Lecture 13 Crimes against women
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RED FEATHER INSTITUTE
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Who is so safe as we two
where none can do treason to us
except one of we two
...John Donne
INTRODUCTION: Crimes against women in American society are many and violent. They range between the systematic exclusion of women from the life of the church, the university, and the polity to brutal beatings at home and in the streets.
Women are the favorite victim of physicians, husbands and rapists. They are also victimized by corporations and street pimps. They are the victim of choice for men of all ages. In a society where males are taught to be dominant, women absorb in their bodies and souls, the outrages of power and gender privilege.
In this Lecture, you will get an overview of the special crimes against women. It is a cruel and violent world out there for the powerless in the underclass of America; especially for women and their children. It can be very bad for women in middle class homes as well.
** Every 15 seconds a woman is battered in her own home, causing more injuries than all the car wrecks, rapes and muggings combined.
** Almost 4 million woman a year are beaten so badly by their boyfriends, husbands or live in lovers that they need medical or police help.
** Violence in any of its many forms occurs in 1 of every 4 homes. Abuse increased from 670,000 cases reported in 1976 to 2,000,000 in 1986. The American Association for the Protection of Children reports that, in 1987, there were 2.2 million abused children (USA Today: 8 Mar. 89).
** Men who beat women are very likely to beat their own children as well: 53% do so. 1200 children die each year from beating or criminal neglect.
Selected Cases The cases below can only give you some small taste of what happens to women in a sexist society marked by alienated power at work and alienated sexuality at home. Put yourself in the place of these women as you reflect on the causes of crime when you hear pseudo-theories about the necessity or inevitability or the desirability of individualism; of stratification; of prostitution or of punishment.
*Alton Fergel, 61, beat his wife to death. Lois Fergel, 50, suffered 20 broken ribs, a punctured lung and a torn liver in a ...fierce, savage kind of beating. Ms. Fergel had failed to run an errand for him.
*Camille Johnson, 38, of Oakland, California, was in serious condition after the thugs of organized crime demanded but did not get payment of a debt. They threw gasoline and set her afire. There were no arrests.
*John Fedders, former Securities and Exchange Commissioner, beat his wife Charlotte for 17 years before she decided to leave him and try to make it on her own.
*Jan Bunzey, 15, ran away from home in Omaha. She did not get along with her mother after the mother's second marriage. She lived in a hotel for six days until her money ran out. She now sells sexual favors for $20 to $50 in the streets around the state Capitol building in Denver.
*James Brown, 54, a famous singer and musician, beat his wife Adrienne, 38, severely with a pipe in their luxury car on April 6, 1988. She was treated for bruises and released from the hospital in Augusta, Georgia.
*David Guenther was convicted of murdering his estranged wife and wounding her boyfriend. Guenther had been found innocent in killing a neighbor earlier. He pled innocent to the first murder under the 'make my day' law. He pled innocent by reason of temporary insanity...in the heat of passion...to the second murder.
*Carolee Koster accused her married boss at Chase Manhattan of making sexual advances to her. After 2 1/2 years of litigation, U.S. District Judge Richard Daronco ruled in favor of the banker. Daronco was shot to death by Charles Koster, the father of Carolee. Koster was a New York policeman.
*James Angson, 77, a Methodist minister, was charged with sexual harassment. He was alleged to use his control over salary and jobs in the church to demand sexual favors from the young women he hired. He was arrested after fondling three women.
*Shirley Darnell, 76, was evicted from her home. Her nephew, Carl Thompson, 38, disappeared after he had cleaned out her savings and checking account. He took her money with him.
*Tina Matson, 12, was removed from her home by social workers. Her stepfather, Thomas Daynard, 42, was charged with aggravated sexual assault. He had been abusing the girl for two years.
Tina's mother knew and had done nothing to stop the abuse. Daynard provided for Tina and three other children.
*David Schram, 34, a Colorado teacher, was arrested for battery. He required five of his teenage female students to dance topless during class. He was freed on bail after one student complained that he had fondled her breast.
*Hotchkiss is a small town in Colorado. The high school coach and social studies teacher, Tom Elman 46, hid a T.V. camera in the girls' shower room and took video tapes. He also invited girls to his home and persuaded or tricked them into being taped. Police found dozens of tapes in his home.
*Kirsten Farnes was fired by the New York Police department when authorities learned she was undergoing treatment for cancer. Farnes had worked full time during the successful treatment and had made more drug related arrests than her partner.
*American Cyanamide told its female production workers that chemicals used in most areas of the plant posed a threat to fetuses. Five women underwent hysterectomies in order to prove they were infertile...and thus eligible to keep their jobs. The American Civil Liberties Union intervened to sue the company. The company settled out of court.
FEMALE CRIME: Women seldom commit murder; most often the crimes they do commit are economic crimes. But some of the crimes are pre-theoretical rebellion against patriarchy and class inequality. Not that they are to be excused...only that one needs understand the larger social context if one wants good theory with which to inform good social policy.
Selected Cases.
*May Edwards, 38, was arrested in Detroit for the 18th time in six weeks for soliciting. Ms. Edwards had two small children to support. Her husband of five years had left her to seek work in Houston.
*Christine Fireman was sentenced to 3 years in prison in Texas for writing checks on her closed checking account. Fireman had written 29 checks over a period of 7 months. She explained that she had not been able to find a job that paid enough to cover rent, food, and child care for her 2 year old daughter, Stephanie.
*Donna Yaklich was acquitted of the murder of her husband, Dennis. She admitted she hired two brothers to kill him but said that "it was the only way out" of a violent relationship. She was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder but is out on $300,000 bond.
The Greenwell brothers who did the deed for $20,000 each and a promise of $5000 a year for 5 years said they were not the killer type but that the money sounded good. They say that the murder is her fault, not theirs. She planned and paid for it.
*Lori McLuckie wasn't so lucky. Denver police arrested her when they found parts of the body of her boyfriend in her living room. Other parts were found in dumpsters around the city. Police are still looking for his left foot.
*Molly Harbin, Doris Betz, Francis McConnell, and Carol Hostetter [pseudonyms] were arrested in a Dallas drug raid involving a total of 29 persons. The women were charged with selling marijuana, cocaine and stolen prescription drugs. They all lived with boyfriends who organized the drug ring. Three of the women had small children.
*Stella Nickell, 44, of Auburn, a suburb of Seattle, Washington, was found guilty of murder. She poisoned her husband for $175,000 insurance policy. She used cyanamid to kill him and another person to make it look like part of a nation-wide tampering of headache remedies.
Ms. Nickell eliminated an abusive husband and improved her relationship to the means of distribution in the same moment. Most capitalists would regard that as entrepreneurship.
In his interview with six women in Elmwood Jail, Santa Clara, California, Geraldo Rivera found the six women with whom he talked to have been arrested 104 times (ABC: July 15, 1988). Most were involved in theft or robbery in order to support a drug habit. Most had a relationship with a male who lead the exploits of the pair.
