Feminist criminology emerged from the 1970s onwards amidst what is recognised as second wave feminism. Feminist contributions to criminology span Liberal, Marxist, Radical and Difference Feminist perspectives.
Early feminism criticised the extreme male bias in early to mid 20th century criminology. Most criminological theories from consensus theories to radical criminology focused exclusively on men, ignoring women, issues of patriarchy and gendered discourses altogether.
One key early feminist criminology text was Carol Smart’s (1976) Women, Crime and Criminology 1976.
Smart argued that the sociology of deviance had to become more than just about men if it was ever to fully understand crime. She criticised the gender blind assumptions inherent within criminology, which saw male and female experiences of crime and criminal justice as largely the same.
Smart argued criminology should focus on highlighting the similarities and differences between male and female experiences of crime and the criminal justice system and the importance of creating a space for women’s experiences and voices within criminological research and theory.
Feminist contributions to criminology can be broken down into four main categories:
- An early focus on developing theories of why women do and don’t commit crime.
- A focus on‘ doing gender’: how masculinity is a main driver of crime.
- Criticising the Chivalry Thesis by focusing on how women are seen as doubly deviant by the criminal justice system
- A later focus on intersectionality and how factors such as ethnicity and age intersect with gender resulting in diverse experience of crime and criminal justice.
These contributions throughout the 1970s and 1980s reshaped the contours of modern criminology.
The rest of this post explores some of the contributions of mainly second wave feminism to the development of criminology in the 1970s, 1980s and into the early 1990s.
Much of this involved criticising existing criminological theory and practice.
Control theory: why do women commit less crime than men?
Fracnces Heidensohn (1985) argued that male dominated patriarchal societies control women more effectively than they do men, making it more difficult for women to break the law. She developed Hirschi’s Control Theory but adapted it to focus on gender.
Control operates across three spheres:
- At home
- In public
- At work.
Control of women at home
Being a housewife directly restricts women by limiting the opportunities for criminality. Heidensohn describes domesticity as a form of detention. The endless hours spent on housework and the constant monitoring of young children leaves very little time for illegal activities. A pervasive value system persuades women they must carry out their domestic responsibilities dutifully or they will have failed as mothers and wives. Women who challenge the traditional roles of women within the family run the risk of having them imposed by force. Heidensohn says many observers confirm that wife battering is in fact an assertion of patriarchal authority.
If they are the main or only breadwinner men may also use their financial power to control women’s behaviour. The family more closely controls daughters as well as wives. They are usually given less freedom than boys who may come and go as they please or stay out later at night, and girls are expected to spend more time doing housework.
Control of women in public
In public women are controlled by the male use of force and violence, by the idea of holding onto a good reputation and the ideology of separate spheres.
Women often choose not to go out into public places because of the fear of being attacked or raped. Heidensohn quotes the 1986 Islington crime survey which found that 54% of women but only 14% of men often or always avoided going out after dark because of fear of crime. She quotes Susan Brownmiller’s claim that rape and fear of rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. Heidensohn stops a short of endorsing this view but she does argue that the sensational reporting of rapes and the unsympathetic attitude of some police officers and judges to rape victims act as forces controlling women.
Women also tend to limit their behaviour in public Places because of the risk of being labelled unrespectable. The wrong sort of dress, demeanour, makeup and even speech can damage your women’s reputation in the eyes of men.
The ideology of separate spheres which sees women’s place as being in the home has become part of the system that subtly and sometimes brutally confines women. Women are not expected to raise their concerns in public or place them on the political agenda. If they try they may be ridiculed and told to return to where they belong in the home. such a fate befell of the Greenham Common women who during the 1980s protested about the sighting of American nuclear weapons in Britain.
Control of women at work
At work male superiors in the hierarchy usually control women and men also dominate trade unions. Women may also be intimidated by various forms of sexual harassment that discourage female employees from asserting themselves and from feeling at home. Sexual harassment ranges from whistles and cat calls and the fixing of pinups and soft p*** pictures to physical approaches and attacks which could be defined as indecent and criminal. Heidensohn quotes surveys that find that up to 60% of women have suffered some form of sexual harassment at work.
Conclusion
Heidensohn’s arguments about the causes or conformity by women fits in well with consensus views on the causes of deviance. Based on control theory, both agree the crime and deviance by women takes place when controls break down and women lose the real or imagined incentives to conform. Heidensohn suggests that some female criminals may be those who have perceived the biases of the system and decided to push against it.
