Women's Liberation and the Female Delinquent

Abstract

Presumed changes in patterns of crime by females are drawing the attention of the popular media as well as that of sociologists and criminologists. Increases in the rate of crime by women and shifts in the nature of women's criminal involvement are commonly attributed to the emergence of the women's liberation movement. Ac cording to one perspective, the influence of the women's movement on crime is direct; feminist women, or women holding favorable attitudes toward feminism, are more likely than women with more traditional attitudes to engage in criminal mis conduct. Other investigators posit an indirect association between the feminist movement and changes in female crime, arguing that the feminist movement filters down to young, black, and poor women in the form of increasing criminal op portunities, growing group support for illegal behavior, and weakening social con trols, especially by parents. Confining our interest to the delinquency of adolescent girls, we examine not only the direct effects of feminist attitudes on delinquency involvement, but also the indirect influence of the women's movement on delin quency through the intervening variables of delinquency opportunity, the avail ability of social support for delinquency, and parental social controls.

Data were collected through an anonymous self-report questionnaire adminis tered to 287 eighth through twelfth grade girls attending schools in a small city in the Northwest. After analyzing the students' responses through nonparametric cor- relational techniques and regression analysis, we conclude that attitudes toward feminism have little direct effect on social delinquency but do have slight direct effects on property and aggressive delinquency. This influence is negative—a find ing that contradicts most conventional wisdom about the relationship of feminist attitudes to delinquency, Furthermore, there is some indication that girls encoun tering high degrees of delinquency opportunity and social support for delinquency who have low levels of parental social control are less likely to be aggressively delin quent when they hold favorable, rather than unfavorable, attitudes toward feminism.