Most tried to break the cycle of prison but failed for a number of reasons including their inability to find support in the community immediately after release. They went back to that cycle. Only one of them, Letitia, appeared to be a hardened career criminal. The rest, but for luck and fate, were quite ordinary people.
ALIENATED GENDER POLITICS James Comer, Professor of Child Psychology at Yale Child Study Center identifies two issues over which male violence erupts in the home:
1. Control issues...the wife does not do as she is told to do by the male. Control issues center around domestic service, child care and proper deference demanded by males.
2. Money issues...the wife is blamed when the couple spend more than they earn in wages. Since women do most of the shopping and often pay bills, they are blamed when spending outruns income.
3.Sexual access issues. Strange as it may seem, some men demand sexual access from spouses apart from the health, energy, desire or context. When women refuse, they are in jeopardy in a sexist society.
Such gender politics vary across societies. In those societies where women have social and economic power, there is much less violence against them. In societies which use predatory economics or exclusionary economics, men are often given moral and social power advantages over women.
These societies are called patriarchal societies. Men have sexual access to women and social power over them. Patriarchy motivates men to put themselves at risk in warfare and to cooperate with other men while doing so. It is a complex story which explains alienated gender politics of contemporary society. Those politics inform many crimes against women.
One of the many virtues of capitalism is that it tends to destroy the ancient structures of gender politics. However, in a capitalist society, corporations take full advantage of the alienated sexuality and alienated power of patriarchal gender relations to make profit. The alienated sexuality of patriarchy is used to sell automobiles, perfumes and alcohol. The alienated power of women is used to drive wages down.
Out of all this alienated power and alienated sexuality comes a variety of hate crimes against women: rape, assault, prostitution, pornography, as well as poverty, and retreat into drugs. In response to rape, assault and drug use, the police state emerges. In response to poverty, battering, and desertion, the welfare state emerges.
Women are the victim of choice for street crime, organized crime, white collar crime, and corporate crime. When patriarchy, racism and class privilege converge, women are greatly harmed.
Across the world, women make up half of the population; put in two-thirds of the work hours; are counted as one-third of the work force and take home just one-tenth of the world's income.
...Stephanie Coontz, Evergreen St. Univ.
Reproducing Power Advantages The rules of dating, courtship and marriage tend to reproduce the unequal power relations between men and women. The rules work to the advantage of men. These rules require that women be:
-- smaller than the men they date
-- act less intelligent than do the men they date
-- economically dependent upon the men they date
-- younger than the men they date.
-- passive in interpersonal gender relations
All these dating, courting and marriage rules tend to give the male physical power, economic power, social power and, sadly enough, moral power with which to dominate women. Men use these power advantages to control women. Gender politics render the female the property of her father until marriage at which time the father 'gives away' the bride to her new husband...symbolized by the name change at marriage. At no point does a young woman in Anglo culture have a name of her own. Most do not know the last name of their mother's mother.
The woman who submits to the norms of marriage has a secure and significant place in a family structure within which she receives food, lodging, tools and other essential goods and services. She has a right to demand sexual service but not a right to demand sexual fidelity. As long as she complies to the social power of, first her father then her husband, she is fairly safe from physical coercion.
But part of the norms of patriarchy requires a male to use physical power, to control economic power and to call on the moral power of religion to consolidate his advantages. When the woman does not comply, physical power is justified by these norms. A man who does not control his wife is said to be 'hen-pecked,' while the woman is said to 'wear the pants in the family.'
In these days, there is a great but slow transformation in gender politics. Men and women who enter marriage now find traditional gender politics won't work well while a new and more appropriate model of gender politics is not yet available. This dysjunction between the old gender politics and the new, unstable politics of dating, courtship and marriage lead, more often than not, to divorce; or to violence...or to both.
Angela Davis, philosophy professor at San Francisco State University makes a compelling case that is gender plus class plus race which explains the dramatic disproportion in crimes against black women. In a lecture at Northern Colorado University, Davis reported that the status of black women continues to worsen in America.
The Davis data show alarming deterioration of conditions for poor, minority women. Class and race join with patriarchy to punish the bodies and minds of millions of women living in the richest, most open society in the world.
Race, class and gender converge to destroy our young minority people in a vicious cycle of crime and punishment. Black men and Black women are far more likely to be processed by the Criminal Justice System while wealthy white males who commit more and worse crimes are likely to be processed by the lenient and lackadaisical Administrative Justice System or the Peer Review System.
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN The battered women's movement brought to the attention of the public the fact that some 1.5 million women were beaten each year by their husbands (Murray Strauss, et.al.) and another 1.5 million single, separated, or divorced women were injured by male friends (Mark Rosenberg, et.al., 1985).
In one of seven homes, violence is used against women and children as a social control tactic. Over 2 million children are beaten severely enough to require medical aid (USAToday: April 6, 1988:D1).
Violence and aggression are not instinctual. Biosocial theories of murder and assault are little more than excuses for cultural practices found in some European and Mid East cultures. The Hopi are very gentle people. The Semai of Malaysia and Southeast Asia do not express interpersonal violence of any kind.
Clay and Carole Robarchek, anthropologists at Wichita State University report that Semai husbands do not beat their wives; Semai parents do not beat their children; Semai children do not fight and murder is virtually unknown. If we want to look for the sources of male violence, we must look to the social rewards of violence.
VIOLENCE IN THE HOME Men who beat women do so for the three generic reasons I outlined above for you: Refusal to perform domestic services; refusal to provide sex on demand and inability to budget household expenses.
The one place that law and traditional gender politics permit a display of power, violence and arbitrary judgment is at home. All too often, the male comes home from work and attempts to recapture power in an alienated fashion by domineering and/or violent behavior toward the female.
In a generic case, the male comes home to find the house less than spotless; the children active and noisy; dinner may not be ready or to his appetite. After a hard day's work, the wife less than a fashion model. Angry words turn into physical pushing and shoving and then into fists and blows.
When a woman works, she has some economic power. She always has some moral power with which to defend herself from such demands. When she is utterly dependent upon a male, she is in jeopardy of violence.
Marital Rape Justice Mathew Hale set the precedent for a century of court rulings on marital rape. In the 1800s, He held that the husband could not be guilty of rape since the wife had '...given herself unto her husband.'
Nancy Withers, Ohio State University, has reviewed the history of marital rape in America. The first case to go to court was that of the State of Massachusetts vs. Oliver in the 1800s. The Judge ruled that if there were no permanent damage, it was better to 'draw the curtain' and leave the parties to forgive and forget. In Texas, in a 1905 case, a court ruled that a woman could not withdraw her consent for sexual access once given; therefore the accused could not be guilty of rape.
