The fate of seventy marten skins collected by Mrs. Beatrice Helen Mitchell, a well-to-do woman from Kent, in Greater London, illustrates a key moment in the history of women’s shoplifting in the metropolis in the early twentieth century. Mrs. Mitchell collected the skins on her travels in India, and upon her return to London in the summer of 1919 she brought the skins to a tailor to have them made into a coat and muff. Throughout the fall the tailor, Charles Davis, worked his art on the skins, which were valued at £600. Between her numerous travels Mrs. Mitchell dropped in to check on her coat, and she frequently quibbled with Davis about the cut and fit. While in Davis’s care, the coat was kept in a safe, but it was brought out every day to be brushed, shaken, and prominently displayed in a case in the showroom. Such conspicuous consumption attracted two respectable-looking customers, Maggie Hughes and Diana Black, who entered Davis’s shop wearing voluminous fur coats and asked for estimates on items in the showroom. Davis was sent for, gave the women their information, and then graciously escorted them from the shop. Half an hour later, Davis discovered that Mrs. Mitchell’s coat was missing. She never got it back.Footnote 1
This case appears to be a conventional instance of “kleptomania”: the offenders were ostensibly well-to-do women who succumbed to shop-window temptation; the visual display of the fur coat was calculated to arouse the desire to possess luxurious things; and the setting was London’s West End, which had been transformed since the 1880s into a space where it was acceptable for middle-class women to engage in conspicuous consumption. And yet appearances were deceptive. Detective-Inspector George Cornish and Detective-Sergeant Ambrose Askew arrested Hughes and Black and stated in court that both women were professional criminals who led a gang of working-class women shoplifters, the self-appointed “Forty Thieves,” who preyed upon West End draperies and department stores. In addition to their coup at Davis’s showroom, Hughes and Black were charged with the theft of a skunk fur stole valued at £36; a lady’s fur coat worth £70; two fur wraps and a mole coatee, valued at £110; and five silver-fox skins valued at £200. These items were no mere trifles; Hughes and Black specialized in stealing high-value furs. At their trial at the Central Criminal Court in February 1920, Cornish testified that together the two women had committed at least nine recent thefts, and that Hughes had been previously convicted of shoplifting.Footnote 2 Askew later claimed that the women “were the cleverest shoplifters in the country, and their associates regarded them as the most expert thieves in the world. They operated all over the country, and their methods were so remarkable that they had never been seen to take any goods, and none of the stolen property had ever been recovered.”Footnote 3 In passing sentences of twelve months’ and eighteen months’ hard labor on Hughes and Black, the Common Serjeant insisted, “Society must be protected against such women as the prisoners, and if they came before him again, he would send them to penal servitude.”Footnote 4
In underworld parlance Hughes and Black were hoisters—shoplifters distinguished not only by their use of disguise and clever felonious methods, but also by their cunning premeditation, the scale and value of their thefts, and their ability to “fence” stolen property. “Hoister” was an occupational designation rather than a legal label (like “convict”) or a clinical diagnosis (like “kleptomaniac”); it denoted skill, deliberation, and specialization in the pursuit of crime. More than this: the pursuit of hoisting offered women like Hughes and Black new ways to fashion a proud identity. As one “retired” hoister recalled in explaining her decision to become a professional shoplifter, “I suppose it’s because there’s not a lot of room in the crooked game for a woman who doesn’t want to go regularly to work, like the mugs who punch a clock every morning. She either hustles for a living and keeps some layabout as a ponce, or she becomes a hoister. It’s not a bad life if you must be crooked.”Footnote 5 Detective Lilian Wyles, who pursued professional shoplifters, confirmed the pride hoisters took in their craft: “A great number of the women who take up crime as a profession are by no means overwhelmed by the enormity of their wickedness. Many indeed are exceedingly proud of their prowess in that field. They do well out of their activities, live under the most comfortable circumstances, rub shoulders with the wealthy in the best hotels and restaurants, and have a thoroughly good time while it lasts.”Footnote 6 Hoisting offered women a chance to perform a diversity of roles: worker, professional criminal, respectable woman, fashionable dresser, and fashion critic. These shop thieves put purloined clothing, accessories, and cosmetics to use in displaying their aspirations, defiance, and even independence in a society structured by norms of gender and class. As such, shoplifting boosted opportunities to pursue “modern,” independent womanhood at the same time that wider developments in women’s work in the early twentieth century—namely, the expansion of employment in retail, clerical, and light manufacturing sectors—extended the promise of economic emancipation and fuller participation in consumerism.Footnote 7
The Forty Thieves illustrate a nexus between crime, work, and identity that promises to reveal how and why women participated in the criminal landscape of the metropolis in the early twentieth century. Though not every woman shoplifter was a professional crook, working women in particular turned to crime as a way to deal with historical contingencies in class and culture. This article examines the criminal behavior of shoplifters from the respectable middle classes, the casual working classes, and the professional criminal classes such as the Forty Thieves during an era when the manufacture and retailing of the most commonly shoplifted items—clothes—underwent significant changes. The values and desires inherent in a consumer society affected women in all three groups, but occupation and class status were even more significant in shaping shoplifting activity. The entire spectrum of women’s shoplifting—from amateurish, individual thefts to organized depredations by gangs like the Forty Thieves—was directly related to the material and psychological underpinnings of class in early twentieth-century London.
Occupation
Hoisters like Hughes and Black—indeed, working-class shoplifters, either professional or amateur—are unfamiliar figures in the current historiography on women’s thievery because dissection of the “kleptomania diagnosis” continues to dominate the scholarship. Admittedly, well-publicized stories of bourgeois women who shoplifted and then attributed their behavior to physical and psychological ailments have proven fertile sources for historians to explore discourses about gender, consumption, and the role of medical professionals in the courtroom.Footnote 8 But historians have allowed these secondary stories, such as accounts of the rise of the department store, to structure the history of shoplifting; the result is that the sociological dimension of the crime and its perpetrators has become marginal.Footnote 9 Furthermore, historians’ acceptance of the stereotype of the middle-class kleptomaniac thoroughly distorts our understanding of the ways in which social class shaped what type of women stole, how they stole, what they stole, and why they stole. To focus on consumerism and the department store yields at best a partial account of shoplifting.Footnote 10
The historiography of women’s thievery must move beyond the paradigm of kleptomania and consumption to consider the crime and the thief on their own merits, and to analyze the ways in which women shoplifters were criminal agents, not victims of advertising and desire. Academic and popular accounts of crime continue to relegate women to the margins of a male-dominated criminal underworld.Footnote 11 In these accounts, the stereotypical property criminals are all men: armed robbers, drug smugglers, racketeers, fraudsters, and burglars. Indeed, leaving aside the notable figure of the prostitute, women typically appear in narratives of criminal history as passive accomplices, “gangsters’ molls,” or even as crooks who are more “mad” than “bad” (kleptomaniacs and murderesses, for example). Modern academic approaches echo the sociologists of the period, who refused to acknowledge that female criminals were “true” women: Hargrave Lee Adam considered the female offender—and the “new” woman in general—to be “a hybrid sort of being, a kind of social hermaphrodite, a female by nature assuming the habits and habiliments of a male” who thereby surrenders her “moral vision” and participates wholeheartedly in crime.Footnote 12 Such views of women’s criminality erase their role as active agents in transgressing the law.
