ABSTRACT
Unlike during the nineteenth century when the Refuge was underpinned by a prevailing moral paradigm, the institution during the twentieth century was characterised by two seemingly opposing, but at the same time, mutually reinforcing discourses built around morality/religion and medical science. These two discourses were employed to explain and respond to women's deviant behaviour and although each had periods of influence throughout the century, neither one ever gained total, singular dominance over the other. Because these discourses tended to re-emerge at particular points during the twentieth century, this chapter will be structured differently to the previous chapter. So although I will address similar themes to those addressed in the previous chapter (themes of continuity between past and present, the merging of informal and formal methods of control for women, the way in which women responded to, or resisted, the disciplinary discourses and regimes imposed upon them and so on), a chronological (as opposed to a thematic) structure will be applied here.
