The Relationship Between a Woman’s Occupation and Criminality

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from United States Senate, “Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States. Volume 15: Relation between Occupation and Criminality of Women” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911).

That is the topic of a report, volume 15 of 19, concerned with “Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States,” published in 1911 by the United States Department of Commerce and Labor. The premise of the investigation was summed up in the opening sentence: “Is the trend of modern industry dangerous to the character of woman?” The author, Mary Katherine Conyngton, took for granted that the social and economic changes of the previous half-century affected women physically and mentally but she wanted to know were her “moral qualities also affected” (9)?

[This is where I would include a thorough summary of the changes of women’s workforce participation since at least the Civil War, citing such authorities as Alice Kessler-Harris, Eileen Boris, and Lara Vapnek. But for my purposes here, you’ll just have to believe that the it increased not only in numbers but changed the gender dynamics between men and women.]

Unsurprisingly, the author begins from the pretext that “serious studies of criminological and social questions” suggested “the widening of their sphere of industrial activity is accompanied by a marked increase of criminality among women” (10). There was a great deal of angst among contemporary observers about the effects women working had on gender roles. Of course, women had always worked. But where they worked, for whom they worked, and the compensation they received was quite different as the United States experienced its industrial revolution after the Civil War.

[This is where I would write about what I personally call the “proto industrial revolution” of the early nineteenth-century, acknowledging the important changes that began in New England with the rise of textile mills staffed by women described by historians such as Thomas Dublin and the emergence of the fantasy that women did not work so brilliantly described by the late Jeanne Boydston as the “pastoralization of housework.” However, the scale of industrialization after the Civil War was such that it is where I assign a start date to the United States’ “revolution.” Furthermore, it is that earlier discourse about the proper roles of women and wives that forms the backdrop to the apprehension over women working for wages. But, again, let’s not get sidetracked for our purposes here today.]

Women “competing” with men for jobs, earning wages that had the possibility of giving them leverage over their personal lives, and the concurrent changes in American culture, primarily urban culture, that provided an outlet for women to spend their wages in public ways–that is, shopping and commercial leisure–unsettled men raised in a Victorian United States. Intent on proving that these changes presented American society with an existential crisis, anti-feminist[?] writers asserted “‘an undeniable fact…that of late years a marked proportionate increase of crime among women has attended the widening of their spheres of political and industrial activity’” (12). It is worth noting that this writer cited in the report included increased political participation as a concurrent development. 

So this is where the report began and as many readers of reports from the early twentieth century would agree, “an investigation” grossly overstates what follows. The authors tended to find what they were looking for, actual evidence be damned. However, such was not the case with this report. Based on the records of more than three thousand women in prison from six states, the author found that there was zero correlation between occupation and criminality and, in fact, the number of women in prison who listed their occupation as one deemed from the “newer pursuits,” were less likely to be found guilty of a crime.⁠1 Although Conyngton tried to reframe the numbers a few different ways, the conclusion remained the same:

As the numbers above attest, the majority of female offenders in prison, “came there from the pursuits which have for generations been recognized as peculiarly woman's work,” primarily domestic workers and waitresses (41). Conyngton briefly entertained a twist to the numbers by quoting an unnamed observer that women convicted of crimes listed those occupations rather than manufacturing to hide their shame. The logic supposedly being that women who worked in “newer pursuits” had a better sense of right and wrong and tried to hide the shame of their criminality by claiming the identity of someone (a domestic worker) that would be expected to make bad decisions. Despite that brief tangent to make the data fit expectations, Conyngton continued to point out that there was not a correlation between changes in the “political and industrial activity” of women and criminality. In fact, the newer occupations “attracted the class least likely to go wrong,” and industrial work offered women “some safeguards and incentives to right living not found in the older forms of their industry, and that consequently, so far as they affected the character of women at all, their influence was beneficial” (81).

Although this report was unusual in that it did not confirm the investigator’s initial expectations about the deleterious effect of industrial work on women, it did turn to another popular and fanciful line of argument that had the effect of confirming the gist of the initial hypothesis from a slightly different angle. After dispatching the argument less than half way through the one hundred page report that industrial work made women into convicted criminals, Conyngton drifted to a familiar concern among her contemporaries about the profound changes to gender roles and expectations that followed in the wake of industrialization. Using the data collected about prisoners–notice the shift from an investigation about workers to one about prisoners–she claimed that “among the majority of the class who reach the prisons orderly housekeeping is rare. Work is done when the worker feels like it and neglected when she does not. Procrastination, shiftlessness, impulsive and desultory activity or sheer idling characterize their nominal occupation.” The target of speculation and condemnation became the increasing number of women who were “too unskilled to find pleasurable interest in caring for their homes” (72). The women who refused to do housework, devote her life to bearing and raising children, and serving her husband’s needs were the ones most likely to commit crimes.

[This is where I would spend some time talking about the trends and reactions to the types of behaviors that women exhibited that rejected Victorian gender roles and became known as the “new woman.” But, you’ll just have to take my word for it here and we’ll press on.]

