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.... en en men in Highland culture, 'alcoholism' is seen 'more or less as an occu­

pational hazard of being male, particularly of being unmarried and male' (p. 138).

This book offers a stimulating read with some excellent ethnographic material that I would recommend to anyone wishing to explore further the relationship between gender, drink and drugs. However, I did have concerns about some of the underlying implications of the social constructionist par­adigm that it espouses. In particular, there appears to be considerable reluc­tance on the part of several contributors even to acknowledge the potentially damaging effects of excessive alcohol or drug consumption. As someone who is currently responsible for an elderly relative with severe dementia resulting from chronic alcoholism, I am constantly made aware of the purely biological effects on the brain of too much alcohol and too little food. As a women's health activist (and regular wine drinker) I worry about the growing evidence implicating very small amounts of alcohol as a significant risk factor in breast cancer. Of course, we need to understand drinking - and all other human activity - as a cultural phenomenon. However, this should not lead us to deny the physical and psychological damage that excessive alcohol consumption may cause. We do not do it with smoking and lung cancer, so why should we treat alcohol differently?

Lesley Doyal

International Feminist Perspectives in Criminology Nicole Hahn Rafter and Frances Heidensohn (eds)

Open University Press: Buckingham, 1995

ISBN 0 335 19388 9, £13.99 (Pbk) ISBN 0 335 19389 7, £40.00 (Hbk)

This is a book to be welcomed; it is an important addition to the body of literature that now exists on feminist perspectives in criminology. Bringing together a number of contributors from various countries - Australia, South Africa, Britain, Italy, Poland, the USA and Canada - it attempts to assess the influence of feminism on criminology from an international per­spective and includes pieces by well-known academics such as Frances Heidensohn, Tamar Pitch, Kathleen Daly and James Messerschmidt.

The majority of contributors begin by providing a useful overview of the development of criminology in their particular country. This clearly demonstrates that what constitutes criminology varies markedly from country to country and is shaped both by specific academic lineage and by

112 political conditions. Thus Tamar Pitch shows how criminology in Italy is

predominantly clinical, associated with forensic psychiatry, and, as such, focuses on the individual, while in much of the rest of Europe and in Aus­tralia the academic base is the law department. In Britain and North America criminology is much more sociologically orientated. The influence of politi­cal context is particularly clear in Poland, as Monika Platek indicates, where establishment criminology was a vehicle for extolling the 'crime-free' nature of Communist societies and still presents a hangover inhibiting the develop­ment of a more radical criminology. In South Africa, however, the influence of left realism in the shape of 'progressive realism' becomes apparent as the country faces up to fundamental political and economic upheaval.

For each country the book considers the role of feminist scholarship within the discipline. It asks whether criminology can be engendered and docu­ments the range and volume of work. Feminists have provided a critique of conventional criminology for failing to include women in its analyses; their work has made the woman offender visible, offered explanations for the difference between male and female crime rates and revealed the insti­tutionalized sexism of the criminal justice system. But it is perhaps in the area of violence against women that it has had the greatest impact both in criminology and outside the discipline. Here it is important to remember that much of the work that has transformed public opinion on issues such as rape, domestic violence and child sexual abuse was activist led. It did not come from inside the academy. Indeed, it was these campaigns which shaped academic feminism which in turn seeks to influence establishment criminol­ogy. As well as a coverage of these key areas, this volume also reveals a fasci­nating diversity of debate. For example, Christine Alder alerts us to the interest of Australian feminist criminologists in representations of women in crime fiction. Tamar Pitch includes a particularly thought-provoking piece on the influence of feminism on organized crime in Italy. She highlights the emergence of women's voices and women's groups against the Mafia and the impact this has had in terms of stimulating new ways of looking at the phenomenon. And there is much self-critique: Alder reveals the frequent neglect of race in Australian writing. The situation of Aboriginal women, she notes, has seldom been considered and Patricia Easteal's book The For­gotten Few: Migrant Women in Australian Prisons (1992) is a rare example of a study on the criminal justice experiences of women from non-English speaking backgrounds.

