Usually, when people write about the crimes that women commit, it's a complicated dance of omission and deception. A recent article in Newsweek magazine illustrated this approach: arrests of violent girls were up 125%, it said. The article never gave the raw number for arrests, however, nor did it define the circumstanes of those arrests, or place them in context. Most critically, it did not place those arrests up against the figures for male violence. Women commit approximately ten to fifteen percent of all violent crimes, yet in fact they are subject to an almost all-male law enforcement and judicial system which is inhabited by conservative males who judge them harshly. Jones explores the context for these judgements, and points out that women are routinely judged twice: as criminals, and then as that mythical creature, Woman, who's sugar and spice if s he knows what's good for her. Thus, while men kill their children to get revenge on escaped spouses, women tend to kill in self defense or because of mental illness. The merciless response to Andrea Yates---rendered psychotic by too much childbearing, too much stress, and the indifference of her breeder-mad fundie hubbbie, is prefigured in this book by the case of the Irish epilectic maid who killed her mistress clumsily while in the midst of an attack and received no mercy whatsoever.
Similarly, in the chapter dealing with despoiled maidens, the author makes the critical point that by letting some women get away with murdering men who had 'seduced' and abandoned them, society was upholding the status quo. Women did not have the vote and yet were punished by the very people who held them powerless and wanted to keep them that way. By letting a few appropriately remorseful women off the hook, society could solve one woman's problem and ignore all the rest.
Jones analyzes society's views of women and crime and weaves the analysis through a fascinating string of historical cases. Amongst the startling facts she reveals are that infanticide cases have remained more or less constant, as a percentage, since the 1700s, when draconian laws essentially removed women's right agaisnt self incrimination. If a woman bore a bastard child, she could be fined and whipped. However, if she was an indentured servant and bore a bastard child, her owner could recieve another SEVEN years of servitude from her and sell the child as well. So many employers profited by raping and impregnating their female servants that the law was changed, but nothing really stopped men from raping women. With heavy penalties for bearing bastards, women resorted to concealing pregnancies, delivering in secret, and then killing the babies. Then a law was passed, making it a capital crime to conceal the birth of such a child. She was dmaned if she did, and damned if she didn't---and it didn't matter if she was a rape victim or not. In some cases, girls were so ignorant of the facts of reproduction that they were effectively defenseless. So much for abstinence only. (There was a case, for example, of a grand daughter of Queen Victoria who was kept so ignorant about her own body that she was impregnated by a foot man who tricked her into having sex. Then, hypocritcally, her family threw her out into the street.)
In any event, the book takes apart the standard cliches that dominate the writing about women's crime, and leaves one with the important realization that one should be exceedingly cautious when confronted with a book that uses percentages in the case of raw numbers. As an example of this, consider this: my hometown had one murder one year, then two the next. What percentage increase is that?
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