Beyond the Cell Block Tango: What "Chicago" Tells Us About Crime and Gender

Written by Katalin Parti, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology, Virginia Tech

The protagonists of the musical Chicago were inspired by Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two real women whose 1924 murder trials were covered by journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins for the Chicago Tribune. Watkins, one of few women reporting on crime at the time, closely followed courtroom proceedings and became captivated by the media spectacle surrounding these cases. Drawing on her reporting, she wrote the stage play Chicago in 1926. Both the play — and later the 1975 musical — satirize the justice system and the public’s fascination with crimes, especially when committed by women.

Chicago is set in the late 1920s, during Prohibition. That matters. The 1920s in the U.S. was a moment of moral panic around sex, celebrity, and “modern women”: jazz clubs, speakeasies, flappers, “illicit” pleasure. At the same time, criminology and popular culture tended to see female offenders either as immoral sexual deviants or pathetic, emotional, and not fully responsible for what they’d done. The musical plays with both views and exposes how absurd and strategic they are. We like to think the show depicts olden times, but public and even academic discourse has addressed female offenders very similarly throughout the centuries.

Early criminologists like Cesare Lombroso, an Italian doctor who collected data on body parts of incarcerated males and females, concluded that females are biologically primitive “atavistic throwbacks” (The Female Offender, 1895), and thus, less able to plan and commit crimes than males. He argued that women, by nature, hide their criminal impulses better and are therefore more dangerous when they break the law. Fast forward to the mid-20th century, Otto Pollak (The Criminality of Women, 1950) challenged Lombroso’s idea, arguing that women commit as much crime as men, but it’s “hidden” (or “masked”) because women are better liars, more manipulative, and because a biased system refuses to see them as real criminals. He sexualized women as naturally duplicitous — for him, femininity equaled concealment.

Chicago stages the misogynistic and sexist zeitgeist almost too perfectly. For example, Roxie Hart lies easily about her affair and shooting her lover. She quickly rewrites her story for the cops to make herself look sympathetic. Velma Kelly has a similarly manipulative character. She is accused of double murder, but she refashions that into a nightclub act. We Both Reached for the Gun is basically Otto Pollak’s theory in song. Billy Flynn turns Roxie into a ventriloquist dummy and feeds the press a sanitized, sympathetic version of events. But importantly, Roxie is not passive. She leans into it. She performs naïveté. Her “innocence” is deliberately performed to mask her calculation. The message is clear — women’s criminality is hidden behind this manipulative use of femininity: baby voice, tears, wide eyes, sexual charm. The “masking” is itself part of the crime.

However, Chicago also critiques the sexist depiction of crime. Instead of suggesting that deception is some innate female trait, it shows us the material incentive. Women learn to “mask” because that’s how to survive a system driven by publicity, male lawyers, newspapers, and juries eager for a pretty story. It’s not biology. It’s strategy within a patriarchy.

Another concept Chicago spotlights comes from the 1950s, proposing that the criminal justice system treats (some) women more leniently than men because they’re seen as delicate, emotional, and in need of protection, especially if they conform to respectable femininity: young, pretty, heterosexual, not too aggressive, not too “masculine.” The Press Conference Rag / We Both Reached for the Gun sequence shows how the press loves Roxie once she is packaged as a sweet, deceived girl. Reporters eat it up. Billy Flynn literally tells her how to sit, how to cry, how to pout. This is chivalry being engineered. The jury scene also echoes this. Billy stages Roxie as a helpless victim of a violent man.

Roxie’s narrative becomes: “I’m just a poor girl, led astray by love.” The jury is not just weighing evidence; it’s admiring a performance of womanhood. If you look and act like that fantasy, you get mercy.

But Chicago is not naïve about who gets chivalry. The Cell Block Tango women each tell their murder stories, and some of them are not treated gently by the system at all — especially those whose stories don’t fit “innocent victimhood.” This is realistic. Chivalry in practice is selective: it tends to advantage attractive, white, heterosexual, conventionally feminine defendants. Roxie and Velma benefit from it because they can perform that kind of femininity. Others — more jaded, more rough, more foreign (note Hunyak, the Hungarian woman who is executed after insisting “Not guilty!”) — are denied that mercy. The musical suggests that “chivalry” is not a universal female privilege; it’s a privilege based on race, class, and beauty. You don’t get leniency because you’re a woman. You get leniency because you’re the right kind of woman. The evil woman hypothesis is basically the flip side of chivalry: when women offend in ways that violate both the law and gender norms, the system can punish them even more harshly than men. Why? Because they’re not just criminals — they’re seen as unnatural women. Violent women, disloyal women, sexually assertive women, ambitious women get framed as “monstrous.”

Chicago shows this, too. Hunyak is the clearest tragic embodiment of the evil woman hypothesis. She can’t perform Americanized, sexualized, English-speaking innocence. She is portrayed by the press and courts as cold-blooded. She’s executed. In other words, if you can’t (or won’t) fit the “cute tragic girl” script, the system is capable of extraordinary cruelty. The Cook County Jail’s women’s block is portrayed almost as a backstage dressing room for fame. The murders are secondary; the celebrity machinery is primary. The musical is saying: by the late 1920s, female criminality was already being filtered through gendered spectacle. Women weren’t judged only as “guilty or not guilty.” They were judged as “tragic beauty or evil slut.”

The show exaggerates this dynamic, but it’s referencing real press culture, not inventing it. And because all of this is staged in vaudeville style — courtroom as circus, jailhouse as cabaret, lawyer as showman — Chicago makes a darker claim: justice itself is theatre. Female defendants win or lose not on truth but on how well their bodies and voices can be marketed to the press, the jury, and the public. Gender is currency. Crime is content.

The show exaggerates this dynamic, but it’s referencing real press culture, not inventing it. And because all of this is staged in vaudeville style — courtroom as circus, jailhouse as cabaret, lawyer as showman — Chicago makes a darker claim: justice itself is theatre. Female defendants win or lose not on truth but on how well their bodies and voices can be marketed to the press, the jury, and the public. Gender is currency. Crime is content.

If we put Chicago in conversation with gender-and-crime theory, the musical functions almost like a parody lecture. It shows, with glitter and jazz hands, how women’s criminality is never read “neutrally.” It’s read through a script: either “fallen angel who needs saving” or “monstrous woman who must be eliminated.” In other words, Chicago is less about “did she do it?” and more about “what kind of woman is she allowed to be?” That’s exactly the question feminist criminology keeps asking back to traditional (and sexist) theories of female crime.

Katalin Parti, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Tech. Parti specializes in criminology, online fraud and cybercrime victimization, and gender studies, including her course on Women and Crime. Parti holds advanced degrees in criminal justice, including an M.S. from Boston University, a law degree, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pécs in Hungary.

Photos by Jeremy Daniel