Do We still look at male and female criminals differently
The New York Times
February 12, 2006
City Lore
Armed and Adorable
By STEPHEN DUNCOMBE and ANDREW MATTSON
THERE isn't any bobbed-haired bandit," Mayor John Hylan announced when pressed about the female crime wave of 1924. "That's only a myth."
Despite the largest man (or woman) hunt in the New York Police Department's history, the stylish, bobbed-haired young woman who had been sticking up shops and leaving taunting notes was still at large, and the press was attacking the mayor and his police commissioner, Richard Enright, for their helplessness. How could the police end this "carnival of crime" if they couldn't even stop a girl bandit?
The city had experienced at least three crime waves since the end of the Great War, and the question of who was responsible was hotly debated. Some New Yorkers blamed the hardened young men who had returned from the trenches of France, rough-minded doughboys with automatics and few prospects. Others saw the rash of holdups as a side effect of prosperity and the new hunger for easy money and consumer goods.
Perhaps it was modernity itself, some suggested: too much science and not enough religion, a crisis of faith and a lack of respect for authority. Yet another suspected culprit was Prohibition, which had made breaking the law an everyday occurrence for half of the population and a cause of deep concern for the other half.
For Mayor Hylan, the problem of crime was a problem with the newspapers. In the mid-20's, New York City was served by 11 dailies, and 4 others concentrated on Brooklyn, and the business was undergoing a transformation. The rise of the newspaper chain and the photo tabloid, the competition from radio and an increasing concern with the bottom line pitted paper against paper in a white-hot circulation battle for the eyes and nickels of New Yorkers.
Then, as now, crime — especially crime with a sexy angle — sold papers. Responding to the growing chorus of his critics, Mr. Hylan accused the newspapers of making up the latest crime wave and its star performer to increase their circulation and embarrass his administration.
In one sense, the mayor was wrong. The Bobbed-Haired Bandit was a real flesh-and-blood woman, a unprepossessing-looking 19-year-old ex-laundress from Brooklyn named Celia Cooney. Celia and her husband, Ed, had begun their criminal career a few days into 1924 by robbing a small grocery on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope on a frigid Saturday night. No one was killed, but everyone was amazed by the appearance of girl with a gun. Though it was a minor crime by New York standards, a woman with a gun was man-bites-dog news.
When she robbed on the next Saturday and again the next week, the Bobbed-Haired Bandit was born. Bobbed hair was her defining characteristic, but her accessories were also described in detail: she wore a sealskin coat, wielded a baby automatic, drove a powerful automobile, and came equipped with a tall, dark male accomplice and distinctly unfeminine patter. "Another peep out of either of you and you'll stop gassin' for ever," the "gunmiss" announced to a stunned shopkeeper and his elderly mother; at least that's how a reporter put it.
New Yorkers were worried about more than the actual stick-'em-ups, which to be honest were not all that devastating; they were worried about what these crimes meant in the larger scheme of things. Women had won the vote only four years earlier, and the public was confused and concerned about the character of the modern woman. The flapper, with her bobbed hair, pert profile, lithe figure and devil-may-care attitude, was a stand-in for the woman problem and the immorality of the younger generation. Women voting and smoking, drinking and driving fast, cutting their hair? Bobbed-haired banditry seemed a troublesome sign of things to come.
In the wake of the Bobbed-Haired Bandit's exploits, any bobbed head involved in a crime made the papers. The estimable Zelda Fitzgerald was questioned one night on the Queensborough Bridge on suspicion of being the bandit, and a string of fashionably coiffed girls were jailed in the dragnet. Several transvestites were hauled in for questioning, raising the awkward question: Was the bandit really a woman?
Some commentators refused to believe that a woman was capable of such criminal bravado. Others saw in the Bobbed-Haired Bandit a kind of feminist hero, emblematic of a wider revolt against tradition.
