The nature of female criminality

Our knowledge of the nature of female criminality is still in its infancy. In comparison with the massive documentation on all aspects of male delinquency and criminality, the amount of work carried out in the area of women and crime is extremely limited. The underdevelopment of this particular area of study seems to be in part a consequence of the pervasiveness of the belief in the relative insignificance of female criminality. Of course this belief in the insignificance of the actions of women, the assumption that women are inessential and invisible, is not peculiar to the domain of criminology or the sociology of deviance; on the contrary it is a feature of all aspects of sociology and academic thought. As Ann Oakley maintains,

The concealment of women runs right through sociology. It extends from the classification of subject-areas and the definition of concepts through the topics and methods of empirical research to the construction of models and theory generally

(A. Oakley, 1974, p. 3).