In 1977, Oregon removed marriage vows as an exception to the rape statues. In 1978, Greta Rideout accused her husband of rape. He was acquitted. Later, in another case, the Destanfanos were separated; he broke into the house and raped her at knifepoint. He claimed marital rights since they were not divorced. That court ruled against the right of the husband to use force.
Withers reports studies which estimate that some 14% of married women have been forced to provide sexual access to their husbands. Over a million wives are raped each year by their husbands. According to one study, 65% of 1500 people surveyed in Texas did not support laws controlling marital rape. Those who did support such laws were more likely to be young, single, educated women.
In her study of what is to be done about marital rape, Withers found that a random sample of adults in Columbus, Ohio suggested:
Long term prison sentence 12%
Short term prison 9
Mandatory counseling 50
Divorce 23
Nothing 3
These are, as you can see, solutions which leave the problem of alienated gender politics in place while punishing or treating men after the fact. Good gender politics and economic power for women would prevent such sexual violence in the first place.
DATE RAPE The risk of being raped by an acquaintance is four times higher than that of being raped by a stranger according to a study of 32 college campuses by Mary Koss at Arizona University. Ms. Magazine reported the results. Of 3187 women responding to the Koss study,
*84% said they knew the attacker
*57% happened on dates
*15% met the legal definition of rape
*11% met the legal definition of attempted rape
*09% of college males polled said they had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape.
The interpersonal dynamics of date rape are instructive: the aggressive male is unconcerned with the well being of his target; often he will brag of his deed. The female is so concerned about her name, her family and what small part she may have had in putting herself at risk that she almost never reports the rape...partly out of fear; partly because she assumes that nothing will be done; partly out of shame that she put herself in such a situation...and partly out of concern for the man.
Between 11 and 25% of the men questioned in various studies report that they tried to force a woman into sex with physical force. Between 20 and 25% of the women asked say that they have been the target of physical force on a date.
At UCLA, Neil Malamuth reported that 30 per cent of the men he questioned said they would rape a woman if they thought they would not be caught. When the word force replaced the word, rape, those saying Yes to the question of forcible sex increased to 50%.
Remember that most men don't use force; most men don't rape. But there is a culture of alienated gender politics which sets the stage for rape.
Some Cases:
- Bettina was a student at the University of Michigan. She was on a double date. Her girlfriend's date raped her while her date looked on. Her friend pretended sleep. She told no one.
-Abby went on a date with a co-worker at an ad agency. He acted drunk. She helped him home and into his townhouse. He grabbed and raped her. She told no one.
-Paula worked at a hospital. A young intern asked her several times to date. Finally she agreed to dinner at his place after he assured her nothing would happen. He raped her. She did not report it.
-Nina went to a house party. When others left, she asked the host to drive her home. He said he was tired and that there were extra bedrooms where she could stay. Later that night, he entered her bedroom and used force to rape her. She blamed herself.
-Cassie worked at a bar. One of the customers said he wanted sex and took it forcibly. She said nothing about it.
-Mel was a resident assistant at a dorm at a state university in North Carolina. He saw Georgette standing outside her dorm room one late evening, dragged her into it and raped her. She told no one.
--Susan was a reporter in Iowa. One evening she went out for a drink with coworkers. One of the men offered to walk her home just to be safe. He asked to use the bathroom as a ruse to get in the house; he came out and raped her. Susan blamed herself for having a drink with him and letting him in.
-Denise was raped by a friend of a friend at her own apartment. She went for help and, upon return, found him gone leaving a note saying he would 'catch her later and have a good day!'
THE CULTURE OF DATE RAPE When an unmarried woman is on a date and declines to provide sexual access, many young men feel angry. In terms of the logics of the marketplace, they believe themselves to be cheated. They paid for dinner and drinks, they should get something in return. Men believe they have a right to sex when sex is seen to be a marketable commodity rather than an experience to be shared and enjoyed by both persons.
Men also believe, falsely, that women want to be raped. A thousand movies, books, plays, jokes and dormitory tales in the male culture reinforce the myth that women want to be dominated; want to be forced into sex; want to be treated roughly by men.
Objectification The structure of language turns women into objects and parts; turns human sexuality into games and hunts...the thinking, feeling, hurting person becomes an inanimate thing, an incompetent child or part of a nonhuman process:
Nice phrases; Not Nice Phrases
She's a dish
I scored tonight with Gina
...a cookie I really put it to her
sugar and spice
She wouldn't put out
sweetie pie
She's a cunt; bitch
...a cute tomato
She's a great fuck;
hey, baby!
Best piece, ass, pussy I've had lately
my honey...
What a doll! I'd like to get into her pants
Compare the phrases above which objectify women with the personhood phrases below:
She is a beautiful person
She was in a romantic mood
She listens to what I say
She is very difficult to work with.
She's fun!
She always knows the right thing to say
I find that woman very sensual.
The Hunt College men and others in male solidarities are under pressure 'to score' on the weekend. Such sexual conquests and indifferent use of women is seen to be a trophy of one's manhood and is used as a conversational topic during the week. Fraternities sometimes hold contests to see who scores the most in a given period of time with prizes and titles such as 'Stud of the Month.'
Force Some men also feel morally justified in forcing the woman since her refusal challenges the stratification of gender power. To say 'No' to someone in a position of legitimate authority is to violate the social mores of power.
Radical feminists say that rape is primarily a political act. That is a valid analysis. The case they make that rape tends to preserve unjust gender arrangements is also valid. When the streets are unsafe, women must stay home...where men think they belong.
STREET RAPE FBI statistics report about 80,000 forcible rapes in 1985. The rate climbed faster than that of any other major crime...perhaps because women were more assertive in reporting rape; perhaps because violence against women increased.
Most forcible rapes, date rapes, and marital rapes are not reported...women have reason to believe that little will be done about it and that to report it will be almost as traumatic as the rape itself. When women do make a report, only about 3 cases in 100 end up in a prison sentence for the person charged with the crime.
Poor, minority women are at greatest risk from forcible rape.
About a third of all rapes occur in the victim's home. Almost half of the men who rape use some kind of weapon; more than half make threats. Most women offer some kind of resistance; up to 90% fight back, scream, run or threaten the offender. About 20% of the rapes involve two or more men attacking a single person.
Most rapes victims are women except in jails and prisons where male rape is a way of life. Young boys are especially targeted by male rapists in prisons and jails around the world. The same gender politics are used against men when women are not available.
Women in the USA are about 7 times as likely to be raped as women in other parts of the world...only Latin American dictatorships have comparable rates. Diane Herman reports that, as a group, convicted rapists are normal males of average intelligence, personality, appearance, and sexual drive (1984).
Rape arises out of the culture and mores of a sexist society; the solution to rape requires a radical transformation of the culture of rape.
