King, Walter

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

544 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY the mill towns does take the hierarchy of jobs into account there is an odd omission: women were an absolute majority of the entire workforce studied in Work, Society & Politics, yet they are discussed only in the context of familial relations. It seems reasonable to suggest that sexual subordination in the com-munity and at the workplace may well have fed directly into labour's incorpora-tion. These are large questions, and in some ways substantial deficiencies, upon which critical commentary is necessary. But given the nature of these exciting works and the limitations of all historical studies, it would be highly inappropriate to end without an expression of appreciation. Work, Society & Politics, a Tory social history pitted consciously against contemporary Marxist analysis of the Victorian period, and Masters , Unions and Men, a book described as "an industrial sociology of workplace relations", are both rewarding studies destined to place their mark on future work in the field. Before picking up these volumes I would not have guessed that I would be so attracted to packages like these, however subtle and sophisticated the wrapping. My prejudices have been confirmed too often. But in reading these books I was reminded that prejudices, like history itself, must always be re-examined. * * * Bryan D. PALMER, Simon Fraser University. MICHAEL IGNATIEFF. -A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Pp. xiii, 257. Michael Ignatieff describes "the new philosophy of punishment in England between 1775 and 1840" (p. xiii) according to which criminals, previously labelled incorrigible, were reformable if both mind and body were disciplined. Reformation was to be carried out by the "state". The state disliked sharing control of public punishment with the community and so resorted to private hanging and to building penitentiaries. The state also sought to gain jurisdiction over workers punished privately by employers for work-related offences, over the largely independent keepers of prisons, and over inmate subculture. The state was not alone in seeking to punish criminals by imprisonment. Advocates of prison reform - Nonconformists, Benthamites, industrialists, philanthropists - pointed to changing class relationships: masters and servants were becoming employers and employees, leading to a breakdown of discipline among the lower classes. Penitentiaries were built to inculcate discipline by separating criminals from each other and from outside influences so that of-fenders would reflect upon their condition, feel guilty, accept whatever punish-ment was meted out, and return to society determined to avoid crime. To limit contact, prisoners were forced to wear masks, be silent, sit in separate stalls in chapel, exercise alone, and could receive visitors and write and receive one letter only once every six months. Discipline could be best inculcated if activities within prisons were predict-able. Prison rules were tightened, prisoners were marched in time and forced to COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS 545 wear uniforms, bells were used to end one activity and begin another, chapel attendance was made compulsory, and food was regularly if sparingly supplied by the state rather than by charitable benefactors. The search for predictability led to calls for treating all prisoners alike and replacing custodial discretion with national inspectors enforcing standards of discipline. lgnatieff has illustrated man's inhumanity to man: treadwheel - even for pregnant women, hand crank to be turned ten thousand times every ten hours, confinement in solitude for up to eighteen months that sometimes ended in insanity or suicide. Yet, Ignatieff provides a remarkably restrained and objective analysis. Also to his credit he implicitly cautions quantifiers of offences to take into account the changing definition of crime over time which affects counts. Unfortunately, lgnatieff fails to discuss how prison reformers reconciled laissez-faire with their call for greater state involvement and whether there is a relationship between decreased corporal punishment, increased incarceration, and the rise of the middle class. Some sociological research suggests that today's middle class prefers psychological punishment over physical. And lgnatieffs discussion of the influence of Lockean philosophy on prison reformers is inadequate at best. Also, no evidence is provided to support the thesis that employers punished their workers for work-related illegal acts before penitentiaries were built. Finally, Ignatieff relies too heavily upon London data from Newgate Prison and Old Bailey, the major criminal court for London and Middlesex. Was London typical? Is Ignatieff correct when he argues that penitentiaries grew out of the desire to discipline both the mind and the body of offenders , especially minor offenders? Was that desire weak or absent in earlier generations? If before about 1775 discipline and punishment were directed more toward the body than the mind and more often dispensed publicly than behind walls, it was because judges were unable, not unwilling, to imprison most misdemeanants in relatively small houses of correction and jails. Penitentiaries were not built earlier because the