Commentary on Heidensohn's ‘The deviance of women’: continuity and change over four decades of research on gender, crime and social control

It’s been just over forty years since the publication of Frances Heidensohn’s ‘The deviance of women’ (1968). What a privilege to have the opportunity to reflect on the impact of this work, and to assess where we have honoured Heidensohn’s calls to action and where we have fallen short. Let me begin with a telling confession. When Richard Wright first approached me about writing a commentary on ‘The deviance of women’, I hadn’t previously read it. Of course I knew Heidensohn as a prominent feminist studying crime and justice, but I was unaware of this pivotal work. What does this mean? A number of things, I would imagine. Perhaps American insularity? Or our tendency, much to the lament of former Criminology editor Bob Bursik (2009), to fail to read all of those important works that came before us (and thus to continually ‘reinvent the wheel’)? Each of these likely contains a grain of truth, but I also have a more compelling interpretation which I believe is equally accurate. It was a full two decades after the original publication of ‘The deviance of women’ that I was first introduced to feminist criminology. By this time, the ideas Heidensohn first outlined had become fully integrated into this then burgeoning field. It strikes me that this is a true – though no doubt frustrating – mark of a genuinely significant work: its prescient ideas, met with both dismissal and distain at the time it was written (see Eaton 2000: 13), had within 20 years become so broadly accepted as to be nearly commonplace among feminist thinkers in criminology and sociology. This is a remarkable accomplishment. Three overarching points guided Heidensohn’s analysis in ‘The deviance of women’, and led her to make two significant calls to action. First, she questioned the utter neglect of sociological interest in women’s deviance (and lack