Book Review: Barton, A. (2005). Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. pp. vi, 176

• Author: Pamela Davies
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016808314560
• Published date: 01 March 2008
• Date: 01 March 2008

“experts” and the secret proceedings and money-and-power-driven culture that result in

legal outcomes ranging from unjust to harmful to atrocious. Chapter by chapter, using titles

like “Robed Rage,” “Lawless Law Guardians,” and “Anti-Social Services,” the authors

deftly paint the picture of the perfect storm that is created by the confluence of the actors and

their actions in this nightmarish legal drama. Using the sociological framework of ethnomethod-

ology, the authors dissect the “meaning-making” processes by which normal, fit, and loving

mothers are labeled as delusional, hysterical, or otherwise mentally deranged due to the mother

having made a good-faith report to the court that her child was being sexually abused by

his or her father.

The Overview (chapter 1) alone is worth the price of admission, with its little known

chronology of the protective mothers’ movement and the movement’s resistance to these

legal outrages. Each chapter places another piece of the puzzle into perspective, bringing

into high and horrifying relief the perverse reality in which a mother’s protectiveness, vig-

ilance, and empathy toward her children, viewed universally as desirable maternal traits,

are used to label her, instead, as overprotective, hypervigilant, and borderline as a “parental

alienator” who is therefore unfit. In this alternative universe, lawyers twist the legal rules

of evidence, violating litigants’ due process rights in backdoor legal conferences that end

with a judge’s order that to the mother and her allies is nothing less than insane but from

the viewpoint of family court madness is “in the best interests of the child.”

Rather than resting on the shock value of this scenario to make From Madness to Mutiny

a compelling read, the authors round out the book with a realistic and hopeful plan for true

reform. Absent the total “rebirthing” of the system called for by Neustein and Lesher, the

family courts are like a ship whose captain and crew have gone utterly mad, whose only

chance of redemption is mutiny by the passengers.

Mo Therese Hannah

Siena College, Loudonville, New York

Barton, A. (2005). Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities:

Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women.

Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. pp. vi, 176.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016808314560

In my opinion, feminist contributions to criminology are often still marginalized or recog-

nized in connection with rather too small an enclave of writers. For this reason alone, I feel it is

important that there is a continued effort within the criminological community to focus on how

gender impacts the big issues of social control and imprisonment. In this book, Alana Barton

explores how women in particular experience social control, regulation, discipline, and impris-

onment in the 21st century and compares and contrasts this with their treatment and experiences

in previous centuries. Her particular focus is the “semipenal” institution, an important and rather

overlooked institution where social control is perhaps underdocumented.

Following Weiner (1990), Barton explains that the semipenal institution is “neither ‘formal’

in the sense of a prison, nor ‘informal’ in the sense of a home, but which, at the same time,

120 Criminal Justice Review