Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities

In this book Alana Barton explores the social control and disciplining of unruly and ’deviant’ women from the early nineteenth century to the present day. She focuses in particular on the ’semi penal’ institution, a category that includes refuges, reformatories and homes. She suggests that these occupy a unique position within the social control ’continuum’, somewhere between the formal regulation of the prison and the informal control of the ’community’ or domestic sphere, but at the same time incorporating methods of discipline from both arenas.