Inquiry: Mary Elizabeth Strunk: WANTED WOMEN: AN AMERICAN OBSESSION IN THE REIGN OF J. EDGAR HOOVER.

For most of his checkered career, J. Edgar Hoover considered women gangsters a special thorn in the side of the F.B.I. and set out to reconstruct the way the public viewed the likes of Bonnie Parker, Kathryn Kelly (wife of “Machine Gun Kelly”) and especially Ma Barker. These celebrity outlaw women were the subject of a number of films and endless media coverage. To counter all this attention,  Hoover often created numerous fictions about their habits and lives to emphasize the deviant aspects of these women and make them monsters in the public’s eyes. But who really were these “girls behind the men behind the guns”? Tune in tonight when we talk with MARY ELIZABETH STRUNK, writer, teacher and Associate of Five Colleges Incorporated about her revealing history: WANTED WOMEN: AN AMERICAN OBSESSION IN THE REIGN OF J. EDGAR HOOVER.