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Women routinely practise taxing safety strategies in public, such as avoiding unlit spaces after dark. To date, scholars have understood these behaviors as means by which women bolster their physical safety in public. My in-depth interviews with women in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia suggest that, much less than reliably enhancing women’s safety, safety work often exacerbates women’s fear of violent crime and unreliably mitigates their exposure to violence. I thus interrogate the protective function of gendered safekeeping and reconceptualize women’s safety work as virtue maintenance work, theorizing that women practice risk-management in public places to attain the ontological security associated with evading subjectivities of gendered imprudence.

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Drawing on focus group and interview data, this paper examines how race and social class intersect with gender to inform Canadian women’s responses to police-produced gendered crime-prevention messaging. I position women’s enactments of institutionally endorsed crime-prevention strategies as a resource for the successful achievement of femininity, and I consider how intersecting social statuses shape how women do crime prevention. Focus group dialogue reveals three orientations to police crime-prevention messaging: resentment, pragmatism and gratitude. Across orientations, women strategically enact state imperatives to meet their own agentic ends. By identifying crime prevention as a resource for achieving femininity and highlighting racialized and classed dimensions in women’s gender performances, this research enriches extant literature on crime prevention and femininities.