Quantitative evaluations of women’s role in criminal history also tend to diminish the significance of their wrongdoing. Two scholars have even argued that over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women vanished from the ranks of prosecuted and convicted offenders.Footnote 13 And yet, as Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker have ably demonstrated, reliance on statistical data alone to explore women’s criminality runs the danger of “women being duly counted and then discounted.”Footnote 14 This is especially the case when considering women’s property crimes such as pickpocketing, theft by servants from their places of employment, and shoplifting, all of which are historically underreported in criminal statistics.Footnote 15 Shoplifting was not always detected; if detected, the thief had to be caught red-handed to be prosecuted; and even if caught red-handed, there were significant disincentives to prosecution in terms of cost, risk, and adverse publicity for the victim’s store. Thus the statistical picture must be complemented by sources such as court reports, newspapers and memoirs, as well as attention to the context of social and gender relations in which shoplifting occurred.
In order to undertake a study of the women who shoplifted rather than of the medical and cultural discourses that arose to treat and explain them, I have assembled data on all 284 prosecutions for shoplifting in London that were reported in The Times between 1890 and 1940. These data are clearly constricted and do not purport to be an exhaustive representation of all shoplifting that occurred in this period. The cases that appeared in The Times had been filtered by accumulated biases in prosecution and reporting; victims, owners of stolen property, police, magistrates, and journalists all participated in selecting which crimes would be represented. Nevertheless, this newspaper remains an essential source in investigating women’s shoplifting. In contrast to other metropolitan dailies, The Times consistently reported the daily work of the lower courts where most shoplifters were tried, and in most cases its reportage was matter-of-fact rather than sensational. The consistency of this reportage and the inclusion of thefts by middle- and working-class women help to correct (to some extent) the typical underreporting of shoplifting by its victims, as well as the tendency by other papers to focus on bourgeois “kleptomaniacs.” Furthermore, The Times disclosed much more detailed information about defendants and their depredations than did its competitors (and in most cases, more than the records of the police courts in the London Metropolitan Archives). Indeed, the most discernible patterns to this reportage are directly relevant to the arguments advanced in this article: first, the defendants were almost exclusively women; and second, their thievery took place in predominantly respectable locations—especially the department stores in the West End. As a jumping-off point for investigating the nature of women’s shoplifting, and for the significance of class and status in this criminal act, The Times is essential. As will be seen, I have supplemented newspaper reports with archival records from the London police courts and the Central Criminal Court, as well as by detectives’ memoirs and Parliamentary Papers. These sources provide insight into the demographic and occupational profile of a range of shoplifters and indicate what women stole and how they did it.Footnote 16
Only nine men numbered among the 284 shoplifters in this study.Footnote 17 Of course, this imbalance could have been the result of selective reporting; after all, shoplifting in the interwar years was perceived as a crime committed by women. In his influential criminological treatise The Female Offender (1895), Cesare Lombroso identified shoplifting as “a specially feminine offence—temptation being furnished by the immense number of articles exhibited, and which excite the desires of women who can only afford to buy a few.”Footnote 18 But historically, men who wanted to steal resorted to burglary, housebreaking, or robbery, the commission of which supposedly demanded “masculine” traits like strength and aggression. Furthermore, the places in which shoplifting occurred—namely, West End department stores, tailors’ shops, and draperies—were expressly defined as women’s spaces; a man would have stuck out like a sore thumb. It is also likely that the police enacted assumptions about the gendered nature of shoplifting by supervising female customers more closely than male customers. Indeed, one Scotland Yard detective claimed that for all women who ran afoul of the law, “shoplifting is the school in which they learn their craft.”Footnote 19 Therefore, attention to shoplifting promises to deconstruct the story of a male-dominated criminal landscape.
In 1897, two members of a shoplifting gang entered a furrier’s and asked to see some sealskin capes. The elder of the two women, Shena Suck, age 22, represented herself to be Madame Schnider, a court dressmaker; her confederate, Rose Greenbaum, age 17, was adorned in fashionable clothes and diamonds and claimed to be Suck’s employer. The women placed an order and left, and on the following day the furrier, Herbert Barnard, noticed that the capes were missing. Meanwhile, Sergeant Henry Whitbread and Detective Frederick Wensley had been following the notorious hoisters from shop to shop—from a drapery to a fan manufacturer’s to a jeweler’s to a woolen warehouse and ultimately to a dressmaker’s. Whitbread and Wensley arrested the women and found them in possession of the two capes; when the East End lodgings of Suck and Greenbaum were searched, the detectives found silk petticoats, ties, jewelry, corsets, silk, and satin, all items plundered from other shops. The women’s case was heard at the Central Criminal Court in November 1897, when Suck was sentenced to fifteen months’ hard labor and Greenbaum to nine months’ hard labor.Footnote 20
Sheena Suck’s masquerade as a dressmaker was more than a criminal tactic to lull the furrier into a false sense of security. Many young women like Suck found employment in the clothing trades. Unlike the leisured bourgeois thief of independent means, the working-class thief usually held an occupation. In eighty cases for which we have occupational information on shoplifting defendants, fifty-two of the women came from the clothing trades (twenty-nine) and domestic service (twenty-three)—not coincidentally the two largest sectors of women’s employment in London. Many of these women were relatively young: thirty-eight of the eighty occupationally identified defendants were under the age of 30, and fifty-five of the eighty defendants were under the age of 35. Other sectors of the metropolitan female working class were notably absent from newspaper reports of shoplifting: factory workers, clerks, and secretaries. More research is required into the reasons for their absence, but the greater regularity of wages and security of employment in factory and office work provide possible causes. Why, then, did women in domestic service and the clothing trades turn more often to this type of crime? Or, to be more specific, what is the relationship between their work and their crime?
