Louise A. Jackson

The Coffee Club Menace: Policing Youth, Leisure and Sexuality in Post-war Manchester

Abstract This article examines the strategies and tactics of surveillance that were used by Manchester City Police in relation to anxieties about gender, sexuality, juvenile delinquency and drugs misuse in post-war England. In the early 1960s the members-only ‘coffee beat club’ became a target of police activity, resulting in a series of raids, minor prosecutions and the intensification of the licensing laws. Commenting on the relationship between police culture and youth culture, including the leisure practices of adolescent girls, this article argues that the targeting of the ‘coffee beat club’ became a motif for the defence of an older imagined social order.

Witches, wives and mothers: witchcraft persecution and women's confessions in seventeenth-century England

Abstract The confessions made by the Suffolk women charged with witchcraft in 1645 indicate that, in many cases, accused women were contextualising their own experiences within a wider demonological framework. Often they were judging themselves in their roles as wives and mothers – the witch, after all, was the behavioural opposite of the stereotypical role model of the ‘good wife’. There are noticeable references to infanticide, suicide and possible abuse. It could well be that women who possessed no other language to describe certain traumatic experiences took on the conceptual framework of demonology as a way of explaining events. Witch-hunting was a method of behavioural control in which women as victims (in many senses of the word) were themselves participating because they had no other framework of reference.

6.26 Phenotypic analysis of bovine leukocyte cell lines infected with Theileria annulata

Six cell lines that were infected with Theileria annulata were compared for expression of a range of surface molecules. Immunofluorescence staining with the panel of monoclonal antibodies formulated for the Second Workshop was analysed by flow cytometry. Four lines generated from bovine peripheral blood mononuclear cells by exposure to sporozoites in vitro and one line generated in vivo from an infected calf were phenotypically similar. Phenotypic analysis of those lines did not demonstrate a monocyte or B cell origin, but indicated they were not derived from T cells. An uncloned line generated in vivo from an infected calf was CD3+ and gamma/delta TCR+. The results indicate that a wider range of host cell types may be infected in vivo than suspected hitherto and that some of the cells may express an abnormal pattern of surface molecules. Both could have profound consequences for the pathogenesis of T. annulata infection.

Care or Control? The Metropolitan Women Police and Child Welfare, 1919-1969

The term ‘policing’ is often used to refer to a broad range of regulatory practices, which have been associated with the development of educative and social work frameworks in the modern state. The relationship between the concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘penality’ (or ‘care’ and ‘control’) has been the subject of a number of recent studies of social intervention in twentieth-century Britain. However, the role of police officers themselves in the ‘policing of families’ has rarely been elaborated. From their initial appointment to Londons Metropolitan Police in 1919 until their official integration on the same terms as male officers in the early 1970s, women police officers played a significant role in the detection and prevention of child abuse, neglect, and female delinquency. Through a case study of the work of the Metropolitan Women Police branch, this article considers the negotiation of a social work ethic within policing as well as the shifting configuration of the ‘care’/‘control’ nexus in welfare legislation and professional practice. The Metropolitan Women Police tended to see ‘care’ and ‘control’ as mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting concepts. Such a formulation was resonant with the rhetoric of social work and official legislation until the early 1960s. It also reflected the philosophy of crime prevention laid down as the principal object of policing, enabling women to justify involvement in child protection and welfare as an aspect of police work.

Middle-class women and professional identity

Introduction to special edition of Womens History Review exploring the importance of professional identity to the lives of middle-class women from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Review Article: Youth and Modernity:

Steven Mintz, Hucks Raft: A History of American Childhood, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Harvard, 2004; pp. xi + 445; ISBN 0 674 01508 8 (hb) Janet Nolan, Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2004; pp. xv + 191; ISBN 0 268 03659 4 (hb), O 268 03660 8 (pb) Marjatta Rahikainen, Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004; pp. ix + 272; ISBN 0 7546 0498 5 (hb) Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children. Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960, Chapel Hill, NC and London, University of North Carolina Press, 2005; pp. xii + 337; ISBN 0 8078 2932 3 (hb), O 8078 5596 0 (pb)

The Unusual Case of Mrs Sherlock. Memoir, Identity and the Real Woman Private Detective in Twentieth Century Britain

Despite a huge popular and literary interest in detective fiction and an extensive academic literature on the history of policing, there have been very few studies of the history of private detectives/investigators. The work of women investigators has proved to be even more marginal. Histories of women and work have tended, for obvious reasons, to concentrate on mainstream industries, occupations and professions rather than the unusual or the unique. Focusing on the memoirs of Annette Kerner, published in the early 1950s, this article examines the range of opportunities that investigation created in the first half of the twentieth century, analysing the interaction of professional, gender and class identities. It highlights, firstly, womens ‘professional’ commitment to an exciting and challenging area of work, exploring their relationships with other occupational groups including women police. Second, it considers how disguise and masquerade presented opportunities for urban exploration and the crossing of traditional boundaries of gender and class. Investigative work developed, historically, at the same time as detective fiction and it has been deeply affected by fictional portrayals. The cultural mantle of ‘the female Sherlock Holmes’ was a hard inheritance to shake off and it suffused womens public presentations of themselves.

Children of the Streets: Rescue, Reform and the Family in Leeds, 1850-1914

Abstract Attempts to rescue and reform destitute, orphaned and street children - the ‘waifs and strays’ of the new urban environment - led to a proliferation of children’s homes and welfare organizations in the second half of the I9th century. Local studies enable us to build up a detailed profile of the individuals involved from a grass-roots level. Using a study of Leeds, this article sketches the motives and aspirations of, on the one hand, philanthropists and, on the other, of parents and children enmeshed in what was a complex and ad hoc system. ‘Welfare’ was not simply a rigid mechanism that was imposed on the urban poor; from a local perspective it can be viewed as a relationship, albeit an unequal one. The institution of the children’s home could provide an important strategy for family survival in a world of limited choices.

Historical child sexual abuse in England and Wales: the role of historians

Abstract This article reflects on methodological and ethical issues that have shaped a collaborative project which aims to chart social, legal and political responses to child sexual abuse in England and Wales across the twentieth century. The etymological problem of searching for child sexual abuse in the historical archive is discussed, given that the term itself is a relatively recent one. Acknowledging that research tools will always be partial, it then focuses on the gaps and silences in the archive, most problematically in relation to the voices and experiences of victims and survivors themselves. Finally it discusses ethical issues relating to the naming or anonymising of those accused and convicted (as well as victims and survivors) in the writing up of research findings. The discussion focuses on two key periods – the 1920s and 1950s – and on education policy, including regulatory procedures for teachers in state and fee-paying schools.

Book Review: A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700–2010

that inspired Jacob’s project has demonstrated. It would have been interesting to see her elaborate further on the relevance of these more general contributions of the book to the field of socio-legal studies – or interdisciplinary legal studies more generally, but much of this will have been apparent to the reader from the rest of the chapters, and overall, the book is exemplary of a type of scholarship that provokes much reflection not only on what legality is, and how it matters, but also of how we can go about studying it. Throughout, Jacob makes a very clear case for the importance of the routinised, and the day-to-day, to the constitution of legality, and of the relevance of ethnographic methods to bring to light these aspects of the law that are so central to its mechanisms, and to the constitution of social relationships to law. For this reason in particular, the book will be of real interest to interdisciplinary legal scholars concerned with such methodological reflections. The data and the stories told, meanwhile, are fascinating in their own right.