriac by Mercer staff who forwarded letters sent by her father, as well as her medical information, to the Inquiry. Group letters, including one in which the women disputed Lyall’s charges about lesbianism, were also provided. Transcript and letter in Inquiry clipping files, n.d., RG 20 H1 (Mercer Inquiry), AO. 63 Ibid., 9–10 and appendix 7. 64 Estelle Freedman, ‘The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual,’ Feminist Studies 22, 2 (1996): 397–423. 65 Inquiry Transcript, 26, AO. 66 Ibid., 25–9.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 245 man later claimed, had much to do with cabinet financial priorities, as his colleagues ‘[did not] give a damn about a bunch of prostitutes, and by and large that’s what you had in the Mercer.’67 E. Fry’s initial response to Lyall’s report was to commend the grand jury’s ‘courage’ for offering critical perspectives on an institution long ignored by the government and the public. By the time the government’s hand-picked inquiry reported, EFT had rejected some of Lyall’s recommendations, such as renaming the Mercer a jail; it attempted to re-orient public discussion by offering positive recommendations such as better educational and health programs for prisoners, the removal of alcoholic repeaters from the system, the provision of a canteen and spending money for women, and better use of after-care agencies like itself. On one issue, it did reject the experts, opposing the use of detention cells: denying women in solitary regular meals, it insisted, was an ‘incredible’ punishment in the modern age.68 Interestingly, they also avoided the question of lesbianism, an indication of their own discomfort with female homosexuality.69 The problem for E. Fry, of course, was that the minister’s exonerating inquiry drew on the expert knowledge that it so championed, creating a Catch 22 for itself. The expert legitimatization for the penal project, encapsulated in the inquiry, also had a broader ideological influence on the public, and the power of the political state to use the inquiry for this end should not be forgotten. By hand-picking the inquiry, by providing some evidence but not other information, by using medical and sociological language (like disassociation) to justify punishment, an image was created of the penal system as strict but fair, merciful and judicious. Perhaps, in this instance, E. Fry’s moral claim to speak on behalf of women on the basis of maternal, female empathy might have been a more strategic weapon – though it tended not to use it. E. Fry’s strained relations with the superintendent and the ministry simply crystallized its increasingly critical view of the state’s penal policies, a turn of events too threatening for some of its own members. A few E. Fry members resigned, decrying the replacement of philanthropy with advocacy. One woman told the minister (who then brandished her letter as evidence of E. Fry’s internal problems) that she left E. Fry be67 Peter Oliver, Unlikely Tory: The Life and Politics of Allan Grossman (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1985), 200. 68 Letter to Members, 14 December 1964, and Newsletter, January 1965, EFTA. 69 For another example of such discomfort, see Becki Ross, ‘Detaining the (Tattooed) Delinquent Body,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, 4 (1997): 561–95.

