"Problem Girls": Gendering Criminal Acts and Delinquent Behavior

"Problem Girls": Gendering Criminal Acts and Delinquent Behavior Ruth M. Alexander. The "Girl Problem": Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995. χ + 200 pp. ISBN 0-8014-2821-1 (cl). Regina G. Kunzel. Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945. New Haven & LondonYale University Press, 1993. xi + 264 pp. ISBN 0-300-06509^1 (pb). Mary E. Odern. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920. Chapel Hill & London : University of North CaroUna Press, 1995. xiv + 265 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2215-9 (cl). Ann-Louise Shapiro. Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. vi + 265 pp. ISBN 0-8047-1663-3 (cl). Carolyn Strange. Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1995. xi + 299 pp. ISBN 0-8020-Ό598-5 (pb). Kyle Emily Ciani Criminals, perverts, and delinquents have historicaUy been defined as men; likewise, their violent or deviant actions have been characterized as distinctly masculine. This essay reviews five books that question the gendered assumptions which equate criminal to male and victim to female. Ruth M. Alexander, Regina G. Kunzel, and Mary E. Odern center their studies of female delinquency and deviancy in the institutional authority of adolescent correctional asylums, maternity homes, and juvenüe courts of the United States. Carolyn Strange explores how single, wage-earning women in Toronto "negotiated" with authority to find pleasure and acceptance within the "perilous" city. Ann-Louise Shapiro enters Paris during the "turbulent social environment of the new Third Republic" to investigate how reactions to female criminal behavior set the agenda for debates trying to define the place of women (4). These works reveal the critical role gender plays in constructing and assigning model status to certain behaviors, and add to the growing body of feminist scholarship that confronts the conflicting attitudes and reactions to the power/knowledge dialectic.1 In so doing, these scholars expose the often © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 204 Journal of Women's History Autumn paradoxical solutions devised to govern adolescent girls and young women who sought some control over their bodies, earnings, and environments. The vexing responses to that control offer proof that "girls" seeking pleasure in the modern city produced and reproduced "problems," acts which then engendered equally confining prescriptions designed to erase the tainted marks left behind by dangerous females. Communities have long used the acts of delinquent and criminal women as a foil to teach their citizens how to maintain the purity of family , state, and nation. Yet, as Ann-Louise Shapiro points out, juries, judges, and solicitors have often denied female offenders their due process in order to honor pubUc opinion. These monographs use exhaustive research and theoretical expertise to argue that when dealing with female criminals and delinquents, "no unified ideology structured responses . . . nor did practice mirror prescription" (Shapiro, 3). In fact, the popular culture simultaneously embraced and rejected certain offenses defined as female . It is the process by which these responses entered the culture that interests these historians. Professionals constructed an image of "problem" females as adolescent girls and women who used (or rather, misused) their sexuality to gain economic or social advantage. The problem of these women and possible solutions became blurred: was "feeble-mindedness" the cause or effect of female deviancy? Thus, as concerned citizens began to regulate the sexuaUty of some females, they left other women more vulnerable to abuse. PoUtical experiments, economic uncertainty, and eugenic interpretations of scientific advances helped "experts" characterize the "problem" female. They depended on popular print and film media to distribute their ideas, and assumed their findings would be accepted by the masses. Urban tabloids recounted tales of young white girls entrapped by "foreign" men and warned of the danger that awaited women who traveled alone; seduction narratives detailed premarital trysts which ended in pregnancy, rejection, or a botched abortion—acts which brought shame to young girls "taken in" by the pleasures of their bodies. Films portrayed working women as either seductive temptresses or...