For other women it is the restrictions themselves that force them into reliance upon crime. Heidensohn says women are particularly vulnerable because they are so economically exploited if they lose protection of a man and may turn to crimes such as prostitution as the only way of earning a reasonable living.
Evaluation of Heidensohn’s Control Theory
Many of her arguments are based upon generalisations, some of which do not apply to all women..
Heidensohn does not always support her claims with strong empirical evidence. Furthermore, she admits that many of the empirical tests of control theory have been carried out on juvenile offenders rather than adults.
Control theory does sometimes portray women as passive victims.
However Heidensohn does present a plausible explanation of why such a gap remains between men’s and women’s crime rates. In doing so she highlights some of the inequalities that remain between men and women. Furthermore the theory is supported by some empirical studies.
There is still some relevance today. In 2023 23% of women (compared to only 8% of men) said they had experienced sexual harassment in the previous year. 75% of those reported they’d experienced harassment in public places, 25% in the workplace. (Source: Office for National Statistics).
Pat Carlen: women crime and poverty
In 1985 Pat Carlen conducted a study with 39 women aged 15 to 46 who had been convicted of one or more crimes. She carried out lengthy and in-depth unstructured interviews with each of the women. Most were from the London area and 20 were in prison or youth custody centres at the time of interviewing. Most of the women were working-class and they had committed a range of offences. 26 had convictions for theft or handling stolen goods, 16 for fraud or similar offences, 15 for burglary, 14 for violence, 8 for arson, six for drugs offences and four for prostitution related crime.
Carlen criticised Freda Adler’s Liberation Theory. She did not believe that liberation had resulted in increased crimes by women; most of her sample had been touched little by any games that women had experienced through increasing opportunities in the job market for example.
Carlen argued that the type of working-class background of most of her sample was typical of female offenders convicted of more serious crimes. 30 members of her sample were from working-class backgrounds.
By reconstructing the lives of such women from in-depth interviewing, Carlen hoped to identify the set of circumstances that led to their involvement in crime.
Control Theory
Carlen adopted control theory as her theoretical approach. She argued that working-class women have been controlled through the promise of rewards stemming from the workplace and the family; such women are encouraged to make what she called the class deal and the gender deal.
The class deal offers material rewards such as consumer goods for those respectable working-class women who work dutifully for a wage. The gender deal offers psychological and material rewards from either the labours or the love of a male breadwinner. When these rewards are not available for women, or they have not been persuaded these rewards are real or worth sacrifices, then the deals breakdown and criminality becomes a possibility.
Factors encouraging deviance
Carlen found that the women she studied attributed their criminality to four main factors. These were drug addiction (including alcohol), the desire for excitement, being brought up in care and poverty. She placed particular emphasis on the last two factors: very often the abuse that drugs and the desire for excitement the consequence of being brought up in care will be important
In all 32 the women had always been poor, four of the remaining seven were unemployed at the time of being interviewed and only two had good jobs. 22 of the women had spent at least part of their lives in care.
Rejection of the class deal
Poverty and being brought up in care led to the women rejecting the class and gender deals. Few of the women had experience of the possible benefits of the class deal. they never had access to the consumer goods and leisure facilities which Society portrays as representing the good life.
Attempts to find a legitimate way of earning a decent living had been frustrated. For example six of the women had been through the youth training scheme but they had returned to being unemployed at the end of their training. A number had gained qualifications in prison but found them to be of no use in finding a job. Many had experience of day-to-day humiliations, delays and frustrations in trying to claim benefits. They had a strong sense of injustice, oppression and powerlessness. Crime was a way of resisting these justices and trying to solve the problems of poverty. The women had little to lose by turning to crime and potentially a good deal to gain.
Rejection of the gender deal
According to Carlen women generally are deterred from committing crime because they are brought up to see themselves as the guardians of domestic morality. They have less opportunities to commit crimes because they are more closely supervised than males first by parents, later by husbands. Patriarchal ideology promises women happiness and fulfilment from family life. For most of the women in the study though the gender deal had not been made or had been rejected. They felt they had been freed from family life or felt so closely supervised they felt oppressed by the family.
Some of the women had been sexually or physically abused by their fathers. Eight of them had been physically attacked by male partners.
For the 22 women who had been in care there had been little opportunity to acquire the psychological commitment to male related domesticity. spending time caring.
Broken attachments to friends and family had reduced some of the potential social costs of isolation that could result from crime. Some had run away from care usually with no money and some had experienced homelessness and unemployment, all of which can easily lead on to crime.
Many of the women saw crime as their only route to a decent standard of living. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Convictions and prison sentences served to restrict the women’s legal opportunities even further and make the attractions of crime greater.