When it was revealed that Celia Cooney was not only a woman but pregnant, another theory surfaced: it was the most natural of female conditions that explained this unnaturally strong-willed woman. Psychiatrists, preachers, politicians and police officers, journalists like Ring Lardner and Walter Lippmann, society ladies and members of the "criminal underground" all offered their opinions as "The Mystery of the Bobbed-Haired Bandit" was deliberated endlessly in the city's newspapers.
CELIA COONEY made her own contribution to the debate, leaving notes needling the police with lines lifted straight from the True Detective magazines she consumed voraciously. "You dirty fish peddling bums," one began, concluding with "we defy you fellows to catch us." In a 12-part serial that ran later in the Hearst newspapers, she spun out a softer, melodramatic tale of a poor housewife, newly married and expecting a child, who wanted the life she saw in shop windows and on the silver screen but couldn't afford on working-class wages. (Especially when still paying for a sealskin coat bought on the installment plan.)
Eventually Celia and Ed Cooney were caught. After a last, botched stickup, they fled to Jacksonville, Fla., where their newborn daughter died in a filthy rooming house. The grieving couple were turned in to the police by the undertaker who buried the baby. Extradited back to New York, they were greeted at Penn Station by a crowd of thousands who wanted a look at the infamous bandit. A diminutive dark-haired girl, scarcely more than five feet tall, stepped off the train, looking both scared and thrilled by all the attention.
She served seven years in prison and died in Florida in 1992.
To some New Yorkers, Celia Cooney was a simply a criminal, symptomatic of a nation that had lost its respect for law and order. To others, she was the unfortunate product of a society in which dreams of material plenty existed alongside the reality of long hours and low wages. She was both a desperate mother who stole for the sake of her unborn child and a selfish, thrill-seeking flapper, a disturbing sign of the erosion of traditional submissive femininity and a modern girl with pluck, flair and nerve. She was all these things because New Yorkers needed something, someone, to help them puzzle through a difficult era of shifting norms and values.
Paradoxically, it may have been Mayor Hylan who came closest to understanding the reality of the Bobbed-Haired Bandit. She was a myth.
Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson are the authors of "The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York," to be published this monthby New York University Press.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
February 12, 2006
City Lore
Armed and Adorable
By STEPHEN DUNCOMBE and ANDREW MATTSON
THERE isn't any bobbed-haired bandit," Mayor John Hylan announced when pressed about the female crime wave of 1924. "That's only a myth."
Despite the largest man (or woman) hunt in the New York Police Department's history, the stylish, bobbed-haired young woman who had been sticking up shops and leaving taunting notes was still at large, and the press was attacking the mayor and his police commissioner, Richard Enright, for their helplessness. How could the police end this "carnival of crime" if they couldn't even stop a girl bandit?
The city had experienced at least three crime waves since the end of the Great War, and the question of who was responsible was hotly debated. Some New Yorkers blamed the hardened young men who had returned from the trenches of France, rough-minded doughboys with automatics and few prospects. Others saw the rash of holdups as a side effect of prosperity and the new hunger for easy money and consumer goods.
Perhaps it was modernity itself, some suggested: too much science and not enough religion, a crisis of faith and a lack of respect for authority. Yet another suspected culprit was Prohibition, which had made breaking the law an everyday occurrence for half of the population and a cause of deep concern for the other half.
For Mayor Hylan, the problem of crime was a problem with the newspapers. In the mid-20's, New York City was served by 11 dailies, and 4 others concentrated on Brooklyn, and the business was undergoing a transformation. The rise of the newspaper chain and the photo tabloid, the competition from radio and an increasing concern with the bottom line pitted paper against paper in a white-hot circulation battle for the eyes and nickels of New Yorkers.
Then, as now, crime — especially crime with a sexy angle — sold papers. Responding to the growing chorus of his critics, Mr. Hylan accused the newspapers of making up the latest crime wave and its star performer to increase their circulation and embarrass his administration.