THE CULTURE OF STREET RAPE Rape is as much or more an exercise in male dominance as it is a sexual act. In art, literature, jokes, classroom norms, family norms, and workplace norms, women are expected to comply to male demands. In the USA, when a male makes demands and the demands are not met, males are expected to use physical power to ensure compliance.
Street rape, date rape and marital rape are fueled by the rape myths that permeate American society:
Myth 1. All women want to be forced into sex; it is sexually stimulating; it removes guilt and it leads to love.
Myth 2. Women ask to be raped; by the clothes they wear; by being friendly and then saying No, to sexual requests; by simply being on the street; by being alone and allowing an unknown male in their space.
Myth 3. No woman can be raped against her will. Sexual activity requires cooperation; if the vagina is penetrated, then she must have cooperated. It would be too difficult to enter the woman if she struggled.
If 30 to 40% of the strong, healthy men in prison can be raped against their will, why cannot a woman be raped against her will? Any one who has been subjected to threat with knife, club, gun or fist realize how terrifying such threats are. Most people can be terrorized. It is to their credit that so many women fight back.
Popular Culture and Rape Movies such as Straw Dogs, Gone with the Wind, Clockwork Orange, and Passage to India help create and recreate these myths.
There is a whole new category of movies called 'slash murder movies' such as the Halloween series which link violence and sex. Dirty jokes, S & M pornography, novels, locker room talk, and ads for clothes and cars all tend to unite sex and violence in American culture.
Police response to rape cases have contributed to the rape culture. Susan Brownmiller reported that, at a training session for New York police lieutenants, most male officers there thought that women provoke the attack by their dress and behavior. Such beliefs are not likely to encourage police to protect women effectively or try hard for convictions.
Joe Feagin and N. V. Benokraitis (1986) note that street rape, as with wife beating, tends to pressure women into accepting sex role submissive behavior to which she is socialized in all parts of social life; work, family, church, and school...rape comes out of a social life world and returns to reproduce that world...but see the marxist theory of rape, below.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE UNIVERSITY Sexism is endemic in American colleges and universities. In the class room, both male and female professors give men preference in calling on students and in responding to student comments. Male professors are far more likely to touch women students then male students; to call them by their diminutive name; to talk down to them. Some male professors also harass students for sexual access...usually women are the victim.
Sexual harassment takes many forms. The request for sexual access shades into dating, courtship and, very seldom, marriage. Most usually, the professor makes it clear that a grade depends upon cooperation; that admission to a competitive program is certain if the student complies with such requests; on occasion the professor will simply force himself upon the young woman.
Professors take unfair advantage of the social power entrusted to them when they use that power to exchange grades for sexual access...they betray the trust, honor and high privilege of teaching when they extort sexual favors from students.
In the same instant that social power is corrupted, the learning process is betrayed. When a professor offers a grade for sexual activities, s/he transforms the grade into a commodity to be exchanged rather than an impartial evaluation of progress in the classroom. The professor becomes a merchant trading in sacred supplies.
Sexual extortion disqualifies the person as a professor. Loss of the teaching position is the minimum response appropriate for a university administration. The point is not to punish the professor, but rather to restore the integrity of the learning process by placing someone in the classroom who honors the student and the learning process.
Nanette Davis at Portland State and Karlene Faith of Simon Fraser University have done the basic conceptual work to show how women are controlled in precapitalist, capitalist, and advanced capitalist times.
The Table below is modified from their work.
TABLE 1 CONTROLLING WOMEN ACROSS TIME
MODE OF PRODUCTION
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Unit of Control | Husband, Male kin, Church | Husband, Male kin, Church, | Husband, Boss, Medical System | Home, labor Market, State, Medical System |
Place of Control | Home, Community | Home, shop, church | Home, shop, Asylum, Poor Farm | Home, Welfare, Asylum, Prison |
Offenses Charged Against Women | Witchcraft, Heresy, Infanticide, Infertility, Infidelity |
Witchcraft, Infidelity, abortion, incompetence | Theft, prostitution, role violations | promiscuity, delinquency, theft, prostitution, poor work habits, role violations |
Kind of Threat Posed by strong, Independent Women | innovative sexual, social norms | Economic Competition with men at work or market place | Competition for jobs, quest for political power, human rights v. male rights. | Rebellion against Patriarchy, Separatism, Lesbian life styles, Economic independence |
Theory of Crime | Women are biologically inferior, emotional, seduced by Satan | Women are inferior, immoral, and need firm male hand to control | Women are biological inferior, mentally ill or disadvantaged | Women are naturally emotional, unstable during menses and/or disadvantage |
Theory of Punishment | Casting out devil; more physical pain, more control at home | Biological inferiority requires eugenics; birth control among poor | More external controls, therapy for better internal control | More controls, more supervision, some social reform for poor women |
Control Tactics | Beating, Verbal Abuse, divorce, burning, ex-communication |
Verbal Abuse, Beatings, public shame, banning, shunning, selling into service |
Verbal abuse at home, at work, in church, divorce psychiatry, drug therapy | Verbal abuse, divorce, abandonment, poverty, sterilization, drug therapy |
Davis and Faith argue that women are now becoming a political threat to male hegemony at work, in politics and in the home. They say that the current crisis in control is the inability of the state to maintain male preference: the Reagan administration joins with the conservative interest in reproducing traditional femininity as a solution to the fiscal crisis. Abortion laws and opposition to birth control information tend to push women into producing babies.
In the present fiscal crisis and crisis in crime, conservatives urge that woman stay home, socialize children, nurse the elderly parents, do community service without pay and help out in the classroom and hospital--all unwaged labor.
Liberals join with capitalists to free women from traditional roles and enlist them as cheap labor in the fiscal crisis of the corporation. The labor market is to discipline women and men alike as they compete for scarce, good paying jobs.
The street thugs supplement traditionalist forms of control to beat, rape, and mug women in bars, taverns, streets, and alleys. Prostitution and pornography also instruct men on how to dominate women in the alienated sexuality and politics of patriarchy.
At some level of prepolitical understanding, men know that women are to be punished for presuming to be equal to men. Violent control of women on the street is justified by the argument that they brought it on themselves: had they stayed home where they belong, they would not have been in jeopardy of rape or beating.
Chivalry and Punishment Several kinds of data show that women are treated far more leniently when they commit crime than are men when they commit the same kind of crime. Many criminologists explain that leniency in terms of the male propensity to protect and indulge women.
The ideology of chivalry is used to explain the differences between sending women to jail as compared to men.
Nanci Koser Wilson, Southern Illinois University, has reviewed the data and found something quite different going on to explain this leniency. She finds that women are given probation and lighter sentences when they provide domestic services to husband and children (1985:15). They are respected as unpaid workers...not as women.
The data show that women are treated as harshly as are men when they are not providing unpaid domestic labor. Police officers and judges cease to be chivalrous when women compete with men for jobs and status.
