| Summary: | The Contagious Diseases Acts that were passed in the 1860s to protect the army and the navy from venereal diseases represented the first real attempt of the British government to control and regulate prostitution in Great Britain. Although Glasgow was a garrison town, the laws were never applied there, as the town developed its own system to fight prostitution, the “Glasgow system”. From the early 1870s onwards three different institutions combined their efforts to try to eradicate the “great social evil”: the police, the Lock Hospital, whose mission was to cure venereally diseased prostitutes, and the Magdalene Institution, where prostitutes underwent a process of moral purification. This paper examines the role of the Glasgow Magdalene Institution as an instrument of social control and analyses the content and the function of the former inmates’ letters that were published in the annual reports of the Magdalene Institution. These letters always gave a most positive image of the Institution and tended to demonstrate the efficiency of the system in terms of moral rehabilitation. But the organisation, the structure, the vocabulary as well as the content of the letters are so similar that they seem to testify more to the moral and didactic purpose of the directors of the institution than to the spontaneous and natural expression of their authors. These letters, which were diverted from their primary function — the private sphere –, fitted in the Glasgow Magdalene Institution’s entire strategy that was primarily aimed at resocializing the women who had sinned and at imposing a moral model that actually stifled more than encouraged personal development.
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