economy was pre-industrial; ratepayers and government did not have the money. Lack of general wealth, not lack of desire for discipline, forced much of the cost of maintaining pre-1775 prisons upon prisoners and charitable benefactors. My research suggests that, to minimize public expense, authorities conducted quarter-ly roundups of vagrants just prior to seventeenth-century quarter sessions, and that towns far from prisons conveyed at their expense fewer vagrants to prison than did towns closer to prisons. Also , about 1600, male and female unwed parents were punished in about equal numbers when punishment consisted of whipping and/or stocking. But during the seventeenth century, after houses of correction (pre-penitentiary prisons) opened and incarceration became the only type of punishment dispensed to unwed parents, many more females than males were punished. Pre-industrial society could ill afford removing males from work and forcing parishes to provide the financial support to unwed mothers that should have come from males. Similarly, it can be argued that Tudor-Stuart-Hanoverian England did not have a full-time, salaried police because of insufficient funds. For the pre-peniten-tiary era lacked both an adequate tax-collecting system and an income tax. And who in Tudor-Stuart England would have suggested building penitentiaries knowing that uncontrollable disease and plague would have run unchecked in them? The book contains 26 illustrations, 682 notes , and an index that is incomplete. For example, nine of forty references to Newgate Prison (pp. 13, 21, 34, 43, 55, 61, 92, 147 and 159) are not indexed, and Old Bailey does not appear in the index although it is frequently mentioned in the text. A Just Measure of Pain is very informative about prison reformist views between 1775 and 1840 and will be widely read by legal, social and even intellectual 546 HISTOIRE SOCIALE- SOCIAL HISTORY historians. However, caution is urged regarding comparisons between pre- and post-1775 attitudes toward punishment of offenders . Walter J. KING, Northern State College , Aberdeen, South Dakota. * * * MARK THOMAS CoNNELLY. -The Response to Prostitution in the Progres-sive Era. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Pp. x, 261. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the United States witnessed a crusade against prostitution unprecedented in both scale and approach. Mark Thomas Connelly' s attempt to explain this phenomenon is an intelligent and useful contribution to the literature on both Progressivism and sexuality. It is his contention that the movement cannot be accounted for without reference to the transformation of American life from 1890 to the end of World War I which, while it provided much that was " forward-looking and modernizing" , was also ac-companied "by contrapuntal themes of tension, anxiety and fear" (p. 7). Anti-prostitution shared both of these characteristics , for while it had a positive side, it was also negative and confused. Of particular importance in shaping this crusade, he maintains , was nineteenth-century sexual morality, or, as he refers to it through-out, "civilized morality". The declining public acceptance of this creed engender-ed in its adherents a "sense of moral crisis" (p. 8) and this in tum gave the anti-prostitution campaign much of its zeal , and accounts for many of its eccentricities and fantasies. Connelly does not attempt to trace the history of every anti-prostitution group, but rather examines several broad themes : public perception of the relation-ship between prostitution on the one hand, and women's work, immigration, and venereal disease on the other ; the "white slavery" hysteria ; the scope and nature of the Chicago Vice Commission Report; and finally, the climax of the anti-prostitution campaign during World War I. Given this approach, and the shortness of the actual text (153 pages), the reader gets an episodic and suggestive, rather than comprehensive, account of the movement. This is not said to denigrate Con-nelly's achievement: the book is filled with insights of unusual sharpness and originality, which , even when they are questionable, should serve to provoke both new research and the rethinking of old assumptions. A few of his contentions should be mentioned. One is that prostitution was frequently vaguely defined in this era, and came to include any expression of sexuality outside the limits of civilized morality . This demonstrates , he suggests, that it was the perceived crisis in sexual morality, rather than prostitution alone , which sparked the repressive crusade. Also noteworthy is his argument that the Progressive claim of a close link between prostitution and the low wages of work-ing women was only partially correct ; in fact, he says, the causes of prostitution were more complex. What the claim revealed was a traditional tendency to stereo-type women as suffering victims , and as so innately asexual that they would be unwilling to enter prostitution except out of sheer economic pressure. Moreover, he says, the claim grew out of a profound uneasiness about the fact that, contrary 

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF. — A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850.

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MICHAEL IGNATIEFF. — A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)