246 The Canadian Historical Review cause she admired the Mercer superintendent, a ‘gracious, Christian woman who devoted her life to these girls,’ while E. Fry had abandoned ‘helping others less fortunate than ourselves ... I do not believe in leaving God out of the work.’70 The Mercer scandal also exposed inevitable tensions between penal reformers and state representatives. Despite a veneer of politeness, some ministry officials had never really welcomed E. Fry’s policy input, seeing it as ladies’ unknowledgeable meddling.71 And despite some collaborative efforts, the Mercer superintendent resented E. Fry’s presence, often trying to have members’ movements in the reformatory severely limited,72 or once trying to imply to the minister that they were led by pinko troublemakers.73 E. Fry Board minutes are peppered with minor skirmishes with her, especially her petty use of authority, ‘not letting the girls outside in winter’ or ‘cutting the E. Fry tags off their donated Christmas presents.’ 74 The question of unfettered control in an institution premised on the removal of women’s freedom was crucial here. The superintendent viewed challenges to her control with trepidation75 and especially feared alliances between E. Fry and the inmates. Mercer staff complained bitterly that E. Fry was ‘vilifying staff,’ by ‘listening to’ inmates, who they claimed dismissively had ‘a genius for manipulative tactics’; such ‘subversive manoeuvre,’ they charged, would undermine ‘the whole structure’ of the Mercer.76 Not only was it difficult for EFT to counter the prestige of the expert inquiry, but it was also hard for E. Fry to promote the need for more rehabilitation, less punishment, given the tenor of the media discussion, which focused either on the highly personalized battle between Lyall and the government, or on sensational ‘true confession’ tales of life behind bars, often featuring completely atypical inmates, such as one with a 70 Mrs V. Sarty to Allan Grossman, 6 November 1964, Inquiry exhibits, RG 20 H1, AO. 71 Basher to Minister John Foote, 9 June 1953, RG 20-16-2, J 28, Mercer file, AO. 72 Basher to E. Fry, 16 June 1955, 27 October 1955, and E. Fry to Basher, 24 November 1955, container 43, RG 20-16-2, Mercer file, AO. 73 Burrows tried to tell the minister of EFT President Tracy’s ‘CCF’ sympathies, linking her ‘radical’ politics to her prison reform work. Jean Burrows to Basher, 23 February 1959, with handwritten comments by Basher for the minister, container 53, RG 20, AO. 74 Minutes, 10 April 1957, EFTA. 75 The same was true in the Ontario Training School for Girls. Ruth Bentley to Virgin: ‘I do not agree with E. Fry having access’ to our girls. Container J 37, Galt file, RG 20-16-2, AO. 76 Emphasis is mine. Letter from senior staff to minister Grossman, 19 October 1964, box 5 (Mercer Inquiry), AO.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 247 university degree.77 In seeking out ex-inmates, the press ironically validated a group of women they usually had little time or respect for, but the resulting stories offered polarized versions of life behind bars, either testimonials of Burrows’s Christian kindness or exposés of the Mercer’s harsh discipline and medical mistreatment, with some inmates claiming they were threatened with a ‘strapping’ if they dared even speak to the media or politicians.78 Even exposés with a liberal veneer could detour into exhibitionism and inadvertently reinforce a law-and-order mentality. Ex-inmates told reporters how prisoners secured narcotics, sent out illegal letters, disobeyed rules, and engaged in lesbian affairs: for some, this led to the conclusion that the penal regime was not stringent enough. However strong expert, positivist notions of ‘curing crime’ had become, they could be subverted by powerful ideological investment in notions of individual blame, self-control, and morality: thus, female inmates were responsible for their own fate, however unpleasant it turned out to be in the Mercer. Though inmates’ views were clearly not of one piece, they did indicate displeasure with negative, stigmatizing stereotypes of female offenders,79 and this might include their wish to be distanced from lesbianism.80 The scandal, especially attacks in the legislature and the press’s images of a Dickensian institution, did have an effect on the government. Nor could the history of the Mercer be ignored when the press dredged it up. Since 1948, there had been a number of riots at the Mercer, often over issues such as food and bad treatment; one involved 100 women and 50 Toronto police, while another was quelled with tear gas.81 (Two years after the 1964 inquiry, yet another riot over the lack of 77 Hardly an accurate portrayal of the Mercer population. Toronto Telegram, 6 November 1964. 78 Toronto Telegram, 27 January 1965. 79 After an earlier newspaper column by Lotta Dempsey describing E. Fry’s charity work with Mercer unfortunates – including ‘sub-normal, psychotic or neurotic, unstable’ women – many inmates signed a letter denouncing her and E. Fry. E. Fry, of course, did not write the column. The letter, given its language and terminology, might have been encouraged by staff already upset with E. Fry’s interference in their work. Quotes from Toronto Star, 16 December 1959, container J 62, Mercer Miscellaneous, RG 20, 70-10-5, AO. One Mercer social worker tried to defend E Fry: Letters to E. Fry Society from 72 inmates 26 December 1959 and Maurice Flint to Lotta Dempsey, 29 December 1959. 80 One defender of Burrows took issue with Lyall’s questions about lesbianism: ‘[You] said lesbianism is accepted and practised. This is a lie ... why are you so interested in the perversions of the institution?’ Copy of letter to press, n.d., Mercer Inquiry, AO. 81 Globe and Mail, 26 June 1948; Container J 48, Mercer file, RG 20 68-10-14, AO. See also Mercer file, J 34, RG 20-16-2, AO.