One explanation for the decision of dressmakers, milliners, needlewomen, and tailoresses to thieve lies in the economic transformations that affected the London clothing trades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The decline of apprenticeships, the shift to ready-made clothing products, the dilution of the workforce with immigrant labor, the irregularity of wages, and the seasonality of work all degraded the status and livelihood of these workers and created incentives for women to steal.Footnote 21 More generally, the story of these developments in the clothing trades illustrates the reasons for the chronology of shoplifting, for it was the set of changes in women’s employment and the production of items that enabled large retail establishments like Whiteley’s and Selfridge’s to thrive in the first place.
The Royal Commission on Labour reported in 1893 that mid-nineteenth-century forms of apprenticeship in dressmaking and millinery were giving way to arrangements in which workers received fewer benefits and insufficient training. It had been customary for new hands in these trades to live in their shop and receive meals from their employers. The young worker had typically progressed through a series of training milestones, each of which represented advancement in skill and status. During her early years as an apprentice the young worker was considered a “learner”; thereafter, she could look forward to receiving a weekly wage as an “improver” before becoming, by the third or fourth year, an assistant and ultimately a “hand” or fully trained dressmaker, or a “cutter” or “fitter” in other lines of the clothing trade. Employers’ use of this structured apprenticeship declined precisely as demand for clothing—especially ready-made clothing—increased. The market for ready-made clothing stimulated greater consolidation in the industry, encouraged the substitution of factory labor for small workshops, and promoted the recruitment of unskilled, local labor (for whom no room or board was required) over that of skilled, industrious workers. This development meant a diminution of dressmakers’ and milliners’ real earnings, skill, and prospects for promotion. Indeed, the Royal Commission discovered that “a lower class had come into the dressmaking trade, and that the instruction given was much more specialised and less thorough.”Footnote 22 In other words, the status of work in the clothing trades had diminished.
By the early twentieth century the erosion of apprenticeship and formal training had clearly made an imprint on the metropolitan women’s workforce. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws suggested that while many women on the brink of poverty exhibited “lack of industrial ambition, indifference to training, and want of adaptability,” this was owing to the fact that “many employers make no provision for the training of learners, and that the irregular employment of those who have learned discourages girls from making the necessary initial sacrifice.”Footnote 23 Clearly, then, lack of industrial training restricted the lifestyle that working women could hope to secure from a career in the clothing trades and diminished the pride that such women would have taken in their craft.
Employers in the clothing trades resorted to numerous tactics calculated to minimize their labor costs. Among these were recruitment of immigrant labor, casual employment, and the use of “short-time” employment. In 1927 some 41 percent of workers in the wholesale and ready-made tailoring trades (or about 57,000 workers) were on short-time.Footnote 24 Piecework further enabled employers to circumvent payment of wages fixed by the trade boards. In the industry as a whole, the average weekly wage in 1924 was 30 shillings. The Labour Research Department found (not surprisingly) that “women in the industry are paid much lower wages than men. Not only is the wage a shockingly low one, but the difference in rates paid to men and women is by its very nature a weapon in the hands of the employer.”Footnote 25 Male wages topped out weekly at about 64 shillings per week, while the highest-paid women—cutters, trimmers, and fitters-up in the tailoring trade—earned 32 shillings per week. Women who were “homeworkers” or “sweated” workers in the tailoring trade earned half the rate on average.Footnote 26 During the 1920s more and more girls under the age of 18 entered the clothing trades, and the peak age for women’s employment was about 18.Footnote 27
Young, single girls, married women, and ageing widows were all subjected to these economic conditions, combined with the pressures of the family life cycle. Instability throughout the labor market was the norm for all of these women. Young women casually employed in dressmaking or domestic service reached an important threshold in their late teens or early twenties: either they succeeded to a higher-paying position (usually the factory or the office), or they were stuck in poorly paid jobs with little prospect of improvement. Many young women left the paid labor force upon marriage, but the need to provide for children or to supplement husbands’ meager wages often compelled them to return to work (as part-time employment, laundry work had a high concentration of older women and widows).Footnote 28 Single women working in the clothing trades could expect to earn 18–20 shillings per week by age 30, but the typical experience was that wages declined by a couple of shillings by age 45, and that after age 50 a woman’s job was a precarious one owing to competition from younger girls willing to work for less. Furthermore, wages tended to decrease as one moved eastward in London to places with the largest reservoirs of women’s labor: Hoxton, Hackney, Bermondsey, and Walworth. (As we shall see below, Hoxton in the East End and Bermondsey in Southeast London were the homes of professional shoplifters like the Forty Thieves.)Footnote 29
At the same time that many clothing workers suffered need, their occupational proximity to clothing and fashion also nourished desire. Women who worked in the clothing trades possessed special knowledge of fashion and the significance of clothing as a status symbol. Whether or not they worked in a high-end tailor’s shop in the West End or in a ready-made clothing factory in the East End, clothing workers daily patterned, cut, fitted, and finished the articles that were on display in the metropolis. A Board of Trade inquiry in 1911 that collected data on the expenditure of working women found that aside from board and lodging, the largest category of spending was on dress: blouses, skirts, dresses, coats, and underclothing. One of the respondents to the inquiry was a 29-year-old dressmaker; she was well-off relative to the rest of her colleagues because she was an experienced bodice maker. This dressmaker earned £39 in the year 1909–10. Board and lodging ate up £18. The other large category of expenditure was on dress; she spent a little over £12 on the following articles: material for four blouses and one skirt, four hats, an umbrella, a muff, three pairs of boots, five pairs of gloves, and a raincoat.Footnote 30 As Selina Todd has demonstrated, fashionable clothes and the cultivation of personal appearance became key markers of economically independent, “modern” working women in the interwar years.Footnote 31 Dressmakers and other clothing workers must also have been interested in clothes beyond their work, but not all of them, of course, would have made such healthy earnings as this example suggests.
Though there are insufficient data to make sweeping conclusions about the relationship between work and shoplifting, the impressionistic evidence of shoplifters sampled here provides insights into how the economic conditions described above shaped the contours of working women’s criminality in London. First, thirty of the eighty occupationally identified women shoplifters in this sample were age 25 or younger. This age cohort would have been adjusting to new jobs, growing disillusioned with the poor status of old ones, or have been newly unemployed as they were replaced with younger (and cheaper) workers. Not surprisingly, then, young clothing workers frequently faced shoplifting charges. For example, work and crime went hand-in-hand for the 22-year-old milliner Isabella Brown. She had been born in Newcastle in 1908 and had been charged with stealing while still attending school. She was again charged with larceny in 1921 and sent to a remand home in Sheffield. Upon her release she entered domestic service, first in London and then in Bristol, but by 1927 she had been convicted again—this time of stealing handbags—at the West London police court. In the following year she was sentenced at the Central Criminal Court to nine month’s hard labor for shoplifting. After her release she opened a women’s dress agency in Camden Town, but Scotland Yard detectives soon took her into custody because her shop was the center of a stolen-goods network for London thieves and burglars.Footnote 32 It is clear from this limited evidence of Brown’s life that she flitted between part-time work as a servant, milliner, and dressmaker on the one hand, and petty crime on the other. Though casual and poorly paid work might have provided an incentive to turn to crime, it is also clear that Brown capitalized on her position as a milliner and dressmaker in order to facilitate her criminal enterprise of illicit exchange in clothing.
