Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 87

The limited research examining gender differences in selling drugs indicates that it is much tougher for women than men to break into the drug market (Maher & Daly, 1996; Ryder & Brisgone, 2013), and they do so more easily for lower-level drugs, particularly marijuana. Some research contends that women who successfully gain access to drug selling do so through their husbands or boyfriends (Koester & Schwartz, 1993; Maher & Curtis, 1992). Women’s drug selling may be a better indication of the feminization of poverty than of women’s increased drug use (Díaz-Cotto, 1996). More specifically, not all women drug dealers use drugs, but selling drugs is one of the few options many poor women have to make money (Díaz-Cotto, 1996). However, drug addiction can also spin someone into economic marginalization even if she was not in poverty prior to her drug use (see Maher, 1995). Given the connection between women and girls’ crack addiction and trading sex for crack, the advent of crack flooded the streets with new sex workers and thus street sex workers’ pay decreased drastically (Maher & Curtis, 1992; Maher & Daly, 1996). Lisa Maher’s (1995) study of street prostitutes who did not have pimps but exchanged sex for money to support their crack use perceived themselves as independent, despite the disempowerment and male dependence they experienced with street drug dealers and users. Similar to the pimps, the drug dealers took most of the women’s money. Similarly, Lauderback, Hansen, and Waldorf (1992) reported that after continued dissatisfaction with the division of labor and profits from their boyfriends’ crack-selling ventures, a group of young African American women formed a gang and entered into the crack-selling business themselves.