Kowalsky, Sharon A Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 554 his religious feeling is certainly evident, but he also comes across in this volume as a man capable of independent thought, rather than a blinkered reactionary. The impression is one of considerable military competence, coupled with an increasingly subtle political sensibility; the latter was also evident in his cautious role in the civil war period, and in the emigration. This is a valuable and balanced study which increases our knowledge of a dead end in Russian history. It is well researched using archives in the Russian Federation, the United States and elsewhere, in addition to a wealth of published documents and memoir material. The text is supported by sixty pages of valuable endnotes, and accompanied by maps and photographs. University of Glasgow Evan Mawdsley Kowalsky, Sharon A. Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930. Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, IL, 2009. xii + 314 pp. Tables. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $42.00. This is a book of two halves. The first is dedicated to a history of Russian and Soviet criminology, tracing the development of the field from the late Imperial period into the early years of the Soviet regime. Sharon A. Kowalsky traces the evolution of various schools of thought regarding criminality, discussing European influences, as well as Russian-specific intellectual perspectives. She also outlines the establishment of the institutions of criminology and the professionalization of this field of study. The second half is devoted to a series of case studies in which Kowalsky explores the way in which Russian and Soviet criminology was applied to understand and punish particular crimes including prostitution, illicit alcohol production and infanticide. Crossing the revolutions of 1917 and the crises of the Civil War years, the case studies make clear the continuities in explanations for women’s criminality, as well as highlight the ways in which these theories were adapted to suit the new political regime and the changed gender relations it sought to foster. The central thread of the book which unites both halves is the analysis of the gendered perspective which criminologists took towards female criminality. At its heart, women’s biology was used to explain both the low levels of women’s crimes, but also the nature of crimes which they did commit. Women were viewed as the weaker sex, physically, mentally and morally, due to their experiences of menstruation, pregnancy, child birth and menopause, and to the fact that their biological role as bearers of children confined them REVIEWS 555 to the domestic realm. As a result, it was argued, women did not experience the struggles of the public domain which led men into criminal behaviour. On the other hand, that very domesticity meant they were most likely to commit crimes against their family or crimes which could be conducted in the household, like illicit alcohol production. If women were removed from that domestic sphere by circumstances, they were more prey to the influence of other criminals, but once again most likely to commit crimes related to their sexuality, like prostitution. Kowalsky demonstrates how such expectations of women’s criminality continued into the Soviet era, but were over-layered with socialist theory and expressed in the language of the new regime. Prostitution was understood as a crime born of the last vestiges of the old economic system and, after the Civil War, of the capitalistic elements of the New Economic Policy. Illicit alcohol production was framed as a rural crime committed by backward peasant women who, due to their biological and gender-related frailties, had not embraced socialism. The rural nature of this crime remained even if committed by women living in urban areas, the assumption being that they were new arrivals in the cities who had yet to integrate fully into socialist modernity. Similarly, given the new laws outlawing illegitimacy and legalizing abortion, criminologists viewed women resorting to infanticide as tending to still adhere to the now obsolete moral code of Imperial Russia. Women’s backwardness and their criminality were so conflated in the minds of criminologists that they actually viewed positively any diversification of women’s crime from the ‘domestic’ to the more ‘general’, that is to the...