The study of female criminality is still in its infancy. There is much that remains to be understood and explained about women's crime. There is some literature on contemporary women criminals. Historical accounts, sensitive to the social construction of crime, however, are almost nonexistent. Yet, such study is essential to comprehending fully gender and social control. This research uses the courts in Paris during the 19th century as an arena for examining the interactions and assumptions regarding female crime. Through systematic analysis of court dossiers, monograph and journal literature, and official reports and statistics, the meaning of female criminality will be traced and compared to male criminality. The investigation will include an analysis of why particular discourses about the female criminal emerged, who the contenders were who sought to attribute meaning to female deviancy, how changes in institutions and practices affected female offenders, and how activity related to the female criminal served broader efforts to stabilize gender and class relations. Several theoretical perspectives are woven together: changes in standards of criminal responsibility; the role of the expert in defining norms; narrative representations of crime; the meaning of patterns of conviction and acquittal; and the role of the courts in articulating "the woman question." This study should reveal the ways in which penal practices and procedures mediated and reflected larger processes of social and political redefinition. In addition, the research promises to break new ground, theoretically and methodologically, by drawing on recent theoretical advances across several disciplines to examine an important but rarely studied topic. Finally, this work can have a major impact on the way social scientists define and study criminality by providing a model in which gender is no longer absent or peripheral to the analysis.
