Women's Liberation and The Female Delinquent

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