Examples of dressmakers-turned-shoplifters can be multiplied: 28-year-old Marie Morris was one of a team of shoplifters who stole a necklet and silk blouse from Whiteley’s on the opening day of the winter sale in 1909.Footnote 33 Elizabeth Jean Gibson was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment at the London sessions in July 1930 for stealing £24 worth of silk from Harrod’s. Gibson was also a dressmaker and at the age of 35 she had accumulated ten previous shoplifting convictions.Footnote 34 Another dressmaker, Evelyn Seymour, was already an expert shoplifter at the age of 25. She was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for stealing a jacket and a cape from a draper’s shop in West London in 1899.Footnote 35 The sentence nevertheless failed to deter Seymour, who was back “at it” and received another three years at the London sessions in 1912 for stealing a blouse from Selfridge’s.Footnote 36
Needlewomen and seamstresses also worked at the sharp end of the “sweated trades” in the 1890s and 1900s and were frequently homeworkers who received poor wages. Seasonality and irregularity of work, along with competition in the labor market, depressed the earnings of these women. Because they were scattered about in small workshops or performed out-work in their own homes, unionization was not a possibility.Footnote 37 As with dressmakers and tailoresses, here, too, the evidence suggests that the tenuous nature of needlework could lead to shoplifting. Hannah Kelly, a 68-year-old needlewoman, was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment in 1914 for the theft of silk and scarves from John Barker & Company. By that time Kelly already had twenty-three previous convictions.Footnote 38 Ada King, a needlewoman age 60, was sentenced to six months’ hard labor for stealing blouses from Selfridge’s in 1919.Footnote 39 Forty-nine-year-old needlewoman Lucy Iron was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment at the London sessions in 1921. Described as a professional shoplifter, Iron had absconded from Selfridge’s with a roll of tape, a hair ornament, two tins of crème de menthe, two hats, two pairs of shoes, a writing pad, and three collarettes. She had previous convictions, including one at the London sessions in May 1912.Footnote 40 These women may well have been stealing materials to supplement their incomes and improve their lifestyles.
Another type of worker who handled clothes daily—the laundress—appears repeatedly in the sample of metropolitan shoplifters. Work in the laundry industry was filled by unskilled, married women who worked casually or episodically, such as when their husbands were ill, out of work, or deceased. Therefore, the industry soaked up the poorest and neediest of married, working-class women.Footnote 41 Once again, impressionistic evidence indicates that women in this line of work were unable to achieve economic security and turned to crime to supplement their livelihoods. Eighty-one-year-old laundress Ellen Adams received the title of “London’s veteran shoplifter” when she pled guilty at the London sessions in 1921. She had spent forty-four years of her life in prison, beginning with her first conviction in 1861 for stealing silk.Footnote 42 Some laundresses shoplifted in teams. A pair of laundresses-turned-shoplifters were convicted of stealing a sable muff from Harrod’s in August 1908. In this case Elizabeth Bolton, age 34, and Ellen Smith, age 32, appeared in court fashionably dressed—perhaps wearing the fruits of their previous shoplifting convictions.Footnote 43 Another pair of laundresses—Elizabeth West, age 40, and Margaret Smith, age 40—were sentenced (along with a tailoress) for stealing a necklet and a blouse from Whiteley’s in 1909.Footnote 44
The second major sector of women’s employment—domestic service—also provided a large share of London’s shoplifters surveyed here. Domestic service was the largest sector of women’s employment in early twentieth-century London. One-third of all working women in Britain were engaged in domestic service; according to the 1891 census, servants were the largest single group of workers in the United Kingdom, with a workforce of 1.7 million women.Footnote 45 The average wage for domestic servants in London at the turn of the twentieth century was approximately £17 16s., but real earnings varied widely according to age, type of work, size of the employing household, and provision of perquisites such as holidays, Christmas boxes, and other allowances. The “roughest and most unskilled class of servants” earned significantly less than the average wage; these servants were usually women under the age of 20—some 30 percent of all servants—and earned between £7 and £12 per year.Footnote 46 Young girls under age 15 who had no experience—between-maids, scullery maids, general servants, and nurse-housemaids—were the worst remunerated workers in this service industry, while skilled and experienced cooks, housekeepers, and laundry maids earned the best wages.Footnote 47
For both employer and employee, domestic service was an industry loaded with class significance. On the one hand, employment of servants symbolized the financial capability and status of the householder; on the other hand, entry into service necessitated the deference and subordination of the working woman to the mistress of the household. Many young women regarded domestic service as especially odious because most servants were drawn from the ranks of the working poor, the work itself was fundamentally unattractive, and the terms of service required a loss of personal independence.
Women felt that they suffered from loss of caste by their entry into service. The notion that anybody could do the job cheapened the dignity of the work, and the inflexible conditions and rules of the household cut such servants off from the society of young people of their own class.Footnote 48 The sense of social inferiority and resentment was undoubtedly exacerbated by wider changes in women’s work, especially after the First World War, when many working-class women began to achieve significant upward social mobility through work in munitions factories or as clerical workers in offices. Women whose only option was domestic service were jealous of the physical and sartorial freedom that such upwardly mobile women workers enjoyed.Footnote 49
According to a Board of Trade inquiry in 1899, loss of caste by domestic servants was inextricably linked to the issue of dress: “The fact cannot be denied that domestic workers are regarded by other workers as belonging to a lower social status. The distinctive dress which they are required to wear marks them out as a class apart, the cap being generally resented.”Footnote 50 The cap and apron together symbolized the subjection of the domestic servant. The autobiography of Jean Rennie, a former domestic servant, illustrates this subjection; she referred to her employment in service from 1924 to 1940 as a “sixteen years’ sentence” of hard labor. “My greatest horror,” she recalled, “was the knowledge that I would now have to submit to the badge of servitude—a cap and apron.” Dress was important to Rennie, as she indicated in her disappointment at receiving coarse cotton rather than velvet as a Christmas gift from her employer: “There, in its hideous glory, was a length of that awful pink cotton—a length sufficient to make a morning dress—for work. Not a piece of material for a dress for the very rare times I was off and could dress up … just the one thing that mattered to her Ladyship—work; the nobility and privilege of working for her, dressed in hideous pink, for about threepence an hour.”Footnote 51 Though Rennie never shoplifted, the class bitterness she demonstrated (especially around the issue of clothing and appearance) suggests a possible motivation for many servants to steal nice clothes during their free time. The occupational environment of domestic servants gives us a clear idea of why some of them would have turned to shoplifting, which could be a means of obtaining a leisure dress, or a way of supplementing their income when they were unemployed.
