Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature

Conclusion. Courting Success

Conclusion Courting Success We need to flood the market with our own stories until we get one simple point across: men’s narrative story and phenomenological description of law is not women’s story and phenomenology of law. We need to dislodge legal theorists’ confidence that they speak for women, and we need to fill the gap that will develop when we succeed in doing so.l.l.l.l[F]eminist legal theorists need to show through stories the value of intimacy—not just to women, but to the community—and the damage done—again, not just to women, but to the community—by the law’s refusal to reflect that value. —Robin West, “Jurisprudence and Gender”1 Just as the title Courting Failure conjures up a host of meanings, so, too, does the title of this conclusion, “Courting Success.” It suggests not a final accomplishment, but a process, and signals at least an optimistic stance toward the future. Throughout this book, I have explored a myriad of issues to do with women and the law, reading real-life trials against fictional texts (and vice versa) and closely reading the responses to women’s perceived femininity. In many places, these readings offer uncomfortable examples of women’s pain and unfairly differentiated treatment before the courts. To leave the message here would, I think, be to reinforce critical perceptions of women’s ultimate inability to be treated appropriately. Yet it is important to trace the path taken to get here. Criminology has long treated the female offender as “other,” and feminist analyses are a necessary counterpoint to this one-sided portrait . Interdisciplinary studies such as law and literature also make a much-needed contribution to this debate. Courting Failure has been 224 Courting Success 225 an attempt to explore just a few of the implications of the space accorded the female offender and to analyze some aspects of con- finement and release that characterize her position. Karlene Faith acknowledges the gendered implications of crime in her scholarly text, Unruly Women: The Politics of Resistance and Confinement. The “unruly woman,” she argues, is a product of the bourgeois imagination and the politics of patriarchal relations . Her crimes are the impolite crimes of the woman who lacks the resources to wrap herself in the cloaks of middle-class femininity. The “bad girl” of cultural stereotyping is the product of class-biased, racist and heterosexist myths. Historically and to the present, her appearance, actions and attitudes have been offensive to the dominant discourses which define, classify, regulate and set penalties for deviance.2 Faith argues that, in this context, even the relatively benign terms used for such women (such as “women in conflict with the law,” a phrase I have used throughout) are problematic, given that they do not suggest the inequality of the relationship. As Faith notes, “One cannot be simply ‘in conflict’ with power to which one is subordinate.”3 Despite fears that the women’s movement would increase female criminal activity (on the basis that the more women had access to power and the public sphere, the more they would abuse such privileges ), studies suggest that it is not women’s access to power but their barring from it that causes crime. As Faith notes, the crimes women are most often convicted of in North America are stealing, writing bad checks, and cheating on welfare claims—hardly crimes of “independence ” or “empowerment.” Faith also reports that women’s crimes are in some ways, perhaps, linked to their femininity: women who steal or shoplift most frequently take lipstick, clothes, and household goods.4 Holly Johnson and Karen Rodgers further argue that many Canadian women prisoners’ only crime is poverty; almost a third of women prisoners are jailed for failure to pay fines.5 Women in conflict with the law most often come from lower socioeconomic groups, suffer from a lack of education, experience physical abuse and substance abuse, and are from ethnic minorities. As Johnson and Rodgers note, “This description is remote from the image of a ‘liberated ’ woman attempting to imitate the behaviour of men.” Similarly, Faith argues that women’s “lawbreaking is a futile response to the 226 Courting Failure continuum of private and/or social abuse to which females are commonly subjected.”6 And yet women’s very subordination, which is reiterated in a variety of ways by feminists...