Paper Summary:

Elaine Abelson's 1992 book, "When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store", is an excellent sociological analysis of a particular type of crime, that of shoplifting by middle-class women. The paper shows that this category of crime is often presented as puzzling, even as irrational. Why should such women shoplift when they could easily afford to buy the usually inexpensive items that they steal? The paper discusses the new theories and medical diagnoses that have been developed to explain this phenomenon, including the idea of kleptomania.

From the Paper:

"Middle-class white women (although the book does not dwell very much on the issue of race, it is clear that standards of who could steal what were very much race-based as well as class-based) were given a moral and often even a legal "out" when caught with stolen goods: They could plead that they were affected by the incapacitating illness of kleptomania. But this new form of irresistible urge was in many ways " or at least Abelson argues " an ad hoc invention by psychiatrists along with the women who were their patients. This was not a case of mental illness in the most limited clinical sense. Rather both shoplifting and kleptomania can both be seen as the symptoms of the social pressures that were squeezing women."

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