West and Zimmerman: Doing gender
Feminist Criminology also engaged in a closer consideration of masculinity, and the social construction of maleness. For example West and Zimmerman (1987) in their article ‘Doing Gender’.
West and Zimmerman proposed that women and men engage in gendered practices i.e ‘do gender ‘in response to situated social hierarchies and expectations about masculinity and femininity thus contributing to the reproduction of social structure.
Messerschmidt (1993) has developed this arguing that for many men crime served as a resource for doing gender and that different crimes were useful for demonstrating masculinity depending on men’s social structural positions across axes of race and class.
Masculinity was seen as a crucial point of intersection of different forms of power stratification and identity formation . Feminist theoretical work on the social construction of gender asserted that male power was crucial in understanding crime.
Feminist Criticisms of the Chivalry Thesis
The Chivalry Thesis stated that women were treated less leniently by the police and courts than men which partially explained their lower levels of representation in the official crime statistics.
One of the first criticisms of this was put forward by Francis Heidensohn (1968). Heidensohn argued that women were treated more harshly by the criminal justice system because they were seen as doubly deviant: They had broken social norms by breaking the law and also broken the social norms of their gender, thus they received harsher punishments.
There is some evidence that this is true:
- Research from 1987 found that compared to men women were more likely to be put in jail for robbery and assault compared to property crime. This suggests women are punished more harshly for being violent than men.
- Research from 2018 found that mothers receive harsher penalties than fathers. This suggests women are punished more when they break the ‘good mother’ stereotype.
Carol Smart (1989) argued male offenders are sometimes treated more sympathetically than their female victims. This is particularly the case with rape trials She argued such trials ‘celebrate notions of male sexual need and female sexual capriciousness’. She quoted some historical comments by judges in rape trials as evidence:
“It is well known that women in particular and small boys are likely to be untruthful and invent stories.” Judge Sutcliffe, 1976.
“Women who say no do not always mean no. It is not just a question of how she shows and makes it clear. If she doesn’t want it she only has to keep her legs shut”. Judge Wild, 1982.
“It is the height of impudence for any girl to hitch-hike at night. That is plain, it isn’t really worth stating. She is in the true sense asking for it”. Bertrand Richards, 1982.
Sandra Walklate (2004) argued that it is the female victim who ends up on trial. Women have to establish their respectability if their evidence is to be believed.
From a feminist perspective rape trials tend to see things from the male point of view which accepts that men become unable to restrain their sexual desires once women give them any indication they may be available for sex.
Female victims of rape are portrayed as not knowing their own mind, not being able to determine whether they want sex or not.
Prison is a harsher form of punishment for women
Pat Carlen’s work revealed that prisons were outdated, outmoded and gender insensitive forms of punishment for women. She argued that women’s prisons both infantilize and medicalice their occupants. Women and girls confinement was revealed to be shaped by powerful and pervasive ideologies about femininity and the proper place of women
Intersectionality and Criminal Justice
Third wave Feminism celebrated multiple ways of ‘doing Feminism’. More focus on intersectionality and on the impact of criminal justice on those who cross identities.
Some third and fourth wave feminists criticised early feminisms as being based on the experience of white women. They sought to understand more how gender inequality intersected with cross cutting systems of oppression such as race, class, sexuality, ableism and age. (Collins and Bilge 2016)/.
An intersectional lens is now increasingly used to understand how intersecting social identities mediate crime and experiences of victimisation. And focus critically on how criminal justice systems both embody and perpetuate existing social inequalities. (Healy and Colliver 2022).
Signposting and sources
This material is part of the Crime and Deviance module, taught in the second year of A-level Sociology.
Heidensohn, Frances (1968). “The Deviance of Women: A Critique and an Enquiry”. The British Journal of Sociology. 19 (2): 160–175. doi:10.2307/588692. ISSN 0007-1315. JSTOR 588692.
Messerschmidt, J. (1993). Masculinities and crime: Critique and reconceptualization of theory . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Liebling et al (2023) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.
El Saadawi is a women’s rights activist, who has herself experienced oppression within Egypt. She has campaigned vigorously for women’s rights in the Arab world and has been imprisoned for her activism.
She pointed out that in early history, there were very few effigies of male gods, while symbolic representations of the ‘Great Mother Goddess’ were numerous. In the Middle East, Asia and Europe, for example, archaeologists have uncovered numerous symbols of the Mother Goddess. One common representation is of the mother goddess as a naked pregnant women, which seems to place fertility as central to early spirituality.
