Gendered Social Control: ‘a Virtuous Girl’ and ‘a Proper Boy’

Abstract

The social control of women considered deviant has frequently been described, by feminist criminologists, as deeply gendered: the social control of women and girls is aimed at making them conform to traditional femininity. The authors describe a theoretical tradition that they term the ‘feminist social critique’, and argue that studies in this tradition may be prone both to underestimate the general mechanisms of social control that applies to both men and women, and to overlook the gendered aspects of the social control of men. To analyse similarities and differences in the social control of the two sexes, two empirical cases are explored. The cases are two Norwegian institutions for juvenile delinquents in the 1950s and 1960s: Bjerketun for girls and Foldin for boys. The rehabilitative efforts of the staff are shown to aim at distinctly gendered ideals, identified as ‘a virtuous girl’ and ‘a proper boy’, respectively. The kind of behaviour that brought young boys to Foldin had a certain continuity with the cultural script of acceptable masculinity. The problem was they overdid it: their boyishness was excessive. The behaviour that brought girls to Bjerketun was seen as a breach with, and a threat to acceptable femininity, not as an exaggeration of a culturally recognized pattern.