Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Feminist Art and Social Change Creative Politics and Women’s Criminalization in the United States Carol Jacobsen I began working on issues of women’s criminalization in the early 1980s when I made the connection between my own sense of shame, stigma, and guilt about my past and so many women’s experiences—abortion, rape, lesbian identity, and prostitution—that were punished by the state. I had been discouraged, even ridiculed, in graduate school for my efforts to combine art and politics. But after spending a year in Europe, I was electrified by the creative politics of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp outside London (Jacobsen 1986). 1 I had visited the camp around the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) base and sat through jaw-dropping trials of women being prosecuted for disturbing the peace. They were like scenes out of Monty Python: the women on trial ruled over the blustering, white-wigged men who could not control the court- rooms. They also brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s literary confrontation between “educated men,” the public fathers brought to power by the sacrifices of their sisters and mothers, and the all-women “Outsiders’ So- ciety,” whose creed was: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world” (Woolf [1938] 1977, 24). Returning to the United States, I was anxious to work I wish to gratefully acknowledge my colleagues, Joanne Leonard, Peg Lourie, and Lora Lempert, for their contributions to this essay, and my partners in this struggle, Lynn D’Orio, Susan Fair, and Lore Rogers. 1 Women from all over the world occupied camps encircling the NATO base at Greenham Common for about a decade in protest against nuclear weapons. The British government bulldozed their campsites over and over to get rid of them. In 1982, four hundred women appeared in court with affidavits declaring Greenham their home and demanded the right to vote there. They were awarded residency. [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2008, vol. 33, no. 2]  2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2008/3302-0009$10.00