Another thread of this argument about the rejection of gender roles that I have spent a good deal of time researching and teaching about was the use of the pseudo-scientific field of eugenics that developed around the turn of the century. Observers believed there was a clear connection between the rejection of “traditional” gender roles and innate intelligence. Eugenicists argued that a woman who rejected her gender role did so because she was mentally defective (66). The connection between a woman’s supposed intelligence and her behavior quickly led the medical community to tie itself into argumentative knots when they could not reliably connect intelligence tests to criminality (that is, women who were accused of committing crimes registered normal levels of intelligence when tested). Nevertheless, they concluded that these “rather low-grade women” usually had some “inherited tendency” that contributed to their delinquency. The crime, particularly if it was a crime of morality, became the evidence that the woman was mentally defective.

This “inherited tendency” manifested in two distinct types of crime: one against property and the other against chastity (66). Thus, the report dedicated the final, and longest, chapter to the relation between occupation and immorality among women. Concern over prostitution in urban America dominated Progressive Era attention so the turn to this subject was predictable. Conyngton began the chapter by admitting that these moral offenses were typically not documented (by way of prosecution) and thus she had little reliable data. In fact, she disclaimed to even call the work they did a proper “investigation” (82). And, again, the chapter begins straightaway by asserting “two striking facts…Not one person consulted had given occupational influences as a leading cause of immorality…Not one [social] worker assigned poverty or low wages as a direct and immediate cause of immorality” (82). Nevertheless, Conyngton persisted with her speculation on the causes and character of unchaste working women.   

Although the report did not specifically address the issue of or advocate for involuntary sterilization, the rationales presented in the report were the same ones used by those that did. By fixating on the supposed intelligence of working women, Conyngton tapped into the growing national discourse of eugenics. And by connecting intelligence with behaviors deemed immoral–“moral imbeciles”–critics of sexually liberate young women, advanced a medical argument for their control (66). One superintendent quoted in the report claimed he was certain “‘that a good many of these girls will go wrong again within two years of leaving us. They are not bad, but they are weak and stupid. They are not sufficiently defective to be held in custody, but humanly speaking impossible for them to keep straight except under the most favorable circumstances’” (89). To translate, there was no medical or legal authority to detain them indefinitely but without constant supervision, they were certain to indulge their sexual desires again. Initially, judges were willing to commit young women accused of “crimes of moral turpitude” to places such as the Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded until they could convince medical authorities that they were willing to abide by prevailing sexual norms. (Crimes of “moral turpitude” were, of course, interpreted and enforced by male police and judicial officials. One of the most common charges was that of vagrancy.)⁠2 When it became apparent that it would be impractical and prohibitively expensive to indefinitely detain every promiscuous woman in California, the state increasing turned to forced sterilization based on the argument that these cognitively defective and promiscuous women would reproduce equally defective children, it was in the interest of the state to control their reproduction.

[This is the place where I would present some of my own research and the most excellent discussion of this development found in Wendy Kline’s, Building a Better Race, chapter 2: “From Segregation to Sterilization: Changing Approaches to the Problem of Female Sexuality.” But I haven’t the time for that now so you’ll have to trust me or read her book for yourself.]

As with most of these reports published by governmental agencies or charitable organizations during the Progressive Era, they tell us a great deal more about the authors than their purported subjects. It makes finding and describing and understanding groups of Americans such as working women enormously difficult.

Sidebar: Sexual Harassment Ad nauseam

One of the points this report made in trying to explain the prevalence of women offenders who came from “traditional” female occupations was that those occupations were not the problem but rather it was the type of woman they attracted. It is an interesting argument in that, put another way, only women with questionable morals would undertake occupations viewed as feminine in nature. What I found more striking in this discussion though were the obvious examples of sexual harassment that working women faced followed by accusations of their immorality. “The work of a waitress in a hotel, restaurant, or cafe presents some very obvious dangers. The waitress comes in contact with men of every kind, some of whom consider a girl in her position fair game. She can not resent their advances, for she must not offend customers. Even her refusal to accept overtures must be carefully managed” (87, emphasis added). She must accept that she can be harassed by anyone and because they are customers, because they are men, they must be tolerated. How often have we heard a man become bitter and spiteful or threatening when his advances were turned down. Men feel entitled to say what they want to women and to have their propositions taken seriously. 

Another example Conyngton provided of “dangerous occupations” was in the rapidly growing class of stenographers (and presumably, by extension, women in “pink collar” jobs). According to one social worker, the dangers of this occupation was “confined to the class who receive the lowest salaries of all, the girls of 14 or 15, just out of school, who are ignorant and untrained, wholly undeveloped in character, not habituated to self-control, rather weak willed, and entirely unaware of the possible dangers of their position.” In the case of waitresses or nurses, the women were in moral danger because of the men they encountered in public spaces, men who were not even their employers. In the case of stenographers, in less public spaces, where the men were their direct supervisor and employer, one can imagine the danger many of these women found themselves in. There was at least an acknowledgement that “on occasion” these young women were “taken advantage of by their employers,” but it gets lost or unexamined in the larger drift of the report, which was to raise concerns about the rise of female independence (89).

1 The six states were Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois

2 See for example, Mara L. Keire, For Business & Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890-1933 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 55; Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), chapter 2; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 72.