248 The Canadian Historical Review medical treatment for an inmate resulted in human injuries and physical damages).82 Even the conservative Globe and Mail said enough was enough: it reminded its readers that the government had talked since 1930 of closing the Mercer, an institution, it claimed, better referred to as ‘a jail’ or a ‘training school in prostitution and criminal activities.’83 The grand jury report thus pushed the Tory cabinet, little interested in spending money or time on corrections, to close the Mercer and open a new institution based on the cottage group-living system: the Vanier Correctional Centre, first announced in 1967, opened its doors in 1969.84 Grossman also attempted to fix some of the problems giving rise to the scandal, securing funds to initiate what were considered more progressive and professional models of social work and medical treatment for inmates. E. Fry would later commend his role in these changes, as well as the temporary leave program initiated by his ministry.85 The 1964 inquiry, then, was something of a watershed, crystallizing E. Fry’s antipathy to many aspects of the penal project and forcing it to speak out publicly and critically about the Mercer and the state’s failure to embrace a rehabilitative program. The organization did not come to embrace a radical abolitionist platform in the 1970s, as some anti-prison activists like Claire Culhane did,86 instead maintaining a reformist view that inevitably oscillated between critique of, and cooperation with, the state. In a 1973 retrospective, it stressed that ‘social action,’ especially a critique of prisons, was key to its work, though it never abandoned its ‘frank discussions’ with the government and attempts to ‘assist it in positive ways.’87 How could it not? Some cooperation was necessary since it was increasingly placed in the role of providing services – such as postrelease housing or probationary counselling – in conjunction with the state, a trend bound to accelerate after the federal 1969 Ouimet Committee on Corrections recommended closer partnerships between voluntary agencies and the state – thus resulting in more contracting out of probation and other services to social agencies. If the ongoing contradiction between advocacy and providing needed services, being inside and outside the state, did not alter, some E. Fry 82 Globe and Mail, 4–5 July 1966. 83 Globe and Mail, 6 November 1964. 84 Peter Oliver, ‘Reforming Reform Institutions’ in Canadian Penology: Advanced Perspectives and Research, ed. Kevin McCormick and Livy Visano (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 1992), 167–88. 85 On EFT’s later praise for Grossman, see Newsletter, June 1968, March 1969, EFTA. 86 Claire Culhane, Barred from Prison: A Personal Account (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1979). 87 History of Social Action in EFT, 8, EFTA.

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 249 activists’ positive faith in an expert–government alliance was sorely tested. In an article penned in the next decade, a founding member of the Toronto group, Eileen Morris, wrote a deeply researched, impassioned indictment of Canadian prisons for Homemaker magazine. Explaining crime with indices such as unemployment and youth alienation, she argued that Canadian society had criminalized poverty and addiction. Prisons, she argued, warehoused humans needing retraining, education, jobs, and medical treatment, offering them instead violence and despair. When EFT was founded, she noted, ‘I believed that, as informed and concerned citizens we could improve the system ... I realized that 25 years had gone by since our first well-intentioned efforts to change the system began in 1952. Now I feel strong sympathy with those who advocate the abolition of all prisons because prisons are unreformable.’88 CONCLUSION

