Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [136]
The criminal masses, of course, committed property crimes of staggering banality; and women were no exception. But the patterns of criminality among women were not the same as those among men. Women shied away from burglary. By some accounts they were underrepresented in the pickpocket business, perhaps because of the “manner in which women dress, and from the fact that females are nearly always more observed than men.”4aq But their clothing may, in fact, have given them an edge in shoplifting. This was particularly true, according to one detective in the 1880s, for the higher-class shoplifter. He described her as a woman who lived in a “fashionable private boarding-house” and never came home from a shopping foray “without a good haul.” “Under their rich and costly silk dresses are thick, heavy skirts, in which are huge bags or pockets. Cleverly concealed slits in the dresses communicate with these pockets.” A man had no such chance to hide goods.6 According to another account, young women, “modest in demeanor,” posing as flower girls, were the worst blackmailers in New York City. These women gained access to the “offices and counting rooms of professional men and merchants, and then, if the gentleman is alone, close the door, and threaten to scream and accuse him of taking improper liberties” unless he paid up.7
Most women who were arrested were probably none of the above. They were, instead, part of the underclass of great cities: neglected and destitute girls of the streets. There were women hoboes, vagrants, and tramps. When they turned to crime, women were not violent, as a rule. Sometimes, however, they formed gangs of petty thieves, and many of them turned to prostitution. No one, said George Templeton Strong, the New York lawyer and diarist, writing in 1851, could “walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous troop of ragged girls, from twelve years old down, brutalized already almost beyond redemption by premature vice, clad in the filthy refuse of the rag-picker’s collections, obscene of speech”; there was ”foulness on their lips”; they had ”thief written in their cunning eyes and whore on their depraved faces, though so unnatural, foul and repulsive in every look and gesture, that that last profession seems utterly beyond their aspirations.”8
Yet the weak showing of women, particularly in crimes of violence, is constant, throughout American history; every study of the subject shows it, as does every state, city, or region that has figures for arrests, trials, and convictions. To take one example, in a sample of New York criminal cases in the latter part of the nineteenth century, less than 10 percent of defendants were women.9 The percentages may vary a bit up and down; but women never have their “fair share”; and the more serious the crime, the less likely it is that women commit it. American women, on the whole, have simply never been a violent lot.
Indeed, the official line was that committing crimes was almost unthinkable for women, especially married women. “If a woman commit theft, burglary, or other civil offense,” wrote Blackstone in the middle of the eighteenth century, “by the coercion of her husband, or even in his company, which the law construes a coercion, she is not guilty of any crime, being considered as acting by compulsion, and not of her own free will” (emphasis added).10 In theory, then, a married woman (“feme covert” in legal jargon) was not guilty of a crime she seemed to be committing, if her husband was with her at the time, because the law treated him