Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 27

Thomas, a U.S. sociologist heavily influenced by Lombroso, wrote the books Sex and Society (1907/1967a) and The Unadjusted Girl (1923/1967b), in which he constructed overly simplistic links between gender, sexuality, class, and crime. Considered more liberal than Lombroso, he defined criminality as “a socially induced pathology rather than a biological abnormality” (Smart, 1976, p. 37). Yet, his seeming obsession with women and girls’ sexuality and denial of sexist access to opportunity indicate he was not so different. For example, like Lombroso and Ferrero, Thomas viewed gender differences in the likelihood to become “politicians, great artists, and intellectual giants” as sex (biological) differences, overlooking the strong societal restrictions of women during that era (Smart, 1976, p. 37). An example of a sex difference Thomas promoted was that love varieties are inherent in nervous systems, and women have more love varieties, resulting in their disproportionate “and intense need to give and feel love,” which lead them into prostitution where they are “merely looking for the love and tenderness which all women need” (Smart, 1976, p. 39), discounting that most people who engage in sex work do so because access to legal or similarly lucrative work is not available to them. Similarly, Thomas equated girls and women’s sex-outside-of-marriage with delinquency/criminality, whereas this “promiscuity” was never mentioned regarding boys and men’s delinquency and criminality (Heidensohn, 1985, p. 117). He purported that middle-class women are less criminal due to their investment in protecting their chastity, while poor women long for crime in the manner of a new experience, and delinquent girls manipulate males into sex as a means of achieving their own goals.

Thomas favored psychological over economic motivations to explain female criminality; the disadvantaged position of women and girls in society held little importance to him in accounting for gender differences in crime. Given that Thomas was writing in an era of mass illness and starvation, the choice to ignore economic deprivation as a potential cause of female crime is rather remarkable (Klein, 1973). His later work, however, acknowledged that women were property of men, and he departed from social Darwinism to examine the complexity of the interaction between society and the individual (Klein 1973). The impact of “promiscuity” being attributed almost solely to girls and women has had a lasting impact on their criminalization, as will be seen later in this book.

Founder of psychoanalysis, Austrian Sigmund Freud, centered his explanations of female behavior around the belief that women are anatomically inferior to men—hence, Freud’s infamous “penis envy” approach to explaining female behavior. To Freud, the healthy woman experiences heterosexual sex as a receptor, where sexual pleasure consists of pain, while the sexually healthy man is heterosexual and aggressive and inflicts pain (Klein, 1973). Included in this analysis is a glorification of women’s duties as wives and mothers and, in turn, the view that medical treatment of deviant women involves “helping” them adjust to their “proper” traditional gender roles (Klein, 1973, p. 5). In addition to the obvious sexism, Freud’s theories are fraught with racism, classism, and heterosexism, whereby “only upper- and middle-class women could possibly enjoy lives as sheltered darlings” (Klein, 1973, p. 18).

Pollak’s (1950) book The Criminality of Women, published more than a half century after Lombroso and Ferrero’s work, is intricately linked with their approach. Like Thomas, Pollak believed both biological and sociological factors affect crime. But like Thomas, Lombroso and Ferrero, Pollak portrayed biology and physiology as the fundamental influences on female criminality, repeating many of their assumptions and prejudices (Smart, 1976). Pollak purported that there are no real gender differences in offending, but rather, relative to boys and men, girls and women “mask” (hide) their crimes. In addition, girls and women receive more chivalrous (lenient) treatment in the criminal legal system, making it appear that they are less criminal. His supporting evidence for girls and women’s “deceitful” nature is their ability to hide their menstruation and orgasms and their inactive roles during sexual intercourse. One wonders what happened to girls and women who did not hide that they were menstruating, especially in that era. Additionally, Pollak failed to consider that women’s inactive role during heterosexual sex (where it existed or exists) may be culturally, rather than biologically, determined. Further, women’s training in acquiescence to men, particularly during sex, could account for the fact that women were not hiding orgasms but rather were not experiencing them. Smart compares Pollak’s deceitful woman analysis to Eve’s deceit with Adam (in the Bible), where women are viewed as evil and cunning: “It is Pollak’s contention that women are the masterminds behind criminal organizations; that they are the instigators of crime rather than the perpetrators; that they can and in fact do manipulate men into committing offenses whilst remaining immune from arrest themselves” (Smart, 1976, p. 47).