In this way, a servant’s pursuit of her identity as a young, modern woman (mediated through clothing) could provide just as much incentive to shoplift as could relative poverty. And what better way to overcome the “roughness” of their occupational identity than to steal one of the softest dress materials—silk? A pair of domestic servants—Isabel Ashdown, age 25, and Charlotte Whitbread, age 19—stole silk and other material from a linen drapery in Harrow Road.Footnote 52 Florence Kemp, a 24-year-old charwoman was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for being concerned with Elizabeth Jones in stealing two rolls of silk from Selfridge’s in 1909.Footnote 53 Twenty-one-year-old domestic servant Deborah Tisson stole twenty pairs of silk stockings from a drapery in Shepherd’s Bush in 1919. By way of explanation, the matron at Tisson’s home stated that “the girl was extremely fond of wearing fine clothes.”Footnote 54 The relatively young age of these silk-stealing servants—all in their early twenties—suggests that this was an age cohort among servants whose members felt especially aggrieved by the cap and apron and by the social restrictions involved with this type of employment.Footnote 55
Besides having a youthful profile, many domestic servants thieved together. A pair of housekeepers—Rose Griffin, age 38, and Nellie Griffin, age 29—were tried for stealing blouses, belts, furs, and embroidery from the drapery at Swan and Edgar’s.Footnote 56 Two 24-year-old nurses (Margaret Norwood and Bessie Gill) were also among shoplifting defendants.Footnote 57 Florrie Martin, a parlor maid, and Mary Liversuch, another servant, were tried together in 1929 for stealing eight pairs of stockings and other articles from Selfridge’s.Footnote 58 Gertrude Schmid, a 24-year-old cook, and Frieda Botschi, a 23-year-old parlor maid, pled guilty to stealing from Selfridge’s in 1933.Footnote 59 The determination to steal in teams suggests a shared motivation and shared experience that shaped these women’s criminality. In filching frocks, furs, silk, satin, scarves, shoes, hats, hatpins, belts, blouses, coats, capes, jumpers, and jewelry, servants-turned-shoplifters demonstrated their awareness of the ability of clothing and accessories to signify social mobility.
This brief survey of the relationship between occupational background and shoplifting behavior suggests that clothes and crime were intimately related. If shoplifters such as ageing needlewomen and laundresses stole to live, there was another group of shoplifters who stole to live well. Working-class women’s shoplifting was not simply determined by an economic pathology (in the same way that commentators believed that middle-class women’s shoplifting was caused by physiological and psychological pathology). Rather, shoplifting was a deliberate choice informed by economic opportunities. Working-class shoplifting was an entrepreneurial activity. These women did not steal exclusively for personal use and pleasure; many stole in bulk, repeatedly, and disposed of the spoils for profit. Furthermore, clothing workers and domestic servants were acutely aware of the importance of clothes to self-worth and identity in the metropolis. Women could use crime to obtain expensive clothing and cultivate a lifestyle and identity that transcended the roughness and indignity of their occupations. The fact that dressmakers, needlewomen, laundresses, and domestic servants frequently stole together indicates that they possessed a shared motivation to steal and a shared consciousness of the power of clothing to signify social mobility. Shoplifting is not just about crime, but about stealing style.
Transgression
Not surprisingly, most reports of women’s shoplifting occurred in spaces culturally defined as feminine. As Erika Rappaport has demonstrated, by 1890 department stores like Whiteley’s, Harrod’s, and Selfridge’s had completed a transformation of commercial practice in London’s West End by legitimizing middle-class consumption. The desire to possess luxury items had become a normal part of consumer society, a badge of bourgeois status, and a marker of womanliness.Footnote 60
The cultural encoding of West End shopping districts as both gender- and class-specific spaces shaped (and distinguished between) the type of shoplifting pursued by middle-class versus working-class women. Respectable women shoplifted within their own social spaces; they stole from West End department stores like Whiteley’s, Selfridge’s, Harrod’s, Marshall and Snelgrove’s, Bourne and Hollingsworth’s, Debenham and Freebody’s, and Peter Robinson’s. Working-class shoplifters—amateur and professional alike—also stole from these stores, but the crucial distinction is that working women transgressed both the law and a social boundary in order to shoplift in the West End. The above-mentioned case of Hughes and Black is illustrative: these hoisters donned expensive fur coats to facilitate their movements in the well-to-do West End. Shirley Pitts, who served an apprenticeship under the Forty Thieves before going on to become a hoister after the Second World War, recalled how shoplifting allowed her to participate in a lifestyle that was otherwise unattainable to others of her class: “By going out with the Forty Thieves,” Pitts remembered, “I saw a different way of life. I had visited the West End before, of course, but I had never been to Harrod’s or the posh hotels they took me to.”Footnote 61 A shoplifting sally to the West End constituted more than a routine trip for working women, for it also implied that working-class thieves deliberately adopted social camouflages to blend in to their bourgeois surroundings. Shirley Pitts described Black as wearing “diamond rings on her fingers and fox furs around her neck” in order to look the part of the respectable shopper.Footnote 62 For working-class shoplifters, disguise was a performance of social mobility and enhanced status in addition to being a criminal tactic.
Social class differentiated the act of shoplifting in other ways, too. Unlike plebeian shoplifters, middle-class thieves rarely stole from draperies and tailors’ shops, where the plunder included unfinished linens and silks. Respectable women concentrated their shoplifting on finished fashion accessories available in department stores: stockings, gloves, shoes, hatpins, handkerchiefs, belts, brooches, purses, and scarves. The physical size of these items meant that they were easily concealed and stolen, as in the case of Lily Smith, age 43, a wealthy widow who owned homes in Cardiff and London and who was fined for stealing a handbag from Whiteley’s in 1933.Footnote 63 In some cases, well-to-do shop thieves hoarded their pickings: Sarah Henney, age 30, of Hammersmith, kept boxes full of stolen items in her home.Footnote 64 Annie Barton, age 50, a widow of independent means, was fined for stealing handbags and other items from the Army and Navy stores in 1918; she was judged to be capable of paying a £20 fine. When detectives searched her home, they found numerous stolen items with the tickets still attached.Footnote 65
Working-class thieves, on the other hand, tended to steal unfinished cloth. When they did purloin finished articles of clothing, they tended to do so in bulk or would take high-value items that would fetch a price on the black market. For example, three “old hands” stole fifty-six yards of silk from Debenham and Freebody’s in 1897, while another pair of shoplifters pilfered fifty yards of silk from a shop in Hackney in 1898.Footnote 66 Esther Joab, age 28, a dressmaker, and her confederate Matilda Greenberg, age 23, shoplifted fifty-five yards of satin from Whiteley’s and thirty-four yards of silk from Samuel Lewis’s drapery in 1904. The women completed the circuit of stolen property by fencing their spoils to a tailoress near Oxford Street. Joab and Greenberg were well known to the police as notorious shoplifters and therefore came under the observation of Sergeant Frederick Wensley, who followed them from their homes near Whitechapel Road—long infamous for its criminal population—and followed them into the two shops. Wensley recalled in his memoirs that it had taken great skill to steal this quantity of material from under the noses of shop assistants and that when Joab—the more expert of the two thieves—had been searched, “all kinds of things were found down the leg of one stocking, from jewellery to bank-notes.”Footnote 67 Working-class shoplifters responded to a different set of motivations to steal within the framework of a consumer society; unlike their bourgeois sisters, they stole for material profit.
