PhD Oral Exam - Lisa Moore, History

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the legal regulation of girls and young women who appeared before Montreal’s Cour de bien-être social (CBES), the social welfare court responsible for managing youth protection and delinquency from its establishment in 1950 until its closure in 1977. The CBES was intended to represent a new chapter for the province’s juvenile justice system and to reflect the evolving perception of rights and protections for children in the postwar era. As this study reveals, however, the new court upheld the paternalistic policies and punitive practices of the previous period for more than a decade, especially when it came to the moral regulation of girls. There was an important shift in the court’s approach to female sexuality during the mid-to-late 1960s, a change that can be attributed to the social and cultural dynamics of the Quiet Revolution, which fundamentally transformed understandings of traditional gender roles and normalized aspects of youth culture. Quebec’s juvenile justice system was therefore in a state of transition during this period, resulting in a pattern of continuity and change that had a profound impact on the girls it sought to regulate.

Drawing upon the CBES’s delinquency case files, this analysis examines the various discourses, procedures, evaluations, and methods of rehabilitation employed by juvenile justice officials—from judges to probation officers to mental health experts—to identify, analyze, and discipline young female defendants. By comparing cases heard in a working-class, ethnolinguistically mixed area near the downtown core (Southwest Montreal) and a primarily anglophone, middle-class, suburban district (the West Island), it also demonstrates the influence of social class, language, ethnicity, and religion on the legal regulation of female youth in Montreal. Finally, this study privileges the perspectives of girls and young women, foregrounding their encounters with an extensive roster of legal authorities and the ways they navigated the effects of these encounters on their actions, emotions, and physical bodies. In doing so, this dissertation sheds new light on the relationship between gender and juvenile justice in postwar Quebec.