"Offending women": a double entendre.

• Author: Belknap, Joanne
• Position: Centennial Symposium: A Century of Criminal Justice

1. INTRODUCTION

   This Article is based on a careful reading of the articles published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1) in its first one hundred years that address the histories, sentencing, housing (imprisonment), health, and other characteristics of women offenders. (2) The Journal published nineteen articles from 1913 to 1971 that fit these qualifications (about women offenders), and they are listed in Appendix 1. The articles range in topics, from what a women's reformatory should and did look like to descriptions of incarcerated women and the causes of women's criminal offending. The articles also vary in terms of the type and quality of research methods employed and the compassion, or lack thereof, the authors held for women offenders. Notably, most of the articles were written by women, and with the exception of one by Clarence Growdon, (3) the articles authored by men were not only the most sexist, but surprisingly, the most recent. (4)

   In addition to a critical review of the nineteen articles, this Article also places the historical articles in the context of contemporary feminist criminology, a subfield which has grown exponentially in the past few decades. Although some themes are common in both older and more current studies, in other respects, the research differs. The most poignant difference is the invisibility of trauma, especially abuse, as a precursor to women's and girls' offending in the historical articles. In addition, the early articles either fail to address race and racism, or when race is addressed, it is nearly always done in a racist manner. Although this is not surprising given the time period in which these articles were written, it is still important to acknowledge. Despite some of the limitations, I do not want to diminish the importance of the topics these historical articles addressed, including the documentation of the dire consequences of poverty, "feeble-mindedness," "venereal diseases" (sexually transmitted infections), "epilepsy," and sexuality as risk factors for female offending, or more likely, labeling women as offenders.

   Before reporting in detail on themes in the historical articles, it is useful to summarize the nineteen historical articles as a group. First, most of the historical articles were published in the first two decades of the Journal (1910 to 1929); indeed, twelve of the nineteen articles (six per decade for each of these first two decades) were published before 1930. Four of the historical articles were published in the 1930s, none in the 1940s or 1960s, only two in the 1950s, one in the 1970s, and none in the past three decades (1980 to 2010). Second, all but three of the nineteen articles were written by women. Interestingly, the two most recent articles were both written by men--Satterfield in 1953 (5) and Ellis and Austin in 1971 (6) (Austin is a female co-author)--and they are alone in their focus on women's biological nature as causing their offending or distinguishing it from men's offending. Third, the sixteen articles published in the first three decades were exclusively about women's prisons and reformatories and women prisoners.

   In considerable contrast to the sixteen articles that preceded them, the final three historical articles published in the first one hundred years of the Journal are about the role of women police officers, (7) "biological nature" as an explanation of women's offending, (8) and the link between incarcerated women's menstruation and their aggressive behaviors. (9) This Article will not address these final three articles in depth, mostly because they are aberrations compared to the other sixteen historical articles. For the most part, Higgins's article is a somewhat defensive argument identifying the importance of having women police officers. (10) One can understand the defensive stance that Higgins and other women police assumed in 1950, given the intense resistance to women police officers that occurred two decades later when police departments were forced to hire women into patrol positions in unprecedented numbers after Title VII in 1972. (11) And while Higgins provides some compelling reasons to hire women police and notes their contributions to law enforcement (although sometimes in sexist examples), her article on women police is almost entirely unrelated to the remaining articles that focus on female offenders. (12)

   The two most recent Journal articles, comprise two of the three historical articles about women offenders written by men and are the most sexist of the nineteen historical articles--throwbacks to Cesare Lombroso's obsession with women's biological make-ups as contributing to their offending, Sigmund Freud's "anatomy as destiny," and Otto Pollok's focus on women's menstruation as symbolic of their deviance/offending. (13) While it is beyond the scope of this Article to pick apart in detail Satterfield's and Ellis and Austin's research, their articles will be revisited in the conclusion, in a discussion of how the focus on biology to explain offending is certainly growing in criminology currently. (14)

   Before proceeding to a more detailed account of the Journal's historical articles on women offenders, it is worth noting the authors' backgrounds and accounting for the high quality of some of these same articles. Regarding the first point, although information on these women authors was often missing, it was clear that many of them were closely affiliated with the institutions about which they were writing. For example, in footnotes or in the articles themselves, the authors were often identified as superintendents, medical providers, or researchers for reformatories, prisons, or other agencies in the criminal legal system (such as the Crime Prevention Bureau or the Bureau of Research). Moreover, many of these women authors had impressive educational backgrounds, especially when one considers the time periods in which they were conducting research and writing. For example, in this small sample, at least three of the women authors were medical doctors (Spaulding, Guibord, and Potter), and at least three had Ph.D.'s (Bryant, Bowman, and Davis). Given research indicating a desire for the professionalization of women's reformatories' supervisors and wardens, perhaps it should come as no surprise that most of the women writing these articles were superintendents of or physicians in women's reformatories or prisons, or women statisticians for the prison system. In fact, the first two decades of the 1900s, the Progressive Era, saw a push for increased professionalism of the female prison/reformatory administrators and the incorporation of a medical model. (15) So, for the first time, the reformatories were managed by educated and experienced women professionals, and the Progressive Era was also distinguished by the establishment of physicians', psychiatrists', and psychologists' roles in classifying offenders. (16) This finding by historian Nicole Hahn Rafter is reflected in these early Journal articles on offending women. (17)

   Additionally, whether the women authors in the first hundred years of the Journal worked as superintendents of reformatories, medical doctors, doctors of philosophy (Ph.D.'s), or otherwise, most of them appeared to be committed to improving the lives of female offenders, and often passionately so. For example, four of the articles were authored or coauthored by Helen Worthington Rogers (between the dates of 1917 and 1929), (18) and all of these articles are about the laws and their impact on the housing of offending women in reformatories. Rogers was hugely committed to the implementation of reformatories for women, viewing such incapacitation of women as the only way to provide them with adequate treatment. (19) This is also consistent with prior research reporting that many of the first women lawyers in the United States were advocates for gender and racial equality. (20)

   Of all the Journal articles reviewed, the author who likely had the longest scholarship legacy is the author of the first Journal article on women in prison. Katharine Bement Davis, born in 1860, was a truly remarkable individual who was active in such causes as abolition, racial civil rights, homosexuality studies, and women's suffrage, as well as penology and criminology. (21) Indeed, in 2000 she was honored as "a founding figure in the 'Chicago school of homosexual studies.'" (22) Notably, Davis received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1900, at the age of forty, in political economy and sociology. (23) One of Davis's biographers, Mary Jo Deegan, notes that in 1913, Davis published a chapter in an edited book in which "[d]rawing on her feminist pragmatism, she showed that unemployment, under-employment and low salaries led women to prostitution." (24) As the first woman Commissioner of Corrections in New York City (1914-1916), Davis was instrumental and outspoken in her policies encouraging the racial integration of women prisoners, and she resisted characterizations of the women's prisoners' homosexuality (often "raced" by references to supposedly lecherous African-American women prisoners) as "perverted." (25) Although Katharine Bement Davis was named one of the three most famous women in the United States in 1915, and one of the twelve greatest women living in the United States in a national League of Women Voters poll in 1922, she was forgotten by 1933. (26)

   Today's feminist legal or criminology scholar, with additional information published since the work reported in the first one hundred years of the Journal, would likely disagree with some of these women authors' contentions and views. Still, most of these women authors in the first one hundred years of the Journal could be classified as at least pro-feminist, if not extremely feminist. Again, this is particularly laudable given the times during which most of these articles were written. And it is also a...