This book, as its title suggests, explores the role of women in organized crime, focusing on Chicago, and in two periods, the Progressive era and Prohibition. The author uses “social network analysis and spatial analysis,” poring through data bases to construct elaborate spiderwebs of networks: exploring who knew whom in organized crime circles, and who had relationships with other people somewhere in these spiderwebs.
The basic conclusion which she reaches is that the role of women in organized crime declined drastically between these two periods. The role of women in the early period, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was not insignificant. But in the lawless times of Prohibition, the age of Al Capone and the mob, women hardly played much of a role in organized crime.
To be sure, “organized crime” was not really organized during the Progressive era. Women, Smith argues, play more of a role in criminal markets, and have more of a chance at success in those markets, when those markets are “flat,” that is, “nonhierarchical” and “decentralized” (13). Women thus figured importantly in the red-light districts of the cities, particularly in the business of prostitution. Women sold their bodies, as they had throughout history; the profits went mostly to men, but not exclusively. Some prostitutes were lowly streetwalkers; some lived in brothels that ranged from filthy shacks to elegant bordellos; some were professionals, some were amateurs and part-timers. Many worked for pimps and for men who owned houses of prostitution; but some women were themselves owners and managers. This situation did not change during Prohibition; it was dwarfed, however, by the huge role of the liquor trade. Alcohol had always been a big business, but now it became a big and illegal business; booze fueled organized crime and the vast “illicit economy.” This was now a “large-scale” business; it needed “start-up capital, equipment, spaces for production and storage, vehicles for distribution, and protection” (103). All this was in the hands of organizations which had no use for women. Women constituted “only four percent of Chicago's organized crime network during Prohibition” the market was no longer flat; now it was a “large, sparse, and centralized” network, “with a powerful core of bosses” (134). Women continued to be important to the “sex economy” during the lawless and turbulent years of Prohibition; they played a role in small-scale bootlegging, and in making moonshine at home; but they were shut out of the big stuff, the world of major crime dominated by the likes of Al Capone.
Smith's careful study is a welcome addition to the history of crime and criminal justice. In that history, women primarily play the role of victims: victims of exploitation, of domestic violence, of human trafficking. They also figure large in the history of sexual regulation. Here, too, they have been mostly victims, with a few notorious exceptions—the famous Everleigh sisters, in Chicago, whose classy bordello made them a fortune; or Madame Restell (Ann Lohman), the “wickedest woman in New York,” the richest and most successful of nineteenth century abortionists. Madame Restell ended her own life, as the system closed in on her, but the Everleigh sisters lived on to enjoy their wealth. Smith's study adds a few new characters to this gallery: for example, Vic Shaw, Chicago's “vice queen” of the early twentieth century, who sold “sex, booze, and narcotics,” married a “mobster,” and carried on for some 50 years (1). But mostly the women are at the margins.
The book is, as I said, a valuable addition to the literature. I would have liked to see more attention to the larger social context of criminal justice. There is only a glancing mention of the crackdown on vice in the period from the 1870s or so, through the 1920s; no discussion of the war on “white slavery,” on the many city vice commissions and their reports (the Chicago report on the “social evil” was especially significant), and on the movement to abate the red-light districts; regulation of sex was at the heart of the movement, which had a real impact on the business of prostitution in the cities, at least temporarily.
The author claims that this study advances a “more sociologically relevant approach to understanding… why and how violent and masculine institutions are so successful at excluding women” (141). The author's sophisticated use of network analysis does allow us to measure and assign numbers to the role of women in organized crime, such as it was. I am less convinced that this book, despite its virtues, really adds much to our understanding of the gendered nature of organized crime. One reason seems fairly obvious. Crime was big business during Prohibition; women had no role to speak of in big business. Women had just gained the right to vote. They as yet held virtually no political offices. Very few women were lawyers, doctors; almost none were top executives. No surprise, then, that they did not make much of a mark on organized crime. The President was a man, the governor of Illinois was a man, the mayor of Chicago was a man, all the judges were men, and all the chiefs of police: it would have been startling to find women prominent in the ranks of big mobs. Women were wives and daughters and sex workers, and for the most part, little else. The gangsters and mobsters had no use for women in the business; they preferred their “co-offenders” to be males (111), which is a polite way of saying: back off, this is a man's world; there's no place for women in the violent, dangerous, lucrative, and shadowy world of organized crime.
