Abstract
While criminological research historically has not focused on women, more scholars in recent decades have started to investigate female criminality. A central component of these studies is often the effort to understand why women tend to be less involved in crime than their male counterparts; some of the most intriguing studies explore contexts in which women were once more involved in crime (or certain types of crime) before becoming less involved. More than unearthing women’s place in the world of crime, these studies, when done well, tell us a great deal about the world of crime more generally. Chris Smith’s Syndicate Women is one such study.
As Smith illustrates, while women were firmly embedded in Chicago’s organized crime networks during the Progressive Era, women were virtually excluded from these networks following Prohibition. What makes this shift in women’s place in organized crime especially puzzling is that Prohibition increased criminal opportunities for both men and women. Following Prohibition, women became more active in the types of criminal activities that overlap with organized crime, but they became less active in organized crime itself. Essentially, organized crime became more gender-exclusive in a period of expanding criminal opportunities.
Using careful archival research to construct an extensive dataset analyzed with both qualitative and quantitative methods, and buttressed with a savvy use of network theory and social capital theory, Smith identifies the reason for this shift in women’s participation in organized crime: Prohibition made organized crime activities more violent, dangerous, and higher risk, which made trust a bigger asset, while also changing the types of activities that favor male involvement and reducing the types of activities that allowed for female involvement. Prohibition also shifted the nature of women’s relationships with men in organized crime: whereas women in the Progressive Era were connected to the organized crime networks by brokers, following Prohibition, women were connected primarily through romantic partners (e.g. husbands, boyfriends) and to some extent through other family members.
These shifts in women’s criminal opportunities and connectedness reflect larger shifts in the organized crime networks of the time. Drawing on network theory, Smith demonstrates that organized crime networks in the Progressive Era were denser networks and thus more equitable as there were more opportunities for connections to different people in the network; following the exogenous shock of Prohibition, these networks became sparser and more unequal or hierarchical as opportunities were funneled through specific actors. In the process, Smith demonstrates how structural change ultimately impacted individual actions and actors, making clear the causal connection between macro-level patterns and micro-level behavior.
By locating the cause of women’s reduced presence in organized crime to structural changes in the organized crime networks themselves, Smith challenges some theories of female criminality, both popular and academic. Smith’s analysis suggests that women did not suddenly become less interested in crime or change their behavior; rather the barriers to entry changed, including in gendered ways, as did the nature of what crime looked like in this period. Gender inequality in crime appears to be more structural than agentic.
Chris Smith’s Syndicate Women is an exemplar study in many ways. One of the book’s greatest contributions is to illustrate the utility of techniques that are unfamiliar or underutilized in criminology, but which could help solve challenges in the discipline and beyond. Most notably, the book nicely illustrates what network analysis can do for historical analyses of crime. It also is a fantastic example of how history can inform contemporary debates about criminality.
More generally, the book’s combination of multiple methods and multiple theories simply shines: Smith mobilizes a unique combination of sophisticated computational techniques of network analysis, the insights of multiple theoretical toolkits, and rich archival and historical detail. Smith uses network analyses of the historical data to see large trends and historical narrative to illustrate these changes on the ground. Notably, Smith also fills gaps in the historical record with theory; this is an important use of theory that is often left out of historical criminology and other subjects. Moreover, Smith draws on multiple theories—theories of gender, crime, networks, markets, and social capital, with special attention to inequality in each of these theories; in doing so, she illustrates how to strategically utilize multiple theories without becoming overwhelming to a reader. This approach also allows the book to make contributions to diverse literatures.
There are two aspects of the book that may be somewhat controversial for some readers. The first is the book’s operationalization of organized crime. Like many non-experts, I primarily think of organized crime as the mafia and early “gangsters”, particularly in the Prohibition Era. Syndicate Women challenges this cognitive template by illustrating the variety of ways for organized crime to manifest, what different structures it can have (e.g. that it can be decentralized and less hierarchical than is often imagined), and the many different roles that exist within organized crime networks. However, this very contribution may be difficult to recognize for those readers who prefer a narrower vision of organized crime. Can it really be organized crime when there are no crime bosses? Indeed, without the willingness to accept a more flexible definition of organized crime, some of the book’s central premises are easier to challenge, including women’s role in organized crime networks both before and after Prohibition. But this itself is a debate within the organized crime literature and one in which the book deftly takes a clear side.
The second potentially controversial aspect is the relatively small role played by women in the book. Syndicate women appear in the book somewhat superficially represented in network snapshots or through a few portraits of the more colorful, successful, or notorious criminal women. In many ways, the criminal women’s relatively minor presence is an unavoidable eventuality: first, in order to establish the nature of organized crime more generally, much of the book deals with syndicate men and the disproportionately male organized crime networks, which bring women’s roles into relief. Second, the nature of archival research means there is always a lot left behind that is invisible to both reader and researcher-author; anyone who studies less visible, less powerful populations is familiar with the frustrations of trying to find rich historical evidence of such populations’ lives. The lives of criminal women are doubly hidden—as women and as criminals. As a consequence, a reader may be left wanting far more historical detail about the women who are the book’s primary subject, blocked by the very forces that keep such women underexamined.
In the end, Syndicate Women is a highly readable and entertaining study of a fascinating empirical puzzle with theoretical implications for its historical context as well as today. It showcases theories and techniques, as well as combinations of multiple theories and mixed methods in a way that is complementary rather than gratuitous, while contributing to important debates about the nature and study of criminality. Ultimately, the book offers lessons not only about female criminality, but about criminality in general.