Prostitutes are not policed as long as they are servicing single, transient men or men temporarily without their wives. Chivalry ends when the demand for unattached, casual sex ends (Wilson: 1985:9). Male prostitution is policed viciously since it challenges patriarchy and male dominance patterns.
Studies of witchcraft trials show they were aimed at widows and unmarried women who were not under the control of a male. In Europe, women who competed with men in the healing professions were declared to be witches. The real crime of a witch is, according to Wilson, was that of rejecting her socially determined sex role.
GENDER POWER Take a close look at the structure of gender power which today informs the politics of gender crimes such as rape. As you have learned there are four kinds of power which combine and divide to produce the kinds of crime we see in our society. Again they are:
*moral power: that power assigned to men to control 'their' women by cultural values...including religious commandments to obey men.
*social power: that power which is inherent in all social relationships; in symbolic interaction; in self definitions of manhood and femininity; of those who live in a shared social life world.
*economic power: control over scarce resources...usually money. And usually males have priority over jobs and income.
*physical power: the ability and readiness to hit, kick, batter and beat women who don't comply to the norms of patriarchy.
Date Rape: Men have three kinds of power with which to ensure that women provide sex on a date; social power, economic power and physical power. Men are usually bigger and stronger than the women they date. They usually have more money and are expected to pay for the costs of dating. They have social power; the dating process binds people into a relationship in which the male has the right to shape the actions, feeling and thinking of the female. Various combinations of these forms of power are used by a majority of men.
Women have only one kind of power...moral power. They are expected to value their sexuality and to confine it to the marriage form. As such they have the moral right...and duty...to prevent sexual activity. Even in rape, many people believe it is the fault of the woman: 'she brought it on herself.'
The crisis in gender politics arises from the fact that women are now acquiring economic power and social power. Men have only physical power in many situations with which to assert their machismo and their patriarchal rights. Women are resisting such use of physical power by a variety of social movements discussed below.
Alienated Sexuality Women are beaten, raped, abused and abandoned when sexuality is alienated from the human process. In these times, human sexuality is alienated when:
1. Human sexuality is linked by cultural mores to stratified power relations.
When sex comes to be an exercise in domination of women by men, sexuality and power become intertwined.
2. The labor of people is seen as a commodity. Under market logics, female sexuality is seen as a commodity.
3. Individualism trumps sociability. When men see themselves as individuals rather than members of a larger social whole, women and men alike become objects to men.
4. Love and affection are confused with owning and having by the advertising industry. When desire is shifted from good relationships to objects; people become objects and objects become persons. I heart my car!
5. When work is motivated by wages, commissions, salaries, and stock options, work is stripped of delight and desire. Desire and joy is lost in the world of work. It is regained in alienated form in the marketplace by vesting desire in things.
Alienated Power There is a basic shift in gender politics in America but we still promote patriarchy and machismo as central elements in male behavior. This alienated power is the major source of violence against women.
In predatory societies, young men are taught at an early age to compete, dominate, and to repress feelings of tenderness, compassion, remorse, and shame. Men are taught to express feelings of anger, pride, greed, and rage in the effort to dominate others.
Sources of male alienation from power is found in:
1. Wage labor in stratified corporations. When one sells one's labor power, one gives up the power to decide on working conditions, division of profits, investment and disinvestment policy. Most men cannot be in control in stratified social systems...that alienation is often transferred and distorted in their family life. Women and children absorb some of the costs of bureaucratic 'rationality'
2. Mass societies in which each is expected to compete with all for goods and services supplied by powerful corporations and state agencies. When women compete with men in massified job markets, massified sports, massified religion or massified politics, they become class enemy to competitive males.
Men expect to dominate yet are locked into stratified bureaucracies at school, at work, in government and at church. They are powerless in most of the important domains of male life. They dare not express anger or pride and they are unable to express love or delight. They become the faceless, soulless tools of bureaucratic elites in Eastern and in Western bureaucracies.
Such men can retrieve the power lost in other domains of life by exercising power without restriction at home. Men who must repress anger, rage, and revenge at work can express these feelings freely at home.
PROSTITUTION Women, defined as surplus to family, and unable to find a job, have only their bodies to sell to reunite production and distribution in a class society. Such an economic system promotes structural crimes against women of which prostitution is but one.
In a society marked by the alienated power of the male, commodity sex can be purchased as a transitory moment which unites sexual pleasure with gender power for the male.
Thus supply is provided by women who need funds for real and false needs. Demand is created by males who need to express their sexuality and power in a readily available form.
The supply is increased by children who are sexually abused at home. They run away from home and are prevented by labor laws from working to support themselves. They are recruited by others in the trade or by adults who wait at bus terminals. As one 12 year old girl said on the Geraldo Rivera show, "Well, I am getting fucked, I might as well get paid. Her stepfather was abusing her sexually.
Prostitution is common in hard times as children are pushed out of family structures. Young women go on the street and young men go into petty thievery...and purchase sexuality with some of the proceeds of theft. In revolutionary Paris (1789-1797), prostitution was the largest single source of work for women (Conner:1988). While men stole everything in Paris, women concentrated on food and clothing (Conner:15).
In the USA today, there are over 34 million people below the poverty line. Organized crime, friends and pimps recruit young women to prostitution. Many young women enter into the trade on a part time basis.
ADVANTAGES OF SEXUAL LABOR COYOTE, an organization of prostitutes, says that prostitution gives women control over her own working hours, over her own wages, and over her own working conditions. Young mothers can prostitute themselves and still care for their children. Young women can work at low waged jobs and still turn a few tricks to get a little extra. Young wives can turn a few tricks on the weekend to pay the bills and provide for a few amenities.
For a few prostitutes, male and female alike, turning a trick for $50 to $100 is preferable to a job which pays $3.35 an hour and which has poor working conditions: restaurant work, clerical work, and maid service in hotels all require hard, fast, sustained labor at minimum wages. But prostitution is tawdry, boring work for most women and has many dangers including robbery and assault.
In a society infused by privatized accumulation, false needs, commodification of all cherished relations and lots of poverty, prostitution offers an exciting and well paid alternative for a tiny minority. For many, if not most male and female prostitutes, jobs are not available. Underage or poorly educated, their alternative is sleeping on a grate or under cardboard.
Male Prostitution Male prostitution is one of the fastest growing occupations in America...along with corrections and social work. Men use powerless children, male and female alike to service their alienated sexual desires. Young men are recruited into prostitution by older men.
Hundreds of thousands of young men; bright, good looking and disemployed think that prostitution is a well paying alternative to low wages in fast food places, changing tires for a living or driving truck, cabs or buses. Most find it just as dreary and unpredictable as do most female prostitutes.
Although most customers for both male and female prostitution are male, as women join the upper male middle ranks of management and professional life, they too seek the uncommitted sex of prostitution. They too, see people as commodities to be bought, used and discarded.
