A Home or a Gaol? Scandal, Secrecy, and the St James’s Inebriate Home for Women

In the 1880 s and 1890 s the operations of the St James’s Home for Female Inebriates in Kennington, London, attracted the attention of both the Charity Organisation Society and the popular press when the proprietors of the Home were accused of mistreating women in their care. Such mistreatment, it was suggested, had been allowed to continue for many years due to the cloak of secrecy that surrounded the Home. Both medical and popular conceptions of the inebriate had functioned to legitimise institutionalisation as necessary for cure and—by implying a degree of moral culpability that aligned inebriate women with ‘fallen women’ more generally—to sanction the secrecy of such treatment. This article discusses the St James’s case in detail in order to consider how the institutional culture of the private inebriate home could also be a culture of harm.