Finally, middle- and working-class shoplifters pled differently when faced with prosecution. Bourgeois thieves deployed four variations of the “kleptomania diagnosis” in their defense: impulsiveness, stress, mental illness, and physical ailment. Women deployed the “impulse” defense in two ways: they suggested either that they were overcome by an uncontrollable impulse that made them ignorant of their actions, or that they had stolen impulsively for the fun of it. Thus when Minnie Elizabeth Fairman, who was fined £50 for shoplifting in Kensington in 1937, was asked why she had done the deed, she replied, “It was the excitement of doing it. It was a little whim. … It was so easy and a little exciting.”Footnote 68 The excuse of impulse indicates that these shoplifters fully participated (albeit illegally) in the precise set of consumer practices in which department stores wanted women to engage.
Much the same can be said of women who claimed that shopping helped them to relieve stress: shopping as a pleasurable escape was central to department stores’ marketing. In this sense, shoplifting was an extreme extension of that logic.Footnote 69 The third and fourth categories of kleptomania pleas were mental ill-health and physical ailment. Middle-class women advanced a variety of health-related pleas in mitigation of their shoplifting: alcoholism, high blood pressure, impulses, fits, work-related stress, “neurasthenia,” strung nerves, estrangement from a spouse, too many aspirin pills, insomnia, a brainstorm, and a “tropical disease.”Footnote 70 Such pleas were calculated to explain why the woman was especially susceptible to temptation, and they were readily accepted because the excuses all seemed to confirm, in one way or another, prevailing gender stereotypes about the weakness and irrationality of women (especially middle-class women). This would explain the sentencing trend as well; it was considered better to bind over to good behavior or to fine an “irrational” offender rather than to subject her to prison treatment. What is more, these women claimed that their thefts were anomalous—that this was not something which they would normally do, and so they had to find some reason to explain why they did it. Authority figures—doctors, magistrates, detectives—tended to agree that these women were not dangers to private property or the law. They thus collaborated in legitimating the various explanations that have come to be subsumed under the title of the “kleptomania diagnosis.”
The pleas and outcomes of cases of middle-class shoplifting differed starkly from those of working-class shoplifters. Working women typically pled guilty when brought up in court, perhaps because they did not possess the social or material resources to enlist the services of a doctor, or because they stole deliberately and knew the risks that they took. It is also possible that many working-class shoplifters predicted that a checkered past would tell against them, as when two previously convicted domestic servants, Isabel Ashdown and Charlotte Whitbread, pled guilty to stealing silk from a linen draper in Harrow Road rather than attempt to prove that their characters were beyond reproach.Footnote 71 When Nellie Bignell, age 27, pled guilty to stealing a cape from John Barker’s in Kensington in 1899, she had already racked up a long list of previous convictions for shoplifting.Footnote 72 Other working-class shoplifting defendants shrewdly attempted to game the system. When Detective Wensley arrested Esther Joab, she exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Wensley, we will plead guilty, do not let us go for trial.”Footnote 73 For working-class shoplifters, imprisonment (sometimes with hard labor) was deemed appropriate to deter future such acts of deliberate expropriation. Three months’ imprisonment was the norm for first offenders, but such aggravating circumstances as previous convictions or evidence of expertise and deliberation incurred heavier penalties. Thus the 38-year-old laundress Elizabeth Lloyd, who had twenty-eight previous convictions, was sentenced to twenty-one months’ imprisonment with hard labor for stealing from Peter Robinson’s in 1910,Footnote 74 and 40-year-old Evelyn Seymour, a dressmaker, received three years’ penal servitude as an “expert shoplifter” in 1912.Footnote 75 Clearly the nature of the shoplifter’s transgression—its location, what was stolen and in what quantities, and the cultural perception and punishment of these crimes—differed along lines of social class.
Place and Profession
The connection between occupational experience and criminal behavior helps us to understand why a working-class woman would decide to shoplift. Why, then, did some ordinary shoplifters become extraordinary ones? In other words, how and why did the casual thief become a professional hoister? Seventy-nine of the defendants in this sample bear the hoister’s hallmarks: specialized techniques, teamwork, and previous convictions (not to mention police testimony about their shoplifting careers). Networks of expert shoplifters like the Forty Thieves were unique in explicitly articulating the nexus between work, identity, and shoplifting in the early twentieth-century metropolis. These professional thieves shared in the same age, occupational, and residential background as the ordinary shoplifters canvassed above.Footnote 76 They were products of the same areas in the East End and Southeast London that provided not only the bulk of women’s labor to the clothing and service industries, but also the reputation of harboring the metropolitan criminal classes.Footnote 77 Detective Frederick “Nutty” Sharpe, who later became chief of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad in the 1930s, recalled, “Gangs of women shoplifters or ‘Hoisters’ are to be found in Hoxton and also in South London.”Footnote 78 Edward Greeno remembered his early years as a police constable in the East End during the 1920s: “Hoxton was noted for shoplifters who patronized the rest of London. I remember following three women from Hoxton to Walthamstow. They went into a draper’s like sylphs and came out like heavyweights. They went down to the ‘Ladies’ and came out slim again, carrying carrier bags.”Footnote 79 The Forty Thieves in particular were closely identified with areas south of the Thames: in the first mention of the gang in The Times in 1921, 25-year-old Ada Wellman was said by the police “to belong to a South London gang known as ‘The Forty Thieves,’ who infested the West-end, especially during the sales.”Footnote 80 Detective John Capstick claimed that the original Forty Thieves all lived within a half-mile of the Elephant & Castle in South London, which was a notorious meeting-place for all types of thieves and criminals.Footnote 81
The tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves from the Arabian Nights undoubtedly inspired this London gang to adopt the name of the Forty Thieves, recognizing similarities in the amassing of stolen goods and the use of disguises to get them. But even more revealing is a second name for this group: “The Forty Elephants.” One of the thieves, Maggie Hill, was the sister of gangland legend Billy Hill. In his autobiography, Hill refers to his sister as “Baby Face, the Queen of the Forty Elephants” because “when she hid the gear she nicked from the shops about her person she often looked like the queen of forty elephants.”Footnote 82 Taken together with Greeno’s testimony that the slender thieves would “come out like heavyweights” from a plundered shop, the use of “elephant” combines the physical transformation that a hoister underwent in her depredations with the name of her meeting place. These names reveal that gang members took delight in their activities and pride in their neighborhood. There is little information about hoisters’ collaboration with men in the perpetration of organized crime, though it is likely that the circulation of information and stolen property circulated through male criminal networks. Far from limiting hoisters’ independence, it is more likely that women’s participation in an otherwise male “underworld” cemented their claims to be criminal agents. For these women, thievery had become a way of life and a key marker of their identity.
