Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 42

We have seen that traditionally, criminological theory showed only a passing interest in explaining the offending and the system’s criminal processing of women and girls. All this changed in 1975, however, with the publication of Adler’s (1975) Sisters in Crime and R. J. Simon’s (1975) Women and Crime. These books, particularly Adler’s, received a great deal of attention regarding their hypothesis that the women’s liberation movement increases the female crime rate. Although similar overall, Adler and Simon differed concerning the types of crime the women’s movement was expected to impact. Adler proposed that the violent crime rate would increase because of women’s liberation. In contrast, Simon proposed that only the property crime rate would increase with women’s liberation. Simon suggested further that women’s violent crime would decrease because women’s frustrations with life would diminish as they gained access to new work and educational opportunities. Also called the emancipation hypothesis, this approach suggests that the feminist movement, although working toward equality for women, increased the female crime rate.

Early critics found fault with the women’s liberation/emancipation hypothesis (WLEH): “Circumstantial evidence seems to indict the women’s movement for contributing to an increase in crime” (McCord & Otten, 1983, p. 3). Naffine (1987) summarized some of the troubling assumptions of WLEH: (1) Feminism brings out women’s competitiveness, (2) the women’s movement has opened up structural opportunities to increase places where women can offend, (3) women have fought and won the battle of equality, (4) feminism makes women want to behave like men, and (5) crime itself is inherently masculine. There are obvious problems with these assumptions. Even the most plausible assumption—that feminism has opened up women’s structural opportunities—loses credibility when faced with statistics showing that women have not achieved equality in high-paying and managerial professions (see Chapters 10–12). These assumptions, and WLEH in general, have been soundly criticized not only for the unfounded stance that increasing gender equality increases girls and women’s offending (in stark contrast to strain theories) but also for misusing and manipulating statistics where they were “confirmed” (see, e.g., Crites, 1976; Feinman, 1986; Leonard, 1982; Allison Morris, 1987; Naffine, 1987; Smart, 1976, 1982; Steffensmeier & Streifel, 1992). Notably, a 1983 study using incarcerated women to test WLEH reported these women to be generally “traditional,” “feminine” (not “feminist”), and “conformist” in terms of sex roles, hardly the hard-core feminists Adler’s (1975) theory predicted (Bunch, Foley, & Urbina, 1983).

Analyses of changes in women and girls’ offending in the 1970s and 1980s reported that females’ violent crime rate remained relatively stable (see Feinman, 1986; Steffensmeier, 1980), whereas research on property crimes, particularly larceny and petty property crimes, indicated women’s rates increased during this time (e.g., Box & Hale, 1983, 1984; Chilton & Datesman, 1987; D. A. Smith & Visher, 1980; Steffensmeier & Streifel, 1992). But the increase in women’s property crime rates corresponded with the feminization of poverty, defined as the growing number of women (with and without dependents) living in poverty, which is a better predictor of women’s criminality—and then, of property crimes—than is the strength or weakness of the feminist movement. In fact, the types of crime for which women were increasingly arrested after the women’s movement of the 1970s—prostitution and offenses against the family (such as desertion, neglect, and nonsupport)—are crimes not “altogether compatible with the view of the emancipated female” (Steffensmeier & Allan, 1988).

In addition to the feminization of poverty, sentencing changes in the 1970s and 1980s to “get tough on crime” have done more than the feminist movement to increase females’ (and males’) official crime rate reported by the police (Box & Hale, 1984). Furthermore, if the women’s movement has had any negative effect on women’s criminality, it is that women appear to have become more likely to have their behaviors defined as criminal or delinquent by judges and police officers (D. A. Curran, 1984; Allison Morris, 1987). Notably, researchers specifically examining the effect of young women’s adherence to feminist ideals in the 1980s (e.g., regarding women and work and gender roles in the family) found that pro-feminist women and girls were no more likely than their more traditional sisters to self-report using aggression and criminal or delinquent behavior (Figueira-McDonough, 1984; McCord & Otten, 1983). Kruttschnitt’s (1996) careful overview of tests of Adler’s and Simon’s hypotheses concluded that economic marginalization, drug use, and changes in formal social control provide better predictors of female offending than do WLEHs or opportunity theories, but “they have yet to be formally integrated into an explanatory model of female offending or of gender differences in offending” (p. 137). As expected, this hypothesis is rarely tested any more (because it has so little credence).