The last twenty years have seen an explosion of publishing by, about and for women. The list is designed to make a particular contribution to this continuing process by commissioning and publishing books which consolidate and