defining sexual promiscuity

1
defining sexual promiscuity

• race, gender, and class in the operation of
  ontarios female refuges act1930-1960
• joan sangster

2
1942

• 18 year old dishwasher Anna put on train by
  police to Mercer Reformatory
• Charges under Female Refuges Act
• Idle and dissolute drunken and promiscuous
• Public complaint, police investigation
• Mercer's doctor did research on glandular
  disorders related to womens "anti-social,
  "criminal" acts
• Women's College Hospital archives (1928) show
  doctor believed abnormality could be determined
  by X-rays of skull and its contours

3
Relations of power -- race

• Police chief she had been seen in cafes with
  white boysgoing into mens rooms
• Miscegenation meant sexual debasement
• Indian agent charged for liquor under Indian
  Actfined and warned to no avail
• Judge went to Indian school for ten years,
  should know right from wrong
• sentenced to indefinite term

4
patterns

• Most from impoverished, working class
• Underclass with weak sexual morality
• Needing social, reproductive control
• Rejection of womens sexual activity outside
  marriage

5
significance of expert discourses

• Foucault 1980 sexual control is often most
  intense and meticulous when directed against
  lower class
• Convictions of white women sexually involved with
  asian, black, native men
• Debasement meant carceral supervision
• Law and judicial interpretation constituted and
  reproduced ideologies of race and gender

6
Female Refuges Act, 1897

• To regulate Industrial Houses of Refuge
• Women sentenced under bylaw or CCC
• Aimed at women 16-35 years
• Offered shelter, work, and reform
• Counteract unmanageability, incorrigibility
• Allowed sentence lt 5 years
• Amended lt2 years after death of inmate at
  Torontos Belmont Refuge, GM 4.12.19

7
May 29, 1918 8
8
Act, 1919

• Anybody could bring before a magistrate
• --any female under 35, who is a habitual
  drunkard, leading an idle and dissolute life
• By sworn statement
• No formal charge or trial, hearings held in
  private
• Parents, police, welfare authorities, CAS could
  incarcerate women for poverty, alcoholism, theft,
  sexual immorality, illegitimate pregnancies,
  STDs, runaway

9
Defining promiscuity interracial liasons

• Anxiety that poor women oversexual, led men
  astray
• Women targeted with too many illegitimate
  children, older partners, wrong race
• 1930s undercurrent of eugenics, racist ideas
  about sex, hierarchial division of races

10
surveillance

• Police, probation officers, doctors, social
  workers
• 1930s case of 17 yr-old, described by foster
  mother as boy crazy and untruthful 6972
• --found in bawdy house with Chinaman
• 1940s case of incorrigibility, disobeyed fathers
  curfew, declared mentally slow
• Woman arrested with Chinese boyfriend after
  father came to town to enlist police

11
case AO 8700

• 19 yr old, left home at 14, employed as mail
  clerk, contacted catholic welfare agency in hopes
  of keeping baby
• --agency alerted police and parents
• Woman from northern Ontario
• --sexual relationship with native man
• --claimed boyfriend violent, abusive
• Magistrate put this girl in a home cant have
  her running around with Indian boys
• 22 yr old immigrant nursemaid convicted on police
  information
• --going around with H and other chinamen
• --taken to hospital after taking quinine

case AO 9404
case AO 8634
12
culture of immorality theory

• Risk of not incarcerating determined by
  immorality of family
• AO 7223 The father seems decent, but the
  mother is Indian and easy going in the
  homeapparently the family can do anything it
  pleases. Mother is inefficient and unintelligent
• case AO 9004 It is too bad that such a good
  looking Indian like you should throw yourself
  away. Other men buy the liquor for you, then you
  suffer and they escapeI hope if you are removed
  from unscrupulous white men and Indian soldiers
  you might start a new life.

13
Native women and the FRA

• After 1940s, cases increased
• Threats to traditional subsistence
• Opening up of northern communities
• Increase of natives in urban areas
• Unemployment, racism
• Native women seen as weak, immoral, prone to
  alcoholism, easily corrupted, likely to barter
  sexuality
• Elizabeth Fry women not learning trades in Mercer
• wanted to abolish FRA
• lobbied for education, addiction aid
• poverty addressed in northern communities

14
Who is the agent of carceral control?

• Case 8982
• Indian agent
• Case 9900
• RCMP
• Case 16461
• psychologist
• Case 8432
• -- mother

15
Incorrigible, by Velma Demerson

• 1939, 18-year-old Velma, lover having breakfast
  when police officers arrived
• Crime was loving Chinese man, pregnancy,
  mixed-race child
• Sentenced to Belmont home for wayward girls,
  transferred to Torontos Mercer Reformatory for
  Females
• Girls locked in cells for twelve hours a day,
  required to work in on-site laundry and factory,
  also endured medical examinations
• Released after 10 months' incarceration, weeks of
  solitary confinement, abusive medical treatments,
  state apprehended her child

• I was taken into a room and asked by a woman if
  I had ever slept with anyone else. I felt I would
  have to damage my character to save my boyfriend
  from blame. I said, Yesand I told her I was
  pregnant hoping it would help. Almost immediately
  I was taken to a courtroom

16
conclusion

• Courts unable to recognize material and social
  dislocations shaping conflicts with law
• --poverty, addiction, violence
• FRA reinforced ideas of sexual difference
• FRA reinforced relations of race/power
• Growing paternalism of the state
• Expanding areas of surveillance and control