Syndicate Women: Gender and Networks in Chicago Organized Crime

- Blurb -

In Syndicate Women, sociologist Chris M. Smith uncovers a unique historical puzzle: women composed a substantial part of Chicago organized crime in the early 1900s, but during Prohibition (1920 - 1933), when criminal opportunities increased threefold and crime was most profitable, women were largely excluded. Weaving historical data with contemporary references, the book uncovers how the Prohibition era made organized crime less territorial and less specialized, restructuring organizations to require relationships with crime bosses, and how these changes began with and reproduced gender inequality in organized crime. The book places organized crime within a gender-based theoretical framework and provides an assessment of crime-based patterns that have implications for non-crime and more general societal issues around gender. As a work of criminology that draws on both historical methods and social network analysis, Syndicate Women centers the women who have been erased from contemporary analyses of gender and crime while breathing new life into our understanding of the gender gap.