On writing ‘The deviance of women’: observations and analysis

Abstract

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’– so begins L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953), reminding readers how difficult it is to reconstruct aims and events even if we were participants in them ourselves. This opening line is evocative for the writing of this contribution for other reasons too: Hartley's young hero did not understand his own role in the plot of the novel and only comes to realize it later. My task here is to give an account of how I came to write ‘The deviance of women’ (l968) placing it, as far as I can, in its background in the 1960s and also in the sociological setting of those days. I shall also reflect some of the stimuli, which lead me to write it and to present it in this form. These are, of course, my thoughts, recorded more than forty years later and affected by what has happened since. Three significant developments stand out and colour my reflections: first, this paper is often credited with providing the foundation of feminist criminology (Eaton 2000; Mooney 2009) and see Miller in this issue (Miller 2010); next, feminism as a set of intellectual and cultural perspectives has had a profound impact on our society; and finally, the 1960s have been much written about as a pivotal decade. It is thus not possible to recall this era without being conscious of the changes, which have followed, especially those that are linked to this paper. The 1960s was a ‘cusp’ decade, an era when notable social and political shifts happened, yet much of the old order remained. Affluence and consumerism grew in western countries and higher education expanded. From 1965, US military intervention in Vietnam grew and along with it, opposition to the war and to other aspects of corporate, capitalist society. Much of this turmoil reached its peak at the end of the period – the riots in Paris were in May 1968, student protesters were shot at Kent State in May 1970. Nevertheless, currents of excitement were flowing by the mid-1960s, especially from alternative cultural and political sources and above all, from the USA. The most notable feature of the sociology of the day, which my paper amply demonstrates, is the sociology of deviance. Becker and Lemert are the leading authors cited and it is the notions of social reaction theory and labelling which dominate the argument of the paper. Older writers, neo-functionalists and others, are contrasted with the more modern deviancy theorists who had recently become influential on our generation of young scholars. Paul Rock, whose first paper appeared in the same volume, also began with an exegesis of the sociology of deviance (Rock 1968:176). Stan Cohen's earliest account of his research had appeared in 1967. It is vital to stress here however that all these papers predate the first National Deviancy Symposium, which was held in November 1968. In my own article it is already clear that this theoretical approach was not going to prove helpful to my quest, even though it offered important insights to some of my contemporaries. At this point, I need to focus on what I was seeking in preparing this paper and what the particular context of it was. As a sociology student at the London School of Economics and Political Science (first as an undergraduate and later as a research student) I had had the education typical for these days. We had plenty of exposure to positivist sociology and a solid grounding in research methods (including statistical techniques). Social theory covered the canon – Marx, Weber and Durkheim, as well as Parsons, Davis et al. LSE, founded in the 1890s by Fabian socialists, had a strong tradition of supporting and providing training for public policy and I took relevant courses in social administration. However, the topics in which I became most interested were, so to speak, at an angle to my studies and did not fit within their subject matter. The sociology of crime and deviance was the most fascinating subject we studied, not least since it combined distinctive concepts, such as subcultural theory, with real world engagement with social problems. Yet the topic which drew me was scarcely in the syllabus – the problems and the paradoxes of female crime and deviance. In a further irony it is among an older group of authors, very few of them sociologists, that the small selection of studies of women and crime can be found (for example Lombroso, Thomas and Pollak and see Heidensohn 1996 for an account). The one to whom I have always attributed my immediate inspiration was Barbara Wootton, then an influential public intellectual, an economist by training, who had succinctly claimed that ‘if men behaved like women, the courts would be idle and the prisons empty’. What Wootton summed up was the well-founded observation that there was a notable, long-standing and widespread set of differences between male and female levels of deviance and crime. From the time that the earliest criminal records were kept, they showed female conformity, in contrast to male deviance. Women and girls committed fewer offences, appeared less often before the courts and formed a very small percentage of those in prison. The conventions of research of that time very much favoured empirical studies, and thus in 1965 I embarked on a project to explore the reasons for these marked sex differences. I undertook interviews with girls in borstals at Bullwood Hall, East Sutton Park and, most chilling of all, at the mother and baby wing of Exeter (male) Prison; I also interviewed and observed adult women at Holloway and Styal Prisons and talked to governors and discipline staff. I even collected comparative data from a sample of young women working in industry. All of them completed a psychological test, which I devised to test various hypotheses. Despite these efforts, however, I could not make sense of the material. My 1968 paper represents my attempts to do so: it describes the problems as they appeared to me then, that the deviant behaviour of women was, unlike that of men, a ‘largely ignored area of human behaviour’. Further, existing theories failed to account for either female deviance or sex differences and that the issue, apparently one which could provide interest and insight, had been acknowledged but virtually ignored for generations (Heidensohn 2010 [1968]: 111–12 [160–1]). In short, the article expresses the frustration I experienced at the limitations of contemporary sociology, both its intellectual base and its formal organization in academia. On the latter point, I had presented the substance of ‘The deviance of women’ at the LSE sociology department's regular staff seminar in 1967. My colleagues' reaction is best described as polite incomprehension. The themes I raised were not regarded as important or particularly challenging, but I did receive enough encouragement from a few, notably Terry Morris and Paul Rock, to go ahead and prepare a paper for submission to the BJS. It is worth noting, as I have done elsewhere (Heidensohn 1994 and 1998) that it was not merely my fellow sociologists who found my concerns puzzling then: civil servants in the Home Office and professional staff in prisons were perplexed too. As women formed such a small percentage of offenders