Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-siècle Paris

Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-siècle Paris
ISBN-10
0804716633
ISBN-13
9780804716635
Category
Social Science
Pages
265
Language
English
Published
1996
Author
Ann-Louise Shapiro

Description

The author asserts that "female criminality" was a code that condensed and obscured larger concerns. For example, to what degree and in what ways did the symbolic overtones of female criminality connect to the substantive issues that appeared over and over again in the stories of women's crime? How were the crimes of domestic violence, infanticide, and abortion interpreted in the context of broader debates about divorce, depopulation, sexuality, and women's roles in the public sphere? What was the role of expert commentary - from the forensic psychiatrist, the criminologist, the legal scholar - in producing a normative code for female behavior? And how did this code accommodate or resist the newly recognized voice of popular opinion and changing notions of citizenship?

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