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The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Malcolm M. Feeley  and
Deborah L. Little
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Abstract

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This article 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. Our argument rests on examination of criminal cases in the Old Bailey in London for 1687–1912, as well as of data drawn from English and some American courts for this period. For much of the eighteenth century women made up a substantial portion (over 45 percent at times) of all those indicted for felony offenses, in sharp contrast to contemporary levels of less that 15 percent. We conclude that the change is “real”—it cannot be explained away as an artifact of selective reporting, shifting jurisdiction, short-lived idiosyncratic enforcement policies, etc. We argue that these changes parallel and may be explained by significant shifts in the roles accorded women in the economy, the family, and society, and we conclude that the vanishing female in the criminal process may reflect a shift to more private forms of social control brought on by shifting social attitudes and the rise of industrialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , 1991 , pp. 719 - 757
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

We wish to acknowledge the assistance of Teri Winter, Charles Lester, and David Johnson for coding; Shelly Messinger for careful reading of several drafts of this paper; John Langbein, David Lieberman, and David Sugarman for help in locating sources, supplying background material, and help in devising the code; Dan Rubinfeld, Richard Berk, and John Berecochea for technical advice on sampling and coding; Thomas Green and Pieter Spierenburg for comments on a previous draft; four anonymous readers for the Review; and Shari Diamond for several careful readings of the manuscript and many helpful suggestions. Above all we wish to thank John Beattie and Norma Landau for their careful readings of earlier drafts, extended discussions with us, and for sharing data from their own ongoing research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, Amsterdam, June 1991.

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