Freda Adler

Freda Adler (born 1934) is a criminologist and educator, currently serving as a Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University. She was President of the American Criminological Society in 1994–1995, and has acted as a consultant to the United Nations on criminal justice matters since 1975. A prolific writer, Adler has published in a variety of criminological areas, including female criminality, international issues in crime, piracy, drug abuse, and social control theories.

Sourced

Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975)

• Characteristically, major social movements are spawned in obscurity at the periphery of public awareness, seem to burst suddenly and dramatically into public view, and eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.
  • P. 5.

• The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.
  • P. 31.

• The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.
  • P. 55.

• There is another side to chivalry. If it dispenses leniency, it may with equal justification invoke control.
  • P. 91.

• Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
  • P. 155.

• That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.
  • P. 171.

• Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master.
  • P. 203.

• The controversy between rule of law and rule of men was never relevant to women — because, along with juveniles, imbeciles, and other classes of legal nonpersons, they had no access to law except through men.
  • P. 203.

• Perhaps it is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused and, in reality, it is she who must prove her good reputation, her mental soundness, and her impeccable propriety.
  • P. 215.

• The Rubicons which women must cross, the sex barriers which they must breach, are ultimately those that exist in their own minds.
  • P. 250.