BOYS WILL BE MEN, GIRLS WILL BE MOTHERS: THE LEGAL REGULATION OF CHILDHOOD IN TORONTO AND VANCOUVER.

The article examines the growing hegemony of the bourgeois family pattern among the Canadian working classes that accompanied the development of a welfare state and focuses on the legal institutionalization and regulation of childhood and sexuality in Ontario and British Columbia, particularly during the inter-war years. The discussion centers on similarities and differences between the provinces with respect to two major issues: first, the enactment of criminal and quasi-criminal legislation, ostensibly universal in application but directed primarily at poor children and the adults responsible for them, to force compliance with middle-class standards of morality and family life; and, second, the administration of many such statutes through the Toronto, Ontario and Vancouver Juvenile Courts. In Canada, as in other jurisdictions, demands for implementation and refinement of legislation aimed at upholding the norms of childhood and heterosexual marriages were accompanied by demands for new enforcement mechanisms.