Several difficulties impede discovering the identities of the Forty Thieves. Because they were professional thieves, they were more successful at stealing and at escaping arrest and prosecution than were amateur and occasional thieves. Like other professional criminals, hoisters used aliases: Alice Smith was also known as Ella Bowles; Diana Black went by the names Diana Blake and Alice Diamond; Ivy Merrefield also called herself Ivy Coates.Footnote 83 Nevertheless, it is clear that Maggie Hughes and Diana Black were the chief organizers of the Forty Thieves in the interwar years. Black, alias “Alice Diamond,” was well known to the police, “and in every case of shoplifting was shown to have had her gang ‘working’ with her, and to have had all of them so thoroughly subject to her as to make it plain how she had gained the title of ‘Queen of the Forty Thieves.’”Footnote 84 Shirley Pitts served an apprenticeship under Black before the Second World War. She recalled Black, the chief of the Forty Thieves, in the following way: “She was the biggest woman you ever did see, with diamond rings on her fingers and fox furs around her neck. I thought she looked the business.”Footnote 85
Frederick Wensley, who ultimately rose to the post of chief constable before his retirement in 1929, described Maggie Hughes as “one of the most determined and resourceful thieves” whom he had met. Hughes and the Forty Thieves “wore big, expensive fur coats and elastic bags under their skirts, and members of the gang would distract attention while another would shovel in expensive articles and, still covered by her confederates, walk out of the place, hail a taxi-cab, and so get away. Their depredations involved thousands’ of pounds worth of property, from fur coats to diamond rings.”Footnote 86 Detective John Capstick described Hughes as “one of the slickest thieves I ever tried to follow.” He said of the women: “Dressed to kill, those girls would descend on a West End store like a swarm of locusts. They would roll up in taxis and chauffeur-driven limousines and practically clean the place out inside an hour.”Footnote 87
In executing their shoplifting raids, these extraordinary thieves wore “grafter’s bloomers” or “shoplifters’ pockets,” which were special garments that enabled the shoplifter to conceal vast amounts of clothing and other stolen property. These garments included “hooks sewn in rows to the petticoat, the corset, the inner surface of skirts, capacious concealed pockets, belts around the waist for the suspension of parcels, [and] slots to accommodate small articles even in the stockings.”Footnote 88 Elizabeth Bolton and Ellen Smith, both of whom had previous shoplifting convictions, were sentenced together for stealing a £25 sable muff from Harrod’s. When they were searched, “their underskirts were found to form capacious pockets, and there was a slit in the outer skirt for the convenient insertion of any articles they might steal.”Footnote 89 Other examples abound: Olive Majestic concealed fourteen yards of silk in her pockets in 1894; three women hid fifty-six yards of silk in their pockets in 1897; Joab and Greenberg concealed fifty-five yards of satin and over thirty-four yards of silk in their skirts in 1904; Liza Morris and Ellen Holmes stole two opera cloaks by slipping them into their skirts in 1919; and Mary Connor and Mary Ann Gibbs stole over £100 worth of silk in 1923 by the use of special undergarments.Footnote 90
Professional hoisters further distinguished themselves through the cunning and skill exhibited in the planning of their crimes, which extended beyond London. One former hoister recalled that one of the gang’s biggest successes occurred in Manchester, where a team of thieves stole a £2,000 mink coat. The coat had been on exhibition in a large department store, but its location right in the middle of the store presented the thieves with a special difficulty. One of the Forty Thieves stuffed a cushion under her shirt to make it look as if she were pregnant. While gazing up at the mink, she feigned a collapse in order to draw the attention of the shop assistants. During the confusion her confederates swept up the mink.Footnote 91
In addition to teamwork, the Forty Thieves depended on special, professional knowledge of criminal techniques. Shirley Pitts explained, “Good hoisting is all in the rolling—especially if you want to take fur or heavy items. … There is a certain way that you learn to take the stuff from the top and roll it small.”Footnote 92 Professional shoplifters transmitted this criminal knowledge through a system of apprenticeship, as can clearly be seen through numerous cases in which two or more offenders working together were separated by a generation. In addition to Pitts, who was an apprentice hoister with Diana Black in the interwar years, take the example of Florence Smith, age 45, and her 16-year-old daughter, who both pled guilty to stealing a dress from Peter Robinson’s in Oxford Street. Detective Coote testified that both women were known as shoplifters, and the magistrate decried the fact that “the elder woman was training her daughter to be a thief and to follow her bad example.”Footnote 93 No doubt, thieving with older women was a way for a younger generation of shoplifters to become more adept at their craft. More generally, teamwork on the hoist was a typical characteristic of the professional shoplifter. Thieving together was not just a means of learning the ropes, but also another way to disperse risk and ensure greater success in crime.
Skill, teamwork, and apprenticeship equipped the hoister to steal more, to escape detection, to dispose of the stolen property, and to profit more from her shoplifting activities than either the well-to-do shop thief or the casual shoplifter. The Forty Thieves even sought to distinguish themselves from common crooks by concentrating on specific high-value stores and goods: again, Shirley Pitts boasted, “I’d never bother with Marks and Spencer’s and I’d never take food. Why should I bother with half-a-crown stuff when a £5,000 designer dress, resold, will earn me enough money to eat out all week?”Footnote 94 For women seeking to participate in criminal activity, the professionalization of methods was a way to make crime pay.
