Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Girls in the Gang: A Report from New York City. by Anne
Campbell
Review by: Ruth Kornhauser and Travis Hirschi
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Sep., 1986), pp. 514-516
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2780195
Accessed: 03-04-2017 17:09 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
American Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 152.15.113.8 on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 17:09:18 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from 152.15.113.8 on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 17:09:18 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Book Reviews

sive. Still, Campbell is sarcastic about efforts to save girls from such a
fate by teaching them "cosmetics, comportment, and etiquette" sufficient
for the roles of Independent Woman or (worse?) Good Wife, and she finds
"wearisome" the excessive attention given to the sexual activities of fe-
male gang members.
Since Campbell draws no clear line between observation and precon-
ception, between fact and motivated opinion, the history of girl gangs
appears hopelessly confused with the history of ideas about them; Appar-
ently, girls in gangs now follow what were traditionally male pursuits:
murder, robbery, extortion, burglary, and drug dealing. Apparently,
then, they are moving away from Sex Object to Tomboy or maybe even
to a criminal version of Independent Woman. But if gang girls are indeed
switching roles, how can one say that earlier accounts of them as Sex
Objects were inaccurate? And if direct participation in acts universally
deemed criminal is the consequence of this switch, on what grounds does
one denigrate efforts to promote change in the direction of cleanliness,
nurturance, and the ability to say no?
Similar problems beset the sexual activities question. Does the atten-
tion to this question reflect the behavior of gang girls or what Campbell
calls the prurient interest of observers? Without a conceptual scheme of
some sort, it is difficult to know. Campbell herself asks the girls many
questions about their sexual activities, and it seems fair to say that these
questions are justified by the central role that sex and its attendant prob-
lems appears to play in their lives. (It also seems fair to say that the girls'
answers are unlikely to arouse or satisfy prurient interests.) But if Camp-
bell's interest is justified, it is not clear how it differs from the interest of
others.
Perhaps one lesson from Campbell's history of gang girls is the danger
of characterizing a collection of people by events or episodes without
providing a meaningful base or a comparison group. A savage murder
from 50 years ago and a sawed-off shotgun from 20 years ago, thrown
together with "obliging" sexual behavior from 10 years ago, may suggest
something about the character of female gang activity and even some-
thing about trends in such activity; but it seems more than apparent that
the image created by such a collection of episodes is unlikely to bear much
resemblance to reality.
A brief chapter entitled "Urban Living for Girls" examines the general
situation of black and Hispanic girls in New York. As before, the discus-
sion does not clearly distinguish between present and past, between ideal
and reality. Thus the account of the situation of black women is descrip-
tive and present oriented, whereas the corresponding account of Puerto
Rican women is in prescriptive and traditional terms. Perhaps as a result,
black gang members do not appear to be as far from the standard pattern
for blacks as Puerto Rican gang members are from the standard pattern
for Puerto Ricans. At the same time, the Puerto Rican girls, as described,
appear more conventional in behavior and outlook than the black gang
girls. In any event, the life of the gang girl appears to overlap with the life

515

This content downloaded from 152.15.113.8 on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 17:09:18 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
American Journal of Sociology

characteristic of her ethnic group to such an extent that it is often hard to

see the significance of her gang membership.
Following the chapters devoted to the gang girls' own stories, Camp-
bell returns to general issues and introduces testimony from gang mem-
bers not consulted earlier. On issues of politics, economics, sex roles, gang
structure, and even crime, gang members turn out to be conventional and
conservative. They also tend to be conventionally inconsistent, seeing
themselves as both renegades and defenders of law and order, as both
loners and members of organized gangs.
Such information can be put to use by those interested in constructing
theories of the underclass, as can the responses of the individual girls in
the chapters that comprise the heart of the book. But, for any given
question, the dross rate will be high and the inherent interest of the
irrelevant material sufficiently low, so that the student may not find the
search worth the effort. Ironically, the lives of those outside the class
system and beyond the reach of conventional respectability turn out to be
every bit as ordinary as the lives of those of their fellows trapped by
concerns for the future.

Adolescent Subcultures and Delinquency. By Herman and Julia Schwen-

dinger. New York: Praeger, 1985. xvi+329. $54.95 (cloth); $16.95
(paper).

Gary Schwartz
Northwestern University

Contemporary criminology, according to Herman and Julia Schwen-

dinger, is haunted by the specter of middle-class delinquency; whereas
traditional theories assume that delinquency is concentrated in the lower
reaches of society, in Adolescent Subcultures and Delinquency, these
authors claim that their extensive fieldwork in southern California dem-
onstrates that involvement in certain kinds of peer groups rather than
socioeconomic status per se is the most important determinant of delin-
quency.
The Schwendingers insist that a theory that avoids the errors of the
past must pay attention to two features of youthful deviance. In the first
place, delinquency must be seen as a natural concomitant of the peer-
group processes that give rise to such distinctive youth subcultures as
middle-class "socialites" and working-class "greasers. " The idea that cer-
tain modes of deviance are implicated in peer-group identities will not
raise eyebrows among traditional theorists. The second tenet of the au-
thors' approach, however, is less likely to evoke universal assent. They
argue that the social forms through which delinquency is expressed are
creations of the political economy of capitalist society. The authors be-
lieve that distinct modes of delinquent behavior replicate ideological and

516

This content downloaded from 152.15.113.8 on Mon, 03 Apr 2017 17:09:18 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms