The Magdalene's friend: Prostitution and social control in Glasgow, 1869–1890

Abstract

This paper uses the case of the Glasgow Magdalene Institution to examine the activities of the nonstatutory female penitentiary movement in Glasgow, 1860–1890. It argues that the declaration strategies employed by moral reformers and designed to save women labelled as magdalenes, prostitutes, and fallen women from the formal criminal justice system, resulted in the expansion of the entire system, which began to include more women of a greater age range and type of offence. Drawing upon recent work on the history of sexuality and Victorian prostitution, this paper shows that a) nonstatutory female penitentiaries developed a variety of social control mechanisms to encourage moral reform; and b) the Glasgow Magdalene Institution constituted a technology of power: a social control apparatus for the surveillance, sexual and vocational control, and moral regulation of a segment of the female working class population, who defied middle-class notions of female respectability.