We went over the ways in which prostitution detracted from the human process in the Lecture on Organized Crime. You may want to jump back and review that section in order to remind your self why buying and selling human sexuality is hostile to the human project. People who buy sex commit crimes against the human project.
RENTING WOMEN; BUYING BABIES Richard Neuhaus, a Lutheran minister, worked for 17 years with low income Black and Hispanic residents in Brooklyn. He says that the trade in babies rips the veil off class divisions in America. Neuhaus points out that the baby trade involves middle class women renting the bodies of lower class women. Babies and bodies become a commodity in such a trade.
Neuhaus used the case of Baby M, in which William and Elizabeth Stern, both doctors, contracted with Mary Beth Whitehead for a baby. Ms. Whitehead changed her mind and now wants to parent the child, a healthy baby girl.
The Sterns claim that:
*a contract takes precedence over the mother-child relationship.
*they rented the uterus of Ms. Whitehead therefore they have the right to the contents of the uterus.
*Ms. Whitehead took part of the money, therefore the contract is binding.
*Mr. Stern donated the sperm which fertilized the Whitehead egg, therefore he owns half of it.
*the Sterns are 'far and away more capable of meeting the baby's material needs than are the Whiteheads.
*the Whiteheads are unqualified because they once lived in a house trailer, was on welfare for a few months and Mr. Whitehead once drank too much.
The Whitehead argument is that:
*she gave the baby life, therefore she is part of it.
*she was under economic duress when she agreed.
Barbara Heyl, Professor of Sociology at the State University in Normal, Illinois, says that we all are connected to each other. The Sterns cannot break the connections between the baby and Ms. Whitehead since the child will grow to become an adult and will want to know of her origins.
"If we are going to do this, we need to chose people we respect and like enough to be connected to through time, to include them in our lives and our children's lives. ...If we are not ready to respect the interconnectedness of life at this point, then we had better outlaw surrogacy until we are."
Heyl's solution is to broaden the concept of the family to include surrogate mothers in the parenting process rather than to use her body and then to discard her as if she were a worker in a baby factory. This solution is compatible to the requirements of praxis and congenial to our theory of human rights and human obligations.
FORMS OF FEMALE CRIME Women, as a group, commit very, very little crime. They are about 1/10 the risk of men. When women do commit crimes, the crimes are usually economic crimes:
--shoplifting
--bad check writing
--prostitution
--embezzlement
These crimes make visible the thin and unsatisfactory nature of the relationship which many women have to the means of production. In a sexist society, women are expected to provide unwaged labor at home and in the community. They are to provide most of the child care and most of the domestic service to men without wages.
Women are expected to work for lower wages and then return home to provide housekeeping services: food purchase, preparation and serving; house cleaning; clothes washing and repair; child care; chauffeur service; money management and entertainment.
As a result, women live at the margins of the economy and are dependant upon men for the resources they need for a decent life. In this social position, they are very vulnerable to physical and verbal abuse.
Girl Gangs Gangs of young women are the underground version of bourgeois feminism among the underclass. Rather than act in the traditional role of helpers to young males (by hiding weapons, carrying the narcotics and providing sexual access to dominate males), girls are now liberated from such traditional feminine roles. They assert the right to be as vicious, as predatory, as violent as males in a marginalized population.
In Chicago, there may be as many as 7 independent female gangs. They are engaged in stealing, purse snatching, and intergang fighting for turf. Such Chicago girl gangs are alleged to account for some 14 murders and 2229 assaults in 1987. Members favor carpet knives with the curved blade and large wooden handle.
Robert Martin, a police specialist in youth gangs in Chicago, said girl gangs develop as the welfare system deteriorates, the family structure deteriorates, drug use increases and female roles change.
You can add false needs, privatized accumulation, the growth of the underclass in America and the culture of violence which marks your society as contributing factors to the rise of girl gangs.
While the girl gangs have separatist feminist overtones as well. They have a separate named identity from that of a male gang together with language codes which exclude men.
Conservatives theorize that the women's movement has 'masculinized' women and that, being more masculine, women begin to commit the same kinds of crime as men at the same rate as men commit crime.
Neal Shover at the University of Tennessee and his colleagues found the contrary to be true; women who accepted the masculine traits of competitiveness, assertiveness, and success were less likely to be involved in delinquency than the young women who preferred 'feminine' traits.
Diane Bush at Colorado State University has shown in her work that the increase in women's criminality came before the women's movement. In their extensive study of female offenses, the Steffensmeiers of Penn State, conclude that the women's movement had little or no effect of female offenses. They are not catching up with young male criminals as they become more liberated.
Apart from marijuana use and smoking in general together with drinking, the gender differences in delinquency has remained the same for the past ten years. Both rates are increasing but not those of women faster than men.
Economic Theories Most of the arrests of women are for economic crimes: shoplifting, bad checks, and prostitution. These data together with those above suggest that the solution to female crime is, again, jobs.
Joan Smith of SUNY, Binghamton, has provided us with an overview of the profound changes in the lives of women brought about by the economic upheavals of the 70s and 80s.
Today, there are more women (52%) in the workforce than men. In 1967, women's wages contributed about 12.5% to the household budget. In 1984, her share increased to about 24%. Without her wages, about 35% more families would live in poverty than is now the case...about 15 percent now live below the poverty line.
Smith notes that women bear a double burden in the labor market today...not only are they paid less for better work but they must do unwaged labor at home. The meaning of all this for a theory of female crime is that women cannot support themselves by working nor by not working.
The explanation which seems to fit the data best is that, as more and more households are single mother households...with men no longer providing economic support, more and more women turn to economic crimes to manage and make do.
When women have a secure and adequate relationship to the means of production...when they have good jobs...they are not at risk to prostitute themselves, to write bad checks or to shoplift.
But with the responsibility for paying the bills, buying the food, seeing to the needs of the children, single mothers are put, objectively, into a position in which the crimes they commit; writing bad checks, shoplifting and prostitution enable them to fill their economic role.
Such data call for radical social and economic transformation as a solution to the economic crime of women...not the restoration of women to the home as the traditional women's movement calls for...nor the competitive careerism of bourgeois feminism but rather the economic resources to enable the woman to be a mother if that is her choice. Or if the choice is a career in prosocial work, then equal opportunity and equal pay for comparable work.
Only in advanced societies such as ours are women isolated in suburbs, left with two or three children, bereft of the essential resources and expected to go out and work as well to keep the family out of poverty. Small wonder Joan Smith calls for radical transformation rather than moderate reform.
CRIMES AGAINST ELDERLY WOMEN As people age, the portion of women increases. In a macho society, men take unnecessary risks and are put into unnecessary jeopardy. This leaves women alone to face the many crimes and problems of which they are victim.
