America's current moment is one of tension between wide agreement that our carceral approach for addressing social problems has limited effectiveness, and our continued collective efforts to reckon with gendered violence as reflected in movements like #MeToo. Ideas that were previously considered fringe—such as police and prison abolition—have become topics of mainstream discussion following the 2020 killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, but gendered violence remains a sticking point in many of these conversations around policing and prisons.
Law professor Aya Gruber's The Feminist War on Crime is a timely work that illuminates these tensions by giving texture to a complex history of movements that sought to address domestic and sexual violence, dispatching quickly with any notion that feminism is anything like a monolith but instead contains a rich diversity of thought, strategy, and organization. In a text that is crisp, well sourced, and accessible, Gruber traces modern feminist thought and activism through the late white slavery panic of the early 20th century, with particular attention to first and second-wave feminist efforts and results from them.
Gruber nicely ties the stories of these movements that often sought to eschew state intervention with the broader story of modern American politics—and our collective punitive turn—that saw the interests of politicians who sought to govern through crime align with those of some feminist activists and scholars who deployed an atomized view of gendered violence that elided broader structural complicity, and instead asserted that gendered violence could largely be attributed to individual pathology. These alliances, in turn, resulted in some of the most punitive carceral architecture in the American arsenal, including enhanced criminal penalties, mandatory arrest policies, and lengthy postconviction sex offense registration schemes.
The benefits of these efforts to address gendered violence are often mixed, as Gruber notes. One common and effective theme that runs throughout the various planks of the text—and indeed that the title nods to—is one of complicated and sometimes unintended consequences, in particular for people of color. Gruber's exploration of the relationship between gender and race in the struggle for women's liberation in America brings into stark relief the fact that oftentimes throughout modern American history, calls for protection and equality of women became mechanisms through which racial hierarchies were enforced, and often brutally so. Mandatory arrest laws in cases of domestic violence, for example, benefitted white and middle-class women but were associated staggering increases for mortality attributable to any cause for women of color.
The Feminist War on Crime notes the ways in which these carceral logics have bled into the wider culture and media: how Title IX became weaponized in the fight against campus sexual assault, the recall of Judge Aaron Persky (of Brock Turner infamy) in California, as well as our current fixation on human trafficking as examined through the lens of the arrest of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in 2019. The book also goes into some detail about the ways in which media propel these narratives, even as they become untethered from factual grounding. Culturally, Gruber also does an excellent job of exploring the ways in which legal reforms that were intended to aid women—such as rules of courtroom procedure that preclude defense attorneys from inquiring about witness' sexual history—could have the perverse effect of strengthening existing tropes about rape, chastity, and purity.
The Feminist War on Crime does not deny the existence or the general pervasiveness of gendered harms but instead questions our chosen methods to address them. Gruber observes that our impulse to utilize the criminal legal system as an engine for effecting broad societal change, while understandable, has limited reach and imposes enormous costs particularly on communities of color.
Gruber concludes with charting a proscriptive course for millennial feminists—a “neofeminism” in the hope that they “can yet transform feminism from a movement that maintains the US as a prison nation to one that actively opposes the penal system as racist, neoliberal, uncivilized and bad for women.” (192) Stated differently, Gruber calls for a recognition that gendered harms do not exist in a vacuum, but intersect with race, class, and broader societal structures (such as prisons themselves which, as Gruber notes, are places replete with sexual violence).
Gruber's work negotiates a path through a cultural minefield: our rising recognition that punishment is not synonymous with justice on one hand, and our continued efforts to reckon with gendered violence. The Feminist War on Crime is at the same time provocative, educational, and necessary for our moment where people are beginning to question the utility of imprisonment as a panacea for social ills without denying the fact that those ills demand our attention and effort.
