Nothing Bad Happens To Good Girls

"The possibility of being a victim of a crime is ever present on my mind; thinking about it as natural as breathing."—40-year-old woman This is a compelling analysis of how women in the United States perceive the threat of crime in their everyday lives and how that perception controls their behavior. Esther Madriz draws on focus groups and in-depth interviews to show the damage that fear can wreak on women of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although anxiety about crime affects virtually every woman, Madriz shows that race and class position play a role in a woman's sense of vulnerability. Fear of crime has resulted in public demand for stronger and more repressive policies throughout the country. As funds for social programs are cut, Madriz points out, those for more prisons and police are on the increase. She also illustrates how media images of victims—"good" victims aren't culpable, "bad" victims invite trouble—and a tough political stance toward criminals are linked to a general climate of economic uncertainty and conservatism. Madriz argues that fear itself is a strong element in keeping women in subservient and self-limiting social positions. "Policing" themselves, they construct a restricted world that leads to positions of even greater subordination: Being a woman means being vulnerable. Considering the enormous attention given to crime today, including victims' rights and use of public funds, Madriz's informative study is especially timely.

Sociologist Esther Madriz presents a compelling analysis of how women in the United States perceive the threat of crime in their everyday lives and how that perception controls their behavior. With the enormous attention given to crime today, Madriz's informative study is especially timely.

This carefully edited companion anthology provides provocative, eye-opening examples of the practice of sociology in a well-edited, well-designed, and affordable format. It includes short articles, chapters, and excerpts that examine common everyday experiences, important social issues, or distinct historical events that illustrate the relationship between the individual and society. The new edition will provide more detail regarding the theory and/or history related to each issue presented. The revision will also include more coverage of global issues and world religions.

Have you ever thought about how much energy goes into avoiding sexual violence? The work that goes into feeling safe goes largely unnoticed by the women doing it and by the wider world, and yet women and girls are the first to be blamed the inevitable times when it fails. We need to change the story on rape prevention and ‘well-meaning’ safety advice, because this makes it harder for women and girls to speak out, and hides the amount of work they are already doing trying to decipher ‘the right amount of panic’. With real-life accounts of women’s experiences, and based on the author’s original research on the impact of sexual harassment in public, this book challenges victim-blaming and highlights the need to show women as capable, powerful and skilful in their everyday resistance to harassment and sexual violence.

"Nothing Bad Happens to Good Girls is an important and distinctive addition to the literature on the fear of crime. Madriz captures the voices of the generally silenced and invisible women of color who are proportionately far more likely than their white sisters to be the victims of crime. She moves us through the ways in which the fear of criminal victimization have forced all women to "police" themselves, while also focusing on the ironies of these precautionary behaviors. "Good girls go to heaven. The rest of us go everywhere." Finally, she warns of the dangerous racism that lurks in the rituals of protection employed, sometimes unconsciously, by privileged whites."--Meda Chesney-Lind, author of Girls, Deliquency and Juvenile Justice "While fear of crime has become epidemic in the United States, Esther Madriz reminds us of the special concerns and fears of females, especially minority females, and how these fears limit and constrain their social life, thereby reproducing gender inequalities. This is an important, well-written book on an important issue that should be read by all who are concerned about the fear of crime."--Allen E. Liska, Professor of Sociology, University at Albany

Leslie Kern wants your city to be feminist. An intrepid feminist geographer, Kern combines memoir, theory, pop culture, and geography in this collection of essays that invites the reader to think differently about city spaces and city life. From the geography of rape culture to the politics of snow removal, the city is an ongoing site of gendered struggle. Yet the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping new social relations based around care and justice. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and pathways towards different urban futures.

For fans of Karen McManus' One of Us is Lying and films like I Know What You Did Last Summer, comes a gripping thriller about murder, mystery, and deception. Blackmail lures Ava to the abandoned amusement park on Portgrave Pier. She is one of ten teenagers, all with secrets they intend to protect whatever the cost. When fog and magic swallow the pier, the group find themselves cut off from the real world. As the teenagers turn on each other, Ava will have to face up to the secret that brought her to the pier and decide how far she's willing to go to survive. The teenagers have only their secrets to protect and each other to betray. Perfect for: 13-18 year-old mystery fans Fans of Karen McManus and Stephen King

"Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the 20th century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for "public restrooms, rooming houses, anti-spitting ordinances, covered bus stops, employment bureaus, lunch rooms, and women police," through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces. In doing so, Hickey looks at how class, race, and sexuality shaped activists' agendas and shaped women's experiences of urban space and the gains and limitations of this activism. She uses a wide range of archival material, from press coverage to neighborhood association records to etiquette manuals, and studies a variety of cities, from Minneapolis to Atlanta. Throughout, she draws connections between the vulnerability of women in public spaces, real and presumed, and contemporary debates surrounding rape culture, bathroom bills, and domestic violence. Ultimately, Hickey unveils the institutionalized hierarchies that have made women feel uncomfortable in American cities and the "both strikingly successful and incomplete" initiatives activists undertook to open up public space to women. The manuscript is organized into eight chapters that move chronologically through the twentieth century, with an epilogue that reflects on how these issues manifest in the present"--