In one sense, the mayor was wrong. The Bobbed-Haired Bandit was a real flesh-and-blood woman, a unprepossessing-looking 19-year-old ex-laundress from Brooklyn named Celia Cooney. Celia and her husband, Ed, had begun their criminal career a few days into 1924 by robbing a small grocery on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope on a frigid Saturday night. No one was killed, but everyone was amazed by the appearance of girl with a gun. Though it was a minor crime by New York standards, a woman with a gun was man-bites-dog news.
When she robbed on the next Saturday and again the next week, the Bobbed-Haired Bandit was born. Bobbed hair was her defining characteristic, but her accessories were also described in detail: she wore a sealskin coat, wielded a baby automatic, drove a powerful automobile, and came equipped with a tall, dark male accomplice and distinctly unfeminine patter. "Another peep out of either of you and you'll stop gassin' for ever," the "gunmiss" announced to a stunned shopkeeper and his elderly mother; at least that's how a reporter put it.
New Yorkers were worried about more than the actual stick-'em-ups, which to be honest were not all that devastating; they were worried about what these crimes meant in the larger scheme of things. Women had won the vote only four years earlier, and the public was confused and concerned about the character of the modern woman. The flapper, with her bobbed hair, pert profile, lithe figure and devil-may-care attitude, was a stand-in for the woman problem and the immorality of the younger generation. Women voting and smoking, drinking and driving fast, cutting their hair? Bobbed-haired banditry seemed a troublesome sign of things to come.
In the wake of the Bobbed-Haired Bandit's exploits, any bobbed head involved in a crime made the papers. The estimable Zelda Fitzgerald was questioned one night on the Queensborough Bridge on suspicion of being the bandit, and a string of fashionably coiffed girls were jailed in the dragnet. Several transvestites were hauled in for questioning, raising the awkward question: Was the bandit really a woman?
Some commentators refused to believe that a woman was capable of such criminal bravado. Others saw in the Bobbed-Haired Bandit a kind of feminist hero, emblematic of a wider revolt against tradition.
When it was revealed that Celia Cooney was not only a woman but pregnant, another theory surfaced: it was the most natural of female conditions that explained this unnaturally strong-willed woman. Psychiatrists, preachers, politicians and police officers, journalists like Ring Lardner and Walter Lippmann, society ladies and members of the "criminal underground" all offered their opinions as "The Mystery of the Bobbed-Haired Bandit" was deliberated endlessly in the city's newspapers.
CELIA COONEY made her own contribution to the debate, leaving notes needling the police with lines lifted straight from the True Detective magazines she consumed voraciously. "You dirty fish peddling bums," one began, concluding with "we defy you fellows to catch us." In a 12-part serial that ran later in the Hearst newspapers, she spun out a softer, melodramatic tale of a poor housewife, newly married and expecting a child, who wanted the life she saw in shop windows and on the silver screen but couldn't afford on working-class wages. (Especially when still paying for a sealskin coat bought on the installment plan.)
Eventually Celia and Ed Cooney were caught. After a last, botched stickup, they fled to Jacksonville, Fla., where their newborn daughter died in a filthy rooming house. The grieving couple were turned in to the police by the undertaker who buried the baby. Extradited back to New York, they were greeted at Penn Station by a crowd of thousands who wanted a look at the infamous bandit. A diminutive dark-haired girl, scarcely more than five feet tall, stepped off the train, looking both scared and thrilled by all the attention.
She served seven years in prison and died in Florida in 1992.
To some New Yorkers, Celia Cooney was a simply a criminal, symptomatic of a nation that had lost its respect for law and order. To others, she was the unfortunate product of a society in which dreams of material plenty existed alongside the reality of long hours and low wages. She was both a desperate mother who stole for the sake of her unborn child and a selfish, thrill-seeking flapper, a disturbing sign of the erosion of traditional submissive femininity and a modern girl with pluck, flair and nerve. She was all these things because New Yorkers needed something, someone, to help them puzzle through a difficult era of shifting norms and values.
Paradoxically, it may have been Mayor Hylan who came closest to understanding the reality of the Bobbed-Haired Bandit. She was a myth.
Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson are the authors of "The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York," to be published this monthby New York University Press.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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