The “Mad-Bad” Criminal Woman

Abstract

In the period between the start of the Great Depression in 1929 and the aftermath of World War II, the United States underwent a large number of social, political, and cultural changes. One manifestation of these changes was the redoubled effort to fight crime through a rather draconian policing ideology in response to an increase in urban crime, gangsterism, and corruption.²⁸ This trend was intimately related to the emergence of hardboiled crime fiction in general and to the prevalence of the criminal woman in this genre as a figure who communicated an anxiety about security and maintaining order. Moreover, the social structure of American society was undergoing important changes, including shifts in prevailing attitudes towards gender roles and familial relationships. Broadly speaking, the shifts in gender roles that grew out of the efforts of the women’s movement to gain political rights were translated in different ways that range from the hard-won gains that the “New Woman” seemed to enjoy in the 1920s; to the rescinding of this freedom during the Depression of the following decade; to women’s subsequent involvement in the wartime economy and an unprecedented rate of women’s employment during World War II; and, finally, to a return to a more repressive ideology towards women in the 1950s.²⁹