ABSTRACT
The ideal reader of the feminist crime novels of the 1980s1 is a woman familiar with the problematization of the western feminist project which took place in the late 1970s. The tendency of the early Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) to reduce the variety of different women’s experiences to a conceptual category Woman, in an expedient but essentializing totalizing moment, induced by an activist prerogative, had been displaced by a burgeoning socialist feminist critique of various cultural formations of dominance and submission. This socialist feminist analysis of women’s everyday experience, their ‘ordinary lives’, depended upon a complex set of connections being made between interweaving societal structures and divisions taxonomized as ‘class’, ‘race’, ‘sexuality’, ‘age’, ‘ability’, and so on. The reader of these novels would already be informed by the way feminism in the 1980s had extended its interrogation of gender into a ‘politically correct’ embrace of diverse counter-cultural projects. These alliances led to something of an identity crisis within socialist feminism itself (questioning what might be specific about gender oppression). The spatter gun campaigning agenda of some of the feminist crime novels of the period frequently produced narrative incoherency; in an effort to say something about everything, the most worthy attempts were, flatly, boring. The formal sympathy between the (predominantly urban) crime novel and social comment became collapsed into a crude didacticism which failed to find fans beyond the already converted.
