Women and Crime in the City

Abstract

Criminologists have traditionally defined crime as a predominantly male and urban phenomenon. Until the early twentieth century, theories of crime and delinquency had been dominated by notions of individual pathology focusing upon physical characteristics, mental illness and heredity.¹ In the 1930s social scientists at the University of Chicago seriously challenged the hegemony of biological and physiological determinism by hypothesising a causal relationship between ecological factors in the city and deviant behaviour. ² For the next forty years sociological theories of crime and deviance dominated criminological research. Yet, throughout this work, women had literally disappeared from sociological view. Although academic research did not totally neglect the deviant behaviour of women, the arena in which it was discussed was not that of contemporary sociology but of the pseudo-scientific positivism, which characterised classical criminology at the turn of the century.³