MATRONS WITH STICKY FINGERS: Review

• Published in: The New York times 1990
• Main Authors: Crime.'', JACK KATZ, Jack Katz, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of ''Seductions of
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abelson, Elaine S; KATZ, JACK
• ISSN: 0362-4331

Shoplifting ladies in late-19th-century America posed three interpretive challenges, writes [Elaine S. Abelson] in ''When Ladies Go A-Thieving,'' which she addresses after research into store archives, 19th-century journalism and academic journals. First, how would scientific opinion of the times understand the shoplifter's motivation? Ms. Abelson, who teaches at the New School for Social Research, documents how metaphors from medicine - shaped by beliefs in uniquely female sources of character weakness - dominated the intellectual discovery of ''kleptomania.'' Middle-class shoplifters could still be ''ladies'' if their deviance could be attributed to puberty and the menstrual cycle, if ''their physiology . . . betrayed them.'' When Freudian thought became popular, scientific explanations were given a psychological turn, and they still show up occasionally in criminology as the suggestion that menopause induces crime. Feminist scholarship now presses us all to wonder why the theorists did not note that the customers as well as the shoplifters were primarily female.