and, for the most part, committed trivial crimes, they were not judged to present serious policy problems. ‘Juvenile delinquency’ was deemed to be the matter of the times, specifically in the more aggressive and spectacular forms demonstrated by urban adolescent males. Even more strikingly, the female offenders whom I had interviewed did not see themselves as ‘interesting’. By this I mean that, while they could produce their own narratives of their lives, these were, for the most part, individualized stories, which followed stereotypical lines about ‘bad girls and fallen women’. Many years later, in reconsidering this research project, I was able to analyse the changes I had observed and recorded in the 1960s: In the period I describe I have observed groups of deviant women going through transitions . . . from ‘being deviant women’ to ‘knowing that they were’ from ‘acceptance of deviant status’ to ‘resistance of deviant status’ and ‘being silent’ to ‘finding a voice’. (Heidensohn 1994: 27) These shifts were depicted in a schematic way: The most significant change I tried to illustrate in this 1994 article was one I attributed to the development of feminist perspectives in sociology and in the study of deviance. These were, essentially, the missing concepts which I had needed when I sought to complete my research in the 1960s. In subsequent work, I have called ‘The deviance of women’ a pre-feminist piece and, strictly speaking, so it is. Neither the terms ‘feminist’ nor ‘criminology’ appear in it and it is innocent of the vocabulary of modern feminism. I had set out the deficiencies in the material available for me to work with then ‘(T)he deviance of women is one of the areas of human behaviour most notably ignored in sociological literature’ (Heidensohn 1994: 27) and that existing ‘approaches to female deviance demonstrate their common inadequacy and inappropriateness for the topic’ (Heidensohn 1994: 169). Yet ‘it addresses the major themes for the study of women and crime and provides the agenda for the development of a “feminist criminology”’. (Mooney 2009). Certainly, in another review of this and related work, I concluded: (T)his article contains most of the major concerns of my own later research and that of several other feminists in the field: explaining sex crime differences, relevance for sociology, social policy and masculinity and the need for ethnographies. The ‘liberation causes crime’ argument is considered (1998: 168) as is standpoint-ism and the rationality of female offending. But it is not expressed in terms which would be used today. (Heidensohn 1998: 58) In the same article, I argued that what had been needed in order to complete my early tasks was a ‘series of awakenings’ which required new ideas and even a new set of concepts and vocabulary. The academic world of social science in the 1960s and 1970s was ‘another country’ but one for which new maps were being drawn. (Heidensohn 1998: 59) Looking back from the distance of more than forty years, on this strange but familiar landscape, I can see now much more clearly than I could then what was happening. With the clarity bestowed by hindsight, I realize that my own thinking was influenced by the trends of those times, albeit partly by the persistence of old-fashioned ideas against which I was reacting. Perhaps just as notably, I was part of what Paul Rock has called ‘the fortunate generation’ (Rock 1994) of researchers; among the characteristics Rock found in his study, and which we shared, was our education in, and commitment to, the deviancy theories of our youth in the 1960s (Rock 1994). My BJS article reflects this, even if these perspectives had to be discarded in the end too. The ideas which did alter the subject profoundly appeared quite soon even if their impact was, initially a range of concepts, processes and constructs (was) named by feminist scholars. This enabled us to see that gender, power and control were relevant to the analysis of both serious assaults and comparatively minor incivilities. (Heidensohn 1998: 159) Aware as I was of the requirement for major shifts in theoretical perspectives in order to achieve the understanding I aimed for, I did not anticipate the huge culture changes, which would accompany and facilitate them. As well as seeking new ways of looking at the problems of deviance, I argued in this paper that we needed a massive increase in activity, a re-orientation in the interests of scholars since What seems to be needed in the study of female deviance is a crash programme of research, which telescopes decades of comparable studies of males. (Heidensohn 2010 [1968]: 122 [171]) ‘The deviance of women’ began, as its subtitle suggests, as a critique, a reasoned review of a central neglected sociological question and of the relevant literature. The conclusions are not positive, but instead of ending on a wholly negative note, I proposed what amounts to a wish list. My hopes, as briefly outlined in the paper, were for: transformations in the discipline changes in awareness amongst other academics and policy makers large-scale and rapid research endeavours all to have female crime and deviance as their focus. These aims are ambitious, but it can be argued, they have largely been achieved, even if the impact that I optimistically anticipated for them has sometimes been unexpected. A sense of these outcomes can be gained from a series of assessments I have prepared myself: Heidensohn 1987, 1996, 2006; in the last of these, I noted how vibrant and flourishing the field is and how, in the twenty-first century, it attracts a new generation of scholars: while central questions from the criminology agenda are considered by the authors (in this collection) they all indicate how much these original themes have been extended, reinterpreted and answered in new and distinctive ways . . . this field is . . . vast, diverse and complex. (Heidensohn 2006: 8) Unlike Hartley's hero with whom I began these reflections, I do not regret my role in writing ‘The deviance of women’, indeed I am proud of it and of the status as a ‘classic’ piece it has acquired. As I have noted, the social and sociological contexts in which it was written no longer exist, even though they are well within living memory. The article itself became a factor in these changes and the objectives I had when I wrote it have been at least partly met. The sole caveat I would enter is about what I have called elsewhere the ‘Pandora Problem’ after the mythical Greek figure ‘who opened a box in search of knowledge and released evils into the world which could not then be controlled or recaptured’ (Heidensohn 2009: 26). Carol Smart (1977) had long ago raised the problem of the dangers of making the issue of female criminality visible and risking the ‘amplification’ of ‘The deviance of women’. This is, in any case, a matter of contention and an example of a possible unintended consequence of research. Whether or not this is a fair appraisal, It is now impossible to reverse what has happened during the past forty years and forget all the knowledge we have gained about gender and crime (Heidensohn 2009: 26). We are now in another country, altered profoundly from the place where ‘The deviance of women’ was written and one whose terrain it helped, perhaps, to shape.