Sobering Up The Magdalenes’ Drunken Sisters: The Institutional Treatment of “Female Drunken Pests” in Scotland, 1900–15

Bureaucracy, case geography and the governance of the inebriate in Scotland (1898–1918)

“…The use of convictions helped head off libertarian opposition to lengthy sentencing, for they demonstrated an inability to with liberal freedom. However, the 1898 Act’s reliance on criminal justice created what Hands (2013: 63) terms a ‘two-tier system’ of private retreat ‘care for the wealthy’ and reformatory ‘imprisonment for the poor’. The Act included clauses for use in the magistrate courts of England and Wales and separate ones to account for Scotland’s judicial system.…”

“…Although the published legislation said nothing of class or gender, the gaze of inebriate criminal justice would fall on women of the city street, women with lengthy histories and complex geographies of incarceration for the likes of petty theft, breaches of the peace and prostitution. Thora Hands (2013: 63) describes reformatories as containing ‘the shifting boundaries of deviant femininity’ and an all too public set of behaviours. Even when taking account of its mix of section 23 and 24 admissions, women outnumbered men in Perth by a factor of four to one (129 to 33 by the end of 1913) (BPP, 1914 [Cd.…”

“…Fyfe apparently deemed it a ‘serious matter to take bread winner away from his family’ (NRS, HH57/64, 1627/225, 3 December, memo: 8; see McLaughlin, 1991: 299). Thora Hands’s (2013) analysis shows that many Girgenti women had already separated from their husbands prior to prosecution, although Fyfe’s admission hints at the ways gendered social mores shaped regulatory outcomes. He accused Glasgow’s magistrates of filtering out cases where they anticipated a ‘large amount of trouble’ (BPP, 1909 [Cd.…”

“…Her personal case file (NRS, HH19/1) is seemingly one of just three retained in the National Records of Scotland. It records her separation from her husband, a miscarriage, syphilis, and her mother’s asylum treatment and subsequent suicide (see Hands, 2013). But it is in the Perth Governor’s journal that we see the daily difficulties she posed from her arrival.…”

“…In addition, if the analogy of the circuit appears rather ‘flat’ (Gill et al., 2018: 197) my moving examples reveal contingent and volatile efforts to determine the geographical horizons and responsibilities of government across putatively different hierarchical scales. Their movement raises interpretive challenges around agency and resistance (Moore, 2018), for files record ways in which the subjects of disciplinary power challenged contemporary legal and medical categorisations (see Hands, 2013). While I refer to individuals by their institutional admission numbers, this is not seek to deny such agency but rather at once respect privacy and emphasise the force of categorisation (see Moore, 2010).…”