Aw! Your mother's in the mafia: Women criminals in progressive New York

Abstract

The criminal justice system in New York during the 1930s was an ethnic meeting ground: Irish, Jew and Italian were all part of a "social system held together by friendships and favors" and marked by a vision of the whole world as a racket and of themselves as "the smart guys who recognized how the world operated." Significantly, among the Jewish "smart guys" who functioned as more-or-less corrupt intermediaries within the system, were a number of women [ 1 ]. The examples were unique and suggestive enough to signal an area within the generally neglected topic of kinship patterns in organized crime that needed attention. This paper will deal, therefore, with women in organized crime. More specifically, it will focus on female criminals who operated primarily in the Jewish underworld in New York's Lower East Side during part of the Progressive Era. There are several reasons to center an inquiry on female criminals during the heyday of Progressivism. The most important one is that it was the period in which public attention was most intensely centered on female criminality and during which a particular and long-lasting image of the female criminal reached its malign apotheosis. The only female criminal role discussed during the Progressive period is that of prostitute. And that literature, whether a study of the reformers who moved to eradicate the social evil, or the enterprise itself, depicted women as passive victims of social disequilibrium and the venality and brutality of men. Equally as striking, the image of the prostitute, especially as developed by Progressive-Era reformers, was of a lonely, detached and confused female. Nowhere was it suggested that prostitutes or madams consciously and aggressively chose their activities as a positive adaptation to urban life, their class position in society or as an escape from male oppression and economic exploitation [21.