At the beginning of the 20th century, a range of new laws concerning children and- youths in Sweden were enacted. An effect of the laws was that 15 to 18-year-oldboys and girls facing prosecution could get their sentences transformed into time spent at a reformatory. However, while the state established public reformatories for boys, girls were sent to Viebäckhemmen, a reformatory that was run by a religious organization; the Swedish Deaconess Institute. Given that the state organized different solutions for boys and girls during this period, the aim of this thesis is in part to analyze how gender impacted social policy. Theories on the private and public are used as a theoretical framework, as well as theories on how gender impacts the social contract and how the social contract impacts gendernotions. By incorporating the history of early social work in the field of civil society research, as well as adding a gender perspective, the thesis discusses how and why the logics within civil society were considered more suitable for the upbringing and re-education of girls. The study draws from a wide range of sources. Government documents and correspondence between the state and the organization provide a timeline for the reformatory, while other archival materials such as internal documents, court records, journals, and letters provide an insight into the daily life at Viebäckhemmen. The first part of the thesis focuses on the relationship and negotiations between state and organization, while the second part focuses on the women that populated the institution, where the concept of“caring power” is used to describe the relationship between girls and deaconesses.