Ann-Louise Shapiro's Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris is a compelling and innovative cultural history of the problem of the female criminal in France at the turn of the century. Shapiro's work is also refreshingly distinct from other histories of this period in that it brings a sense of theoretical rigor to her primary argument that the female criminal was "a code that condensed, and thus obscured, other concerns" (p. 4). In this sense Shapiro's work is reminiscent of Mary Louise Roberts' Civilization Without Sexes: Restructuring Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994) and Maria Tatar's Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1995), recent works which address historical responses to the problem of dangerous femininity.
Ann-Louise SHAPIRO, Breaking the Codes : Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.