Street thugs mug elderly women. Street cons invade their homes in order to defraud them. Pharmaceutical companies get rich on the elder. Insurance sales managers plan how to separate the elderly from their scarce resources. Politicians scheme how to reduce services to the elderly whenever the state has a fiscal crises.
Selected Cases According to the AARP, fraud is the most frequent crime committed against the elderly. 75% of this fraud is telemarketing swindles. Elderly women are especially vulnerable because they try to stretch their scarce dollars. The FTC says Americans lose over $1 billion yearly in such scams and cons.
*A 65 year old woman got a call offering a good deal on some pots and pans. She bought them to find that the extra charges added up to far more than the price.
*A 72 year old woman got a call from a teleminister saying she might go to Hell if she did not send money to him. She sent several hundred dollars over the year.
*A 61 year old woman was told by a visitor that he was an 'inspector' from the city. He inspected her furnace and found that it needed to be replaced immediately. It was replaced at a cost of $2330. Her daughter found that the old one did need oiling and a filter replaced.
*A siding salesman told an elderly woman that his firm would give her free siding so the neighbors could see how good it was. The free siding cost her $9000 for installation, supplies, and shipping charges. An honest company would have done it for $4500.
*A travel company promised 23 women in a nursing home that it would bus them to Atlantic City for a two day visit for a modest sum. The bus never showed up.
*An investment firm promised high profits to an aged couple if they invested in gold. The firm sent a messenger around to collect their life savings of $71,000. The company offices were found deserted.
*Insurance companies call retired persons to warn them that medicare will not cover their expenses if they are ill. The premiums are super high and the benefits super low. It is a routine practice of many companies. Star salespeople win trips to Hawaii.
*Mattie Potter, 81, was beaten by her daughter, Betty Lundgen, 58. Ms. Potter was the sole support of her daughter. Lundgen had been fired from her job for alcohol related problems.
Guardianship There is a little known but powerful system of guardianship, under which hundreds of thousands of people are labeled incompetent simply because they are of 'advanced age' or are 'infirm'. These empty phrases have been used to put elderly people under the control of their spouses, children, or strangers.
Courts, social workers, police and doctors are very quick to label the aged, 'incompetent' and to make them wards of the court or to assign guardians to them.
This practice puts the elderly in jeopardy of financial and physical abuse.
The Associated Press ran series on the institution of guardianship in 1987. It found that in 85% of the cases studied the 'expert' testimony provided by doctors and psychiatrists was little more than a one paragraph statement. That was enough to persuade the courts to turn the finances of the aged over to someone else.
The general rule is that the elderly have less to fear from crime than do most other sectors of the population. They are far less likely to be victims, far less likely to commit crime, far less likely to be in prison and far more likely to work to improve the quality of life in their communities. 74% of the volunteers in America are aged 50-70.
Young people seldom have a great deal of empathy with the elderly. You might remember that, as much as medical care, housing, pensions and other services for the elderly cost, it was their generation which created and preserved the vast wealth upon which your prosperity now rests.
You might also remind yourself over the next 40 years that most of the workers, male and female alike, who built America died before they had a chance to collect the benefits of senior citizens. They did not have the resources for life that middle class children and adults have.
Young people might like to keep in mind that, one day soon, they too will be elderly and cast off. The time to work for social justice for the elderly is today.
? The American Catholic Bishops send out a pastoral letter at their National Conference each year. In 1988, the pastoral letter says sexism is a sin.
The Bishops point out that sexism promotes violence against women, pornography and prostitution. The sexism against which they speak derives from the economic problems of population control and resource allocation set forth in some detail above.
With a good mode of production the economic problems which call forth sexism are greatly diminished.
With a good system of production, the problems of population control are greatly diminished. A mode of production which is energy efficient, labor intensive and oriented to authentic human needs could support 4 to 20 times the present population most adequately. There are now 6 billion people on earth.
A well designed economic system could support 20 to 100 billion...if, if we used the same agricultural techniques as in Belgium and if we were content with the simplicity of consumption in Asia.
Without the compelling press of population problems, a woman's sexuality could be her own and not repressed with the practices of sexism to the policy of population control.
With a decent means of distribution, the problems of resource allocation would be diminished. The need to keep women at home to care for children would be diminished, the dependency of women on men would diminish. The violence and degradation of such dependency would also diminish.
If women are to work, then child care facilities, parental leave of absences from work, democratic marriages and adequate parenting practices must be developed. In most societies in history, the parenting process has been widely distributed over the kinship system among sisters, aunts, grandparents, uncles, husbands and brothers.
Stop Gap Solutions. As we promised some time ago, there are four temporary solutions which will help reduce crime against women. These come from the Boulder Socialist Feminists in a conference at the Red Feather Institute in 1978.
They are:
--Jobs
--Self Defense
--Support Groups
--Women's movements for social equality
Jobs. Women whose relationship to the means of production is mediated by a male is at the mercy of that male. A young woman with two or three children and who opts to stay home to raise the children is doing the most important labor in society that there is...but she also makes herself vulnerable to the alienated power of the male.
Women who work have more control over their lives; more self respect and more respect from their male partner. They are much less likely to be beaten. At a minimum, they have the resources to leave the male earlier in the cycle of beating than do women without personal resources.
It is not a good idea to drop out of college to get married; help a husband through school; and stay home to care for the kids for 18 years. Too often women find themselves 40 years old, divorced and without a marketable skill with which to maintain their life style.
Self Defense. Women who resist sexual and other assault are much less likely to be victims of rape. It is a sad world indeed in which men and women must learn karate or judo in order to walk home alone at night but the data on sexual assault and domestic assault argue for self defense capacity.
The streets of many cities in the world are safe both day and night. In those streets, there is much community...much prosocial behavior into the small hours of the night. Street vendors, open cafes, youth centers, family activities, small shops and stores define the town center as social space rather than as economic.
In these streets, children, young men and women, the elderly as well as others weaker and vulnerable are able to walk free from fear for their purse or their lives. The streets of the city need be reclaimed to the human project. They need not be the hunting ground of the predatory criminal.
Support Groups Women who have a circle of sisters to whom to turn have the most valuable resource there is...friends who will understand, protect and share resources. In most small town in America, there is now a safe house for battered women and their children.
Out of the anguish of such assault, there comes an understanding that the world of the American male is a violent, demanding world centered on the needs, real and false, of the male. More and more women are forming support groups out of that experience in order to help each other and the new comers to the house.
Many of these women are forming single sex households in which to rear their children collectively. These alliance may or may not involve lesbian relations but it certainly does exclude the violent male.
Social Movements There are four social movements which arise in America to come to the defense of women under attack by men. They are:
--Radical Separatist Feminism
--Bourgeois Feminism
--Socialist Feminism
--Traditional Patriarchal gender roles
Radical Separatist Feminism In the face of violence, an abiding hatred of the male world develops. After years of trying to live in peace and mutual support with men, many women finally give up and form a separate world in which they and their children can live without the brutality and oppression of patriarchy.
They form separate households, separate shopping areas, separate banking services, separate recreational facilities, and separate religious sisterhoods. I estimate less than 1% of American women are involved in separatist feminism.
Bourgeois Feminism In respond to male privilege and power, bourgeois feminism develops to push into a man's world and share in the exploitation and domination of workers, consumers, and minorities. Women try to better men at their own game.
They enter into male dominated occupations, compete fiercely with men, gain social and economic power then use that power to build a lifestyle parallel to that of an upper class male...some complete their life style to include a gigolo.
This feminism is most compatible to the logics of capitalist and patriarchal relations. I estimate that between 5 and 10% of American women are involved in such role. Those of you who saw the movie, Working Women may recall the two lead female roles. Sigourney Weaver played the mean bourgeois feminist while Melanie Griffin played the nice bourgeois feminist. That both were part of the apparatus by which value is extracted from the economic system without creating new wealth was lost on the producers, the actors and the audience.
But the more interesting point to women has to do with the myths and realities of sisterhood. Tara Roth Madden reports the findings from a study of 1000 women in Women vs. Women: the Uncivil Business War. 95% said that they had had another women undermine them at the office. Jill Barber, co-author of The All About Eve Complex, said that 75 of the 100 women she interviewed reported betrayal by another women in the firm. The logics of competitive capitalism provides very little room for success; male prerogative offers less. When class and gender relations combine, each woman is pitted against her sisters. The rest are left to join the secretaries in the outer office...or hustle on the streets.
Socialist Feminism In the socialist world, the ancient structures of patriarchy continue to distort gender relations. They continue to push women aside; to transfer the costs of development to women; to put women in jeopardy to the alienated power of men at home and work. The status of women is markedly improved in socialist societies over prerevolutionary times, but continues to lag far behind what a genuine praxis society demands.
Seeing this, socialist women add patriarchy to capitalism as the twin sources of distorted gender politics. They insist that collective ownership of the means of production is not enough if socialist men take precedence over socialist women in the distribution of social, economic, and moral power. To own things collectively for the benefit of an male elite does not end alienation...it gives it a new face.
Socialist feminists argue that the principles of social justice must include better gender politics now...not later; that class, gender, racial, and age grade relationships must improve dialectically and concurrently.
Traditional Gender Roles In reaction to the deteriorating position of women in advanced capitalist society, a traditional social philosophy encourages men to honor their wives...and encourages women to support their husbands in every way.
A woman is to keep a well run household, discipline the children, make herself attractive for the husband, embody the social graces when entertaining friends and coworkers..and thus minimize male rage and violence.
In the Christian, Muslim and Jewish holy places, priests, rabbis, mullahs and preachers around the world urge the traditional marriage form upon both men and women. When women are controlled in the household, external control mechanisms...including rape are seldom used (Tifft: 1989)
A great deal of crime against women comes out of the twin alienated structures of economic power and gender privilege. These structures, in turn, are part and parcel of a mode of production. Crimes against the elderly come out the dynamics of privatized accumulation, individualism, security needs, sexism age grade discrimination, and weak political systems. Crimes against children grow out of the same alienated sexuality and alienated power which beset women.
In many respects, capitalism has been most progressive. It has changed the means of production such that now women can control their own sexuality. They need not be treated as instruments of production nor need they be confined to the house to reproduce the next generation of heirs and workers.
But capitalism tends to distort the relations of production. On the upside of a Kondratieff cycle, it is very progressive for men and women alike. On the downside, someone is going to get hurt. In a sexist society, it is very likely to be women.
Crimes against children require that parenting be broadened to include several caring adults. The use of children in pornography and prostitution requires policing and repression. The rates of sexual abuse and incest will vary with the ways in which desire is focussed and love defined. A decent society defines love as a human process rather than an economic process.
Crimes against the elderly require a decent and empowering social security system rather than the cheapjack and degrading one now in place. The marketing of resources needed by the elderly must be stripped of its criminal dimensions...which means that profit motives must be seconded to human need in housing, health care, transport, food, and other essentials.
Bourgeois feminism is the best choice in this society for women who would protect themselves from male rage and violence. Of course it does not do much good for poor women to know that they are exploited by women rather than by men at work or in the marketplace.
If a woman lives in a competitive capitalist and sexist society, she has few options...other than to play the game to win....and thus to risk violence. Those options are divorce, poverty, dependence upon parents or state welfare...or commit economic crime.
Radical separatism feminism is also a safe choice for women. The parallel social institutions found in the separatist world have little violence and a lot of support. There is the problem of distorted gender politics in some lesbian alliances, however. It little serves the emancipatory interest to exchange a male oppressor for a female oppressor.
I want to emphasize the point that most of the women who adopt separatist life styles are not lesbian. Most have tried, time after time, to build good relationships with men and, time after time, find themselves battered, deserted, divorced and betray by men all too caught up in the masculine world of sexual predation, macho competition and withdrawal into alcohol or drugs when they can't compete.
It little serves the cause of human emancipation for some 10 to 20% of the female population to find a safe niche in such a political economy. Human emancipation requires that one work for a world in which her Black sisters are safe; in which her poorer sisters are safe; in which her daughters and granddaughters could be safe. The best long range strategy for women as a collective is to work for democratic socialism.
No woman is an island unto herself. The violence suffered by one woman affects all of us; diminishes us all. We are less than human when we stand aside from oppression and injustice. Those of us who are women have special knowledge of the structural crime coming out of patriarchy. Having knowledge, we are no longer innocent...we are responsible.
Established politics and political parties do not respond to women since they are dominated by males in the first place and organized to reproduce the existing structures of privilege in the second place. Women's' movements are most important to the emancipation of women...and as a result, of men as well.
Women are not good in giving orders, kicking ass, or firing subordinates. Women are good for building morale; not profits.
...Professor of Business Management
[Cited in Benokraitis & Feagin]
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
There is conflict between my feminine self
Who wants to live in a man-ruled world,
To live in harmony with men,
And the creature in me capable of
Creating a world of my own
And a rhythm of my own
Which I can't find anyone to share.
...Anais Nin
Oppression in Middle Class Marriages
...The course of her entire adult life, from beginning to end, is determined by her choice of a husband because she is culturally obligated to allow him to take the lead in career, geographic location, friends, entertainment, interest, and her so-called comforts in life.
Something is terribly wrong with this dependent status of women. Thy are bound up with another human being in a closely intertwined relationship, yet they are carried along in a parasitic manner, never reaching their full potential as human beings, never using their own free choice or functioning as an individual in the marriage relationship. Something must be done to change this unequal, unfair, and oppressive situation in marriage.
...Evelyn Leo in Voices From Women's Liberation.
More feminist poetry is at Women: double click to go there