Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 28

The enduring effects of the positivists can be viewed in the research on female criminality that was published in the 1960s and 1970s. Similar to Pollak, Konopka’s (1966) book, The Adolescent Girl in Conflict, and Vedder and Somerville’s (1970) The Delinquent Girl identify girls as criminal instigators. Konopka views girls’ crime as a result of emotional and sexuality problems, whereas Vedder and Sommerville view it as a result of girls’ inability to adjust to the “normal” female role (Klein, 1973). Most disquieting, Vedder and Sommerville attribute high rates of delinquency among African American girls to “their lack of ‘healthy’ feminine narcissism”—an explanation with racist overtones (Klein, 1973, p. 25). Both books ignore economic and social explanations at the expense of explaining female criminality through physiology and psychology. Following this logic, they see psychotherapy as the solution to girls’ delinquency and ignore the need to address the potentially criminogenic social and economic constraints in which many delinquent girls were (and still are) enmeshed. Finally, in their book Delinquency in Girls, Cowie, Cowie, and Slater (1968) rely on masculinity, femininity, and chromosomes to explain girls’ criminality. “In this perspective, the female offender is different physiologically and psychologically from the ‘normal’ girl,” in that the delinquent girl is too masculine and is rebelling against her femininity (Klein, 1973, p. 27).

Taken together, the positivists failed to see sexism in access to power, nor how this could intersect with race, class, and other characteristics. Thus, in the positivist school, even when some professed that social and economic factors could also play a role, women and girls’ criminal (and some other) behaviors were believed to be largely biologically determined and often tied to their sexuality. The complexity of their criminal behavior was reduced to a challenge of the traditional gender role—a role not rooted in nature (biology), but rather societally specified. The positivists assumed that the girl or woman who defied the prescribed gender role had a problem, and thus the positivists were blind to the possibility that there was a problem with gender prescribed roles, regardless of girls and women’s resources or situations, individually or collectively. They failed to recognize the racist and classist aspects of patriarchy whereby the prescribed societal gender roles often vary across race and class, with different (racist and classist) implications among women and girls (Rice, 1990). As we will see in the following three chapters, women and girls’ offending is often still interpreted through a positivist lens, and the responses to offending girls and women are too often practiced with vestiges of the traditional or positivist approach, fraught with sexism, racism, and classism, and sex-negativity, including a hypervigilance about women and girls’ sexuality.