There is, however, a central limitation to this book. For, despite purport­ing to be international and having excellent contributions on Italy, Aus­tralia and South Africa, it is dominated by North America. A third of the book is on developments in Canada and the United States. Eight of the thirteen contributors are from North America. Although the editors acknowledge the book's cultural limitations, 'we solicited chapters on Asian 113

114

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nations, central and northern African countries, and Central America and the Caribbean, but without success' (p. 11), European feminism is also poorly represented. There are no contributions, for example, from Spain, Belgium or The Netherlands. Indeed the weakest contribution is by Marie­Andree Bertrand, a Canadian, who attempts to cover Germany, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Her piece is a personal account of her impressions and conversations with a few women academics from each of these countries concerning the place of feminist criminology. Her astonishment at her dis­coveries is often well meant but really only surprising for someone immersed in North American criminology. Thus she expresses surprise at the absence of feminists among the authority figures in academic criminology, and that a department had only one course on 'female crime' in an academic year. This is obviously deplorable but not so strange when viewed from a British context. More seriously, although mentioning that at one faculty she pre­sented a study on women's prisons and discussed such topics as abolition­ism and the feminist critique of penology, there is no mention of the key and wide-spread nature of European debates on these subjects. This is despite the fact that, in this volume, Tamar Pitch, a leading figure in this area, refers to the discussion between those who argue for law reform and those who consider law to be detrimental rather than helpful in the development of women's individual and collective autonomy, for it constructs women as 'victims', as weak, and, therefore, in need of protection. It is extraordinary that the extensive debate over abolitionism and feminism in Europe is not touched upon. This would seem to reflect the common ignorance in North America both of abolitionism in general and the way in which many Euro­pean feminists have found its arguments of great interest. This can be seen in the recent work of Tamar Pitch, Encarna Bodel6n in Spain, Jolande uit Beijerse and Renee Kool in The Netherlands, and Gerlinda Smaus in Germany, to name but a few. Bertrand's dismissive attitude is illustrated by her comment on Belgium: 'the long history of very close links between the Montreal and Belgian schools of criminology allows me to say that femin­ist criminology is absent from Belgium's criminology curriculum and research programmes' (p. 108). In fact, while it is indeed marginal, it is unfair to say that it is absent. The Critical Criminology ERASMUS pro­gramme, of which my institution is part, brings me regularly in contact with students from Belgium who are well informed both in terms of feminist literature and debates in criminology.

On a more positive note the book contains throughout a clear awareness of the need to provide a multi-dimensional approach to criminology which refuses to allow the discipline to be reduced to gender, or to class, or to race. The articles by Kathleen Daly and Deborah Stephens and James Messerschmidt are exemplary on this issue, but it is important to stress

how tackling this problem is not equivalent to producing a genuine international criminology. To do this necessitates awareness of the dis­tinctly different political and academic trajectories of the various countries and to acknowledge the idiosyncratic nature of North American social science both in terms of its achievements and limitations.

But overall this book will be invaluable to postgraduate students of crim­inology and will help to cater for the way in which feminist issues, largely because of the efforts of activists outside the academy, have become such popular topics within criminology courses in many parts of the world.

Jayne Mooney

Re'ference

EASTEAL, P.W. (1992) The Forgotten Few: Migrant Women in Australian Prisons Canberra: Bureau of Immigration Research, Australian Government Printing Service.

Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Adion at Greenham Sasha Roseneil

Open University Press, Buckingham, 1995

ISBN 0 335 19 057 X, £13.99 (Pbk) ISBN 0 335 19058 8, £40.00 (Hbk)

In recent months we have seen nuclear issues return to the central politi­cal arena. For many feminist peace activists, it is with a heavy heart that we start to address battles that we thought we had already fought. Con­sequently, this book, Disarming Patriarchy by Sasha Roseneil, was timely. It was with great anticipation that I opened it and started to read, and I was not disappointed. However, I have to admit that I came to the book as a biased reader. I was a peace activist for six years too and a 'camper' at Greenham (a woman who sometimes stayed and sometimes visited the peace camp), thus my own reflections on this work are positioned.

In the introduction Roseneil clearly defines her book within feminist frame­works, stating that she is 'less interested in the routine actions by which women contribute to the reproductions of patriarchy, than in non-routine, extraordinary political action, through which women seek change'. Indeed, this is one of the great strengths of her work. It is through the ethnographic

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insight into the daily lives of thirty-five Greenham women that Roseneil 11s