NCJ Number
167850
Date Published
1996
Length
273 pages
Annotation
A cultural history is presented that uses the "problem" of the criminal woman to examine the debate about the appropriate place of women in French society in the 19th century and ways in which gender issues were central to the most important cultural transformations of the period.
Abstract
The author asserts female criminality was a code that condensed and obscured larger concerns. Such concerns involved the extent to which symbolic overtones of female criminality were related to substantive issues in stories of female crime; how crimes of domestic violence, infanticide, and abortion were interpreted in the context of broader debates about divorce, depopulation, sexuality, and women's roles in the public sphere; and the role of such experts as forensic psychiatrists, criminologists, and legal scholars in producing a normative code for female behavior. In analyzing female crime, the author sheds light on various overlapping processes of cultural negotiation in a period of profound change, links female criminality to social change, and discusses female criminality within the framework of 19th century obsessions about sexual differences. The author also looks at the porosity of cultural boundaries, ways in which medical discourse provided a language for interpreting female deviancy, and the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1890's. References, notes, and illustrations