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Abstract
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‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’– so begins L.P. Hartley's The Go‐Between (1953), reminding readers how difficult it is to reconstruct aims and events even if we were participants in them ourselves. This opening line is evocative for the writing of this contribution for other reasons too: Hartley's young hero did not understand his own role in the plot of the novel and only comes to realize it later.
My task here is to give an account of how I came to write ‘The deviance of women’ (l968) placing it, as far as I can, in its background in the 1960s and also in the sociological setting of those days. I shall also reflect some of the stimuli, which lead me to write it and to present it in this form. These are, of course, my thoughts, recorded more than forty years later and affected by what has happened since. Three significant developments stand out and colour my reflections: first, this paper is often credited with providing the foundation of feminist criminology (Eaton 2000; Mooney 2009) and see Miller in this issue (Miller 2010); next, feminism as a set of intellectual and cultural perspectives has had a profound impact on our society; and finally, the 1960s have been much written about as a pivotal decade. It is thus not possible to recall this era without being conscious of the changes, which have followed, especially those that are linked to this paper.
The 1960s was a ‘cusp’ decade, an era when notable social and political shifts happened, yet much of the old order remained. Affluence and consumerism grew in western countries and higher education expanded. From 1965, US military intervention in Vietnam grew and along with it, opposition to the war and to other aspects of corporate, capitalist society. Much of this turmoil reached its peak at the end of the period – the riots in Paris were in May 1968, student protesters were shot at Kent State in May 1970. Nevertheless, currents of excitement were flowing by the mid‐1960s, especially from alternative cultural and political sources and above all, from the USA.
The most notable feature of the sociology of the day, which my paper amply demonstrates, is the sociology of deviance ... |