Feminized Justice

Drawing on case files and newspapers accounts of women’s confrontations with the law in the Toronto Women’s Police Court, Feminized Justice offers a multifaceted portrait of women, crime, and courts in early twentieth-century Toronto.

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In 1913, Toronto launched an experiment in feminist ideals: a woman’s police court. The court offered a separate venue to hear cases that involved women and became a forum where criminalized women – prostitutes, vagrants, alcoholics, and thieves – met and struggled with the meaning of justice.

This multifaceted portrait of the court’s business and its people – from its inception by middle-class, maternal feminists to its demise in 1934, from the repeat offender to its controversial magistrate, Margaret Patterson – reveals the experiment’s fundamental contradiction. The court was both a site for feminist adaptations of justice and a court empowered to punish the women who appeared on its docket.

Feminized Justice sheds new light on maternal feminist politics, women and crime, and the role of resistance, agency, and experience in the justice system.