Nicole Hahn Rafter

Nicole Hahn Rafter (1939–2016) was a feminist criminology professor at Northeastern University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, achieved her Master of Arts in Teaching from Harvard University, and obtained a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from State University of New York in Albany. She began her career as a high school and college English professor and switched to criminal justice in her mid-thirties. In 1977, Rafter began teaching at Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice in Boston, Massachusetts. There she developed one of the country's first courses on women and crime as well as a course on crime films. In 1999, she resigned her position as a full-time professor to focus on her writing projects. She continued affiliation with Northeastern University as an adjunct professor overseeing dissertation students, but not teaching regular courses. In 2002 she resumed teaching at the College of Criminal Justice with a graduate course in Biological Theories of Crime. During the 1980s, Rafter began publishing her writings mainly focusing on the female prison system. She argued there have always been differences between the prison systems of the different sexes. She also asserted that academia has focused little on women since the majority of studies were done on male institutions by male writers. She wrote about the history of prisons for women, noting the differences between them and commenting on the effects that gender has on institutions. In 1988, Rafter published White Trash: the Eugenic Family Studies 1877-1919, writing about the eugenic movement in the United States and the way in which the poor were shaped as inferior through heredity. At the beginning of the 1990s, Rafter accounted for gender in the eugenic movement in the United States, showing how women were negatively affected with biological notions of being carriers of disease through reproduction.