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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Strunk, Mary. "The Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun": Woman Outlaws, Public Memory, and the Rise and Fall of Hoover's FBI," American Studies, University of Minnesota, May 2003.
Both Bonnie Parker and Kate “Ma” Barker have lingered in public memory, mainly because there has been so little agreement as to their proper place within it. Death and J. Edgar Hoover helped make them famous. But it was their allegorical utility that made Bonnie and Ma the criminal “it girls” of their time. Hoover might have censured the public’s interest in Bonnie and Ma, but that facilitated their posthumous conversion from petty crooks to outlaw legends. This thesis is a study of the cultural importance of notorious outlaw women and their centrality to the law enforcement efforts of the FBI. It argues that, without the menacing figure of the lawless gun woman, J. Edgar Hoover’s “G-Man” could not have captured public imagination as powerfully as he did. The deviant woman acted as a foil against which the FBI could assert the necessity of the G-Man and, in so doing, re-inscribe the boundaries of “normal” citizens behavior. Female outlaw legends became both exhibitions of folk-hero worship and cautionary tales. Women’s criminality has been read as biologically aberrant, sexually threatening, or politically charged. Depending on the criminal act, it may also be regarded as striking a blow for women s freedoms. Ultimately, Bonnie and Ma could be “read” as whatever various audiences needed or wanted them to be, as multiple films about their lives attest. To explain the complex fascination with women who commit violence, this thesis examines how outlaw women consciously sought to produce more sympathetic counter-narratives to their “official” story, as told by the law. The study traces the cultural and legal legacies of the 1930s gunwoman to 1970s radicals Assata Shakur, Patricia Hearst, and Sara Jane Olson. It concludes that the iconography, treatment, and testimony of violent women outlaws were as crucial to the ascendancy of Hoover’s 1930s FBI as they were to the FBI’s decline in the early 1970s.
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