Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sharon A. Kowalsky. Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1930. DeKaIb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. xii, 3 14 pp. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $42.00, cloth.In this insightful study, Sharon Kowalsky examines changing notions of female in pre- and post- revolutionary eras. She begins with story of young Nastia E., a former peasant living in Moscow who sliced off her husband's penis in 1923 and was acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity. Soviet criminologists attributed Nastia' s act to her rural backwardness, infertility, jealousy, and a flare-up of venereal disease. Indeed, views of female offenders were refracted through assumptions about women's traditional isolation in domestic sphere (p. 79), reproductive cycles, maternal instinct distorted or gone wrong, and errant sexuality. Kowalsky traces these notions to duelling schools of nineteenth-century anthropological and sociological criminology. Not surprisingly, explanations that emphasized social factors held more sway in Imperial Russian context, given widespread poverty and dissatisfaction with autocratic state. Yet despite a rejection of biology as a cause of criminal behaviour, essen tialist notions about female offenders persisted well into 1920s. If, as in Nastia' s case, Soviet women could be driven to distraction by problems relating to their gender and class, then, as Kowalsky astutely points out, revolutionary project as a whole remained in jeopardy.Kowalsky maps a gendered of crime (p. 117), showing how Soviet criminologists distinguished between (male) urban offences marked by planning and sophistication, and (female) rural ones associated with backwardness and spontaneity. Kowalsky' s discussion of infanticide ascribed to female ignorance and biology, and remnants of the 'old' way of life (p. 163) illustrates this confluence of geography and gender. Even when women killed their newborns in city, was linked to their peasant roots; true proletaria would do no such thing. Observers had to face fact that despite law that ended illegitimacy and policies ostensibly providing women with education, child support, alimony, and access to abortion, some mothers still found reasons to kill their babies. Soviet jurists and criminologists approached this reality in good paternalistic mode, treating women accused of infanticide and many other female offenders with a compassion and leniency rarely extended to men. But there was a steep price to pay: female criminals in particular and women in general remained saddled with an image that left them as primitive creatures ill-suited to Bolshevik- style enlightenment and socialism. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".