Klein, Dorie: The Etiology of Female Crime

Christine E. Rasche

The study of female criminal offending was almost completely ignored for the first 200 years of criminological theorizing. Prior to the 1970s, only a few scholars had studied women offenders and tried to explain their behavior, often using their ideas about women in general to try to explain female criminality in particular. The “invisibility” of female offenders was partly because women were generally regarded as criminologically unimportant due to their relatively small numbers and/or the lesser seriousness of their most common crimes (e.g., property offenses, prostitution). Indeed, some early theorists (such as Cesare Lombroso) did not consider prostitution to even be a real crime. Compared to the much more frequent, and often highly violent, crimes committed by men, women's offending did not seem interesting to most scholars prior to the last quarter of the 20th century. Dorie Klein is best known in criminological theory for her pioneering feminist critique Issues ...

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