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Society's attitudes toward criminal offenders changed dramatically over the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century the system of handling offenders in Montreal was highly institutionalized and based on sex- and age-specific treatment involving the Catholic Church, civic and legal authorities, and Protestant reform organizations. / A thematic study of the relationship of female offenders, concerned organizations, and the criminal justice system at the height of industrial capitalism shows that as the economy expanded and the city grew, there were increasing opportunities for women to break the law. Women's crimes were largely determined by their socio-economic status in Canadian society, often crimes of poverty and survival. The growing potential to commit crime was met with a more organized and institutionalized response and the definition of what was considered wayward female behaviour broadened. The growth of the state over the latter part of the nineteenth century in the form of new and expanded juridical and penal structures resulted in an increase in disciplining the population. For women this meant the use of laws and institutions to punish inappropriate social and sexual behaviour. / This thesis explores the gender-specific treatment of female offenders in the new institutions created ostensibly to rescue them: Fullum Street Prison for Women, the Ecole de Reforme, the Girls' Cottage Industrial School, the Juvenile Delinquents' Court, and the female police force. It looks at the construction of "criminal" and "bad" and the flexible usage of certain laws to curb unruly behaviour.

Women made, and continue to make history in Point St. Charles, and in doing so, transform selves, groups and community. / Building on the literature on class and gender in community organising, read through the conceptual lens of "translocational positionality" (Anthias, 2002a), I tell a story of the journeys of a group of ten women activists through four decades of neighbourhood organising. I show that although all the women were first involved in citizens' committees around practical needs such as housing, welfare, urban renewal and education, most of them, stimulated by feminist agitators in their midst, came to new awareness about gender inequalities, to new and deepening analyses, and to individual and collective actions around strategic gender needs. Part and parcel of this spiral of change (Nadeau, 1996) were the tensions that emerged with their families, friends and neighbours, and even with the agitators themselves. Out of these tensions came transformations at the macro level---community, public opinion and government, at the meso level---organisational structures and cultures, and at the micro level---family and selves. / Next I do a metanarrative on the methodology that underlies the project upon which my thesis is based, one that borrows from feminist community organising practice (Gutierrez & Lewis, 1994) to deal with the many ethical dilemmas inherent to feminist life history methodology (Geiger, 1990). In line with the notion of "translocational imaginings in dialogue", the project was conceptualised to pre-figure power-with (Starhawk, 1987) in order to construct narratives of belonging that break with processes of differentiation and stratification. The project is about doing community history with the people who make that history. Because of this, when tensions emerged around power relations, instead of paralysis, individual, interpersonal and collective transformations emerged. / Through this work, I am not only releasing new voices into the collective narrative, but I am also contributing to debates on life history methodology. And, my thesis, and the other historical products that will emerge from this project, will enable organisers and activists to learn from the past, and will, hopefully, entice younger people to get involved in community activism.

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