Haunting Reform: Older Women, English Good Shepherd Institutions and the Children Act 1948

Relatively little has been written about the twentieth century legal history of English Catholic Magdalene institutions. This article focuses on the relationship between Good Shepherd institutions and child protection law after 1948. Before the Children Act 1948, the Good Shepherds’ work with teenagers was largely immune from state regulation or control. With the Act in force, the Home Office sought to modify the Good Shepherds’ disciplinary regime; in particular, by mandating that teenagers and adult women should live separately from one another. This article uses Home Office files in the National Archives to examine these reforms, with a particular focus on what surviving records can tell us about the lives of older women confined to Good Shepherd institutions for many years. Older women only appear at the margins of these records. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s theory of haunting, the article shows that these women have, never-the less, left a mark on the archives of law reform. They can tell us something about state awareness of the harms of long-term confinement in Good Shepherd institutions, and about the sacrifices that often accompany processes of legal and institutional reform.