Download or read book Breaking the Codes written by Ann-Louise Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?