But the attractions of a life of crime to the Forty Thieves extended beyond economic calculations of risk and reward. As a form of skilled, acquisitive crime, hoisting conferred special status on women like the Forty Thieves; it enabled women to take pride in their craft—a sense of pride that was commonly lacking in legitimate occupations in the clothing trades or domestic service. Furthermore, the hoisting of the Forty Thieves was a performance. The women dressed up to steal, and stole to dress up. Sartorial performance was more than a criminal tactic: it enabled women to manipulate their identity and their lifestyle. The Forty Thieves prided themselves on their appearance. To Pitts, the Forty Thieves “were like film stars. … They had furs, beautiful make-up, and I thought they looked like Rita Hayworth (one had long red hair) and Barbara Stanwyck in the way they dressed. They arrived for me in a Chrysler car, and I thought I was going to heaven, not out thieving.”Footnote 95 In other words, being a hoister enabled women to perform and to participate in otherwise unattainable lifestyles.
Conclusion
This investigation of women’s shoplifting from 1890 to 1940—a time when hoisting was a “female perquisite”Footnote 96—reveals a spectrum of criminal activity ranging from middle-class “kleptomania” to opportunistic, working-class thievery to expert hoisting. Each category of shoplifting illustrates a particular relationship between women and consumer goods that was structured by the material and cultural dimensions of class. Respectable, middle-class women who committed “impulse thefts” enacted, in illegal form, the logic of conspicuous consumption inherent in metropolitan department stores. This suggests that bourgeois women engaged in thievery for the pleasurable or relaxing experience that such illegal shopping promised. Working-class thieves, on the other hand, committed crime for instrumental purposes; they stole goods to supplement meager incomes or for resale and profit. As we have seen, there was a close connection between economic marginality, particular sectors of women’s work, and the commission of shoplifting.
Nevertheless, the cases of tailoresses, laundresses, and servants-turned-shoplifters demonstrate that their criminality was as much about status and self-worth as it was about their economic situation. In this way working women sought to transgress the social and economic barriers to their own participation in conspicuous consumption. In most cases, the type of mobility that shoplifting offered to working women was temporary and illusory—especially if an offender was caught and imprisoned. It is for this reason that most women did not shoplift; or, if they did steal, did not remain in the “crooked game” for long. But material improvement was perhaps beside the point; as Selina Todd has pointed out, working-class women pursued respectability rather than middle-class status.Footnote 97 Taking a blouse, fur, or silk signified the “imagined” end to poverty that Sally Alexander has identified as being central to the formation of womanhood in the interwar years, when the ready availability of clothes, makeup, and magazines enabled women to aspire to independence from parents, husbands, and/or poverty itself.Footnote 98
Furthermore, the case study of the Forty Thieves demonstrates how women could manipulate the economic changes of this period in British history to their material and psychological advantage. These professional hoisters substituted their own system of apprenticeship for the disintegrating apprenticeships in dressmaking and domestic service; they deployed their fashion acumen to great effect in stealing the most expensive and in-demand items furnished by a consumer culture; and they exhibited in their sartorial choices the way in which dressing up was both a disguise and a performance of what it meant to be a modern, independent woman. Shoplifters were thus trendsetters in criminal activity in early twentieth-century Britain. While professional hoisters were clearly a small minority, their combination of thievery with aspiration for respectability was typical of all stripes of shoplifters—criminals appropriate to an increasingly commodified society in which identity was purchasable through consumer items at department stores.
Women did not stop shoplifting after 1940; after all, Shirley Pitts continued her hoisting until her death in the early 1990s. Marilyn Wisbey, born in 1954, has admitted that she was a part-time shoplifter and knew the best professionals, including Olive Cornell and Pitts, “the best hoister of my time.”Footnote 99 John Swain recalled matching wits with hoisters during his service as a detective sergeant in the Flying Squad in the early 1960s. He named Kitty Lloyd, Rose Costello, and Dora Lane as three famous women shoplifters from South London who had the ingenuity to “clout” items—that is, to wear a strong pair of elastic knickers in order to conceal stolen items.Footnote 100 But the professional female hoister was a rare bird after the Second World War. On the one hand, the willingness of some hoisters (like Pitts) to disclose their methods was a signal that the interwar form of organized shoplifting had long since disappeared; but on the other hand, her published testimony indicated that she continued to share the desire to establish her identity as an independent, criminal agent. By the time of an investigative report into professional shoplifting in 1984, the hoister was discussed as a male professional criminal.Footnote 101
The early twentieth century was not necessarily a “golden age” for women’s shoplifting, for there are continuities with earlier periods of criminal history: both the impact of the family life cycle and the role of performing identity were equally evident among women shoplifters in the eighteenth and in the twentieth century.Footnote 102 Still, it is clear that several contingent factors structured shoplifting activity in novel ways between 1890 and 1940. First, the rise of the department store redefined metropolitan space and provided new opportunities for working women in particular to transgress legal and social boundaries. Second, changes in the availability, wages, conditions, and status of work in the clothing trades and domestic service created new material and psychological pressures for women of all ages who lived on the brink of poverty, and many women viewed thievery as a short-term solution. Third, the development within the wider culture of “new womanhood” fused working women’s desire for economic self-sufficiency with aspirations to participate in consumer capitalism and appear to be respectable. And fourth, women who lived in the traditional working-class areas of East and Southeast London capitalized on their shared identities, community networks, and criminal contacts in order to create an organized form of shoplifting.
Women’s claims to shoplifting as their “prerogative” waned as the metropolitan working class evolved in new directions after the Second World War: clothing production and domestic service all but disappeared from London, and the growth of better-paid and more secure service-sector employment from the mid-1930s enabled many working women to achieve economic self-sufficiency through legal channels. These women could afford to purchase the items they wanted, especially as mass-produced garments more closely mirrored fashion trends. Many old working-class communities had been displaced during the Blitz and rehoused in suburbs after the war. The proliferation of durable consumer items such as radios and other electrical appliances encouraged a wider group of people, including men and boys, to engage in theft from shops. Indeed, the macho robber Bruce Reynolds had no hesitation in describing hoisting as one of his criminal activities prior to his participation in the Great Train Robbery of 1963.Footnote 103 The form and function of shoplifting morphed along with changes in the surrounding social and economic climate.
Whereas historians have documented an “English miracle” of declining criminal activity for the years 1850–1914 and sociologists label twenty-first-century Britain a “high-crime society,” little attention has been paid to the processes that increased criminal activity during the twentieth century.Footnote 104 The period described here was thus a crucial stage in the evolution of crime in modern Britain: the conjunction of consumerism, changes in women’s work, and novel aspirations related to gender and class identity produced a particular form of shoplifting behavior. Shoplifters’ lives and crimes reveal the role of women in this criminal transformation of British society and demonstrate the criminogenic qualities of a society in which mass production and mass access to commodities multiplied the opportunities and incentives to steal.
