CHAPTER FOUR Women, Sexuality And
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- 231 - CHAPTER FOUR Women, Sexuality and the Crime Question In the account we have presented so far of the evolution of the crime question in post-war political and social commentary, women have been almost entirely absent, as commentators and also as subjects of comment. It is only in the last decade, in fact, that the topics of the criminality of women and also crimes against women have been taken seriously within academic criminology; and probably only since the early 1970's that the contribution of women to the annual criminal statistics has become anything like a topic of animated discussion in Governmental circles, amongst police and in the mass media, as "an issue".' In this chapter, I want to attempt to examine some key connections that have been suggested in some of the recent work on women and sexuality (specifically with respect to the crime question), but in a limited way. The limited nature of my comments are a product of two considerations. First, I am not a woman, and I am therefore not able to speak from experience on many of the questions that are central to contemporary feminist debate. It is not that I believe that my gender disqualifies me from comments on these questions, any more than the fact that I believe that not having been a prisoner in a jail disqualifies me from commenting on the prison question. But I do believe that it is difficult to men to comprehend the fears women routinely experience, in adolescence and adulthood, regarding the possibility of rape, sexual attack or harassment; 2 or, for that matter, for them to understand the ways in which the "institutions" of prostitution and pornography contribute, subjectively, to the reproduction of women's sense of subordination to men. When this thesis was being written, women in this part of England were clearly threatened, both objectively and subjectively by the so-called "Yorkshire Ripper". The subsequent capture and prosecution of Peter Sutcliffe early in 1981 may alleviate, but it - 232 - does not remove, the fears that women then experienced of sexual harassment, attack and even murder. In the aftermath of the Ripper, these are no longer matters which men can be allowed to treat in the manner of television comedians. The work being undertaken by members of the Women's Movement into the questions of rape, prostitution and pornography in the current period of explosion in feminist studies will throw light on these issues in a way that this particular exploration could never do. A second reason for attempting to delimit our investigation of this area is that we are primarily interested, in this study, in the question of ideology, and specifically in the implicit and explicit images of crime and conformity that exist within the three most significant ideological "constituencies" of conservatism, liberalism and social democracy. So we shall try to confine our comments here to the question of the nexus of women and sexuality as it exists in ideolgy, rather than dealing with the very broad set of questions (concerning the origins of patriarchy, the relationship of the family and the State, the nature of women's sexuality, the development of radical and revolutionary feminist (or "separatist") critiques of male domination, and others) which have been thrown up in recent feminist literature and political activity. A few, inadequate, comments are required on these issues, however. We take the word patriarchy to refer to the set of structures and beliefs which sustain the oppression of women by men. So "patriarchy" can be a reference to the form of family structure (the patrilineal nuclear family) which subordinates /t he women by marriage to the male Head of the family, or to sets of beliefs, laws, or ideologies, which describe these structural forms as natural and inevitable inequalities. "Patriarchy" is, in other words, a property relation. "Sexism", on the other hand, is best reserved as a reference to the sets of beliefs about the inevitability of "difference" between the sexes, which differences are seen, usually, to be the product of biological difference. Sexism exploits the fact of biological difference through jests and ridicule (in jokes about male and female sexuality) and also through silences (in suppressing discussion of women as subjects of history). Properly speaking, sexism is not patriarchal unless the - 233 - "jokes" and the silences are actually at work in the direct reproduction of the subordination of women to the male Head of the family, as a. commodity. The distinction between patriarchal and sexist structures is a very fine one indeed, however, and has been the topic of considerable theoretical examination within feminism (cf. Women Publishing Collective 1976; Kuhn and Wolpe 1978). For our purposes, the key observation is the accommodation of social democratic thinkers to patriarchy, particularly in the support given by social democracy in the post-war period to the working class nuclear family. The costs that have been paid for this subordination by women (as wives and daughters) are largely uncalculated in the "sociology of the family", in post-war history or in orthodox social surveys, although some insight into the effects of sex-role sterotyping and coercive divisions of domestic labour is available in Sue Sharpe's study of the early childh000f girls and in Sheila Rowbotham and 3ean McCrindle's collection of reminiscences of working class adult women (Sharpe 1976 : McCrindle and Rowbotham 1979). An Italian study of the early socialisation of girls in working class families by Belotti has shown the pernicious power of sexist beliefs (especially when linked to theological themes of the dirty, devil woman) in relegating women to subordinate roles in the family and in life generally; and the enormous costs that are then paid by Italian women. (Belotti 1975). In conventional social democratic writing on the family in the post-war period, all of these costs, if mentioned, are insignificant by comparison to the overwhelming comforts and desirability for women of a life of domestic labour and child rearing. I shall give some detailed instances of this celebration of the nuclear family in the next section. For the time being, the point is merely to note the particular, primary and specific form in which social democracy worked ideologically on patriarchal structures. Clearly, this primary articulation of patriarchy was also supported by cultural accommodations to sexism within social democracy. It is not merely that the Labour Movement has been tolerant and even active in the reproduction of - 234 - sexism as a form of humour or in the objectification of women, in the use of pin-ups in union journals, in the manner of the popular press. It is also that women's issues have been treated as if they were naturally separate from other issues. Until recently, this separation of women's issues from others was unambiguously "justified" by references to the obvious primacy for the Labour Movement of the economic struggles of male "breadwinners". In more recent years, the separation of women's and men's issues has tended to be justified differently (sometimes in recognition of the need for programmes of positive discrimination in favour of women, requiring separate discussion by women). But the differentiation of men and women as a natural division, irrespective of the issue in question (whether trade union struggles or crime questions) is a form of sexism in itself, in assuming that women's involvement in such struggles or in crime is essentialiy to be understood in terms of their biological gender. The organisation of this chapter is itself sexist in such terms, in that I have decided to include in this chapter all the various topics which criminologists in general tend to discuss in texthooks on women and crime, or which surface in popular and political debate as if they were to do with changes in the character or the behaviour of women. There is no a priori reason for discussing the delinquency of girls in the same chapter as pornography and sexual offences, for example, except only in that they are "to do with" women. In the one, delinquency, girls are (at least allegedly) the subjects (in activities concerning, in particular, the breaking of laws governing property relations or the minimal age of voluntary sexual relationships), and in the other, pornography and sexual offences, women are the objects and, very largely, the Victims. It clearly is one task of socialist feminists to break the "essentialist" assumption that topics like the delinquency of girls and sexual offences are - 235 - discussable as if they are within an organic category, because they are thought by some to involve the facts of women's biology. A part of any socialist criminological project must be to show that the "delinquency of girls" is a reflexion of both patriarchal and capitalist class relationships, and also that "the delinquency of girls" is not simply a behaviour but an area of heavy ideological work, in which judges and magistrates debate with social workers and teachers, and others, in the presence of the mass media, and attempt to police the parameters of acceptable behaviour by adolescent girls. The "delinquency of girls" is a topic area made up of complex ideological work about social behaviour, the property relations of the classs and indirectly the sexual division of labour. The other topic areas discussed in this chapter, of prostitution, rape and sexual offences and pornography fall into relatively distinct areas ofldeological work, but all have to do predominantly with the reproduction of women in general as the sexual property of men. They are areas in which ideological work is done that is crucial to the reproduction of patriarchy in the sense I described it above.