ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the prevailing scholarly belief that women have always been at the periphery of crime and argues that a central issue for those studying the criminal process should be the decline over time of women as criminal offenders and defendants. It argues that one of the central puzzles for students of gender and crime should be the vanishing female participation in the criminal process. The chapter suggests the need to reorient the attention of both historians and criminologists. It traces female criminal involvement over time, showing that it declines throughout the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. The chapter considers and largely rejects several hypotheses that treat this decline as more apparent than real. It outlines an argument that treats the declining involvement of women in the criminal justice system as part of a larger set of social processes that transformed social controls over women during this period.