Despite Morris’s disillusionment, her participation in E. Fry’s valiant efforts to effect penal and legal reforms should not be slighted. In an era often portrayed as a low point in women’s political organizing, E. Fry’s project of reform, advocacy, and humanitarian aid paved the way for policy innovations, such as halfway houses, temporary leave programs, and post-release aid for offenders, while also articulating prisoners’ rights to medical, educational, and social services and care – in short, their right to live in conditions that did not demean and degrade. For female prisoners, perceived to be part of the underclass, cast as morally and sexually suspect, hardly full citizens, this emphasis on their right to citizenship and decent motherhood was a bold challenge to the dominant social narratives of womanhood of the time. E. Fry’s volunteer and reform work thus challenged both social norms and the correctional state; yet paradoxically, other aspects of its reform ideology merged comfortably with tenets of the emerging welfare state. As other historians have argued, women’s unpaid work in the ‘borderlands’ of volunteer work has often been undervalued, particularly its long-term importance in brokering the creation of the welfare state.89 E. Fry’s approach to the female prisoner reflected and also stimulated new welfare state approaches to corrections, in the making since the interwar 88 Eileen Morris, ‘Towards a Prisonless Society,’ Homemakers, April 1978, 62. 89 Seth Koven, ‘Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840–1914’; Koven and Michel, ‘Introduction,’ Mothers of a New World; Bruce Scates, ‘The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement in the Great War,’ Labour History 81 (November 2001): 29–49.

250 The Canadian Historical Review years, yet now developed with new intensity: a focus on treatment of the self through medical and psychological methods and more intense use of casework methods drawn from schools of social work. One could argue that E. Fry policies also allowed for and therefore implicitly endorsed penality, with its overall acceptance of the need for reformatories and its timidity in challenging criminological experts, who were increasingly integrated into the correctional bureaucracy and thus offered ideological legitimization to the state’s penal project. Here, E. Fry’s tangled alliance of maternalist and expert reform discourses, both caring and more coercive in nature, was important. Though the two certainly co-existed, E. Fry’s assumption was that expert discourses provided better diagnostic dissection of women’s criminality. This endorsement of academic credentials and faith in criminological research proved to be a double-edged sword, for the organization’s uncritical embrace of reigning positivist criminology, with its emphasis on individual maladjustment, its call for women to reconstruct their damaged selves, its Freudian, patriarchal, and heterosexist biases, could also be deeply confining. The blind spot of expert advice was exemplified in the case of EFT’s attempts to address the problems of First Nations women: despite a compelling critique of racism and discrimination, its reliance on the DIA and other white experts led to an equation of assimilation with progress. The conclusion that even reformers intent on transforming the criminal justice system can become trapped within the most powerful, dominant sets of knowledge about criminality is not a new proposition, but certainly is one worth stressing for the history of the EFT. Female prison reformers sometimes opposed state goals, but their work also became intertwined with these same goals, which themselves were sometimes fractured as bureaucrats, politicians, and medical/social work experts tussled over the best strategy for regulating and reforming criminalized women. However, to go a step further, as do some Foucauldian theories, repudiating any ‘hierarchical conception of the state and dominant social groups’90 errs on the side of a de-centred state and dispersed power. In the last instance, the state’s power to implement the punishment of penality as an ideology necessary for ‘society’s own good’ was a compelling social force, which EFT reformers had difficulty countering in the public sphere, and which female prisoners encountered in the most immediate, coercive manner possible.91 90 Hunt, Governing Morals, 5. 91 ‘The state crystallizes certain interests and concentrated power, which can only be deconstructed in the abstract, not in terms of the concrete, and oppressive, effects on

Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State 251 E. Fry’s analysis of women and crime did, of course, alter with the emergence of new criminological and political ideologies: in the decade after the Mercer scandal, the influence of feminism, the anti-psychiatry, and First Nations rights movements began to transform E. Fry’s political program and rhetoric, though maternalism as a mobilizing rhetoric remained visible well into the 1960s, indicated in E. Fry’s submission to the 1967 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which stressed the need to ‘save’ mothers in order to save families.92 Yet their submission to the commission also contained portents of change, including the use of the phrase women in conflict with the law, which gave political validation to the notion that the law and its implementation, not women, were the problems.93 During the next decade, E. Fry’s political program increasingly stressed women’s sexual autonomy and economic independence, supported prostitutes’ rights organizations, and lauded Native self-organization. Compared to the earlier emphasis on maternal helping, a discomfort with lesbianism, the association of prostitution with a moral choice, and the acceptance of Native assimilation, this significant ideological shift should not be underestimated.94 E. Fry reform was increasingly mobilized around feminist metaphors, critical of class and patriarchal relations, mainstream criminology, and the state.95 The previous expert emphasis on individual maladjustment as a cause of crime lost much of its efficacy as E. Fry drew instead on an emerging feminist criminology concerned with the social control of women. Interestingly, long-time E. Fry members now explained their pioneering work in the 1950s not in maternalist terms, but in the language of feminism, stressing their desire to ‘change the system’ and their ‘belief in the equality and capability of all women.’96 Of course the shift from maternalism to feminism did not abolish the differences between E. Fry members and their clients,

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women’s lives.’ Dawn Currie, ‘Feminist Encounters with the Postmodern: Exploring the Impasse of Debates on Patriarchy and Law,’ Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 5, 1 (1992): 63–87. See also Susan Boyd, ‘(Re)Placing the State: Family, Law and Oppression,’ Canadian Journal Law and Society 9, 1 (Spring 1994): 39–73. Taking into account women’s needs as mothers is not the same as claiming maternalism. Since the majority of female offenders have children and are responsible for them, their parental needs need consideration. This may be a ‘feminist’ as much as a ‘maternalist’ analysis. Draft of Provincial Brief to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 1968, EFTA. Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London: Routledge, 1994), chap. 2. Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, Newsletter, April 1979, June 1975. Adelberg and Currie, eds., Too Few to Count, Introduction, 12. Newsletter, November 1972, March 1977, EFTA.

252 The Canadian Historical Review between professional staff and those in prison. One could argue that in both maternalism and feminism, politicized women were using a form of strategic essentialism97 so that they could speak out for another group of women. The most recent scholarly studies of women’s penality are often indebted to Foucauldian theory, particularly notions of governmentality.98 Ironically, this theoretical turn of events may lead to us to a more pessimistic view of prison reform. Kelly Hannah-Moffat, for example, argues persuasively that the terrible irony of recent feminist reformers’ attempts to provide female prisoners with choices, liberation, and empowerment were re-fashioned as projects of individual blame or ‘responsibilization’ by the state and its attendant agencies unable to let go of the core of the penal project: removing peoples’ most basic freedom as a means of punishment.99 This is a sobering if not depressing thought, and one that might lead to the most pessimistic reading of Foucault’s power/knowledge nexus, the notion that the only raison d’être of regulation is a will to more regulation, and that there is no self-conscious political resistance imaginable outside the existing discursive ‘conditions of possibility.’ Such a pessimistic reading, however, too completely slights the possibility of resistance in the form of more decidedly dissident ideologies of penal reform, or more likely, abolitionism. An alternative analysis might recognize the state’s ideological and practical interests in maintaining the penal project and the immense difficulties in creating projects of reform outside this matrix of power, but still appreciate that reform efforts may create openings to challenge that power, just as the early attempts by E. Fry women to secure humane treatment for female prisoners did. Political struggles for partial reforms, these early prison reformers would probably tell us, prevent us from losing sight of the everyday, pressing, and truly desperate needs of criminalized women. Moreover, making such rights claims on the state provides, at the very least, a window of opportunity for oppositional thinking and resistance to develop.

97 The term was coined by G. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316. 98 For the distinctions between social control, moral regulation, and governmentality, see John McLaren, Robert Menzies, and Dorothy Chunn, eds., Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual, and the Law (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 10–18. 99 Hannah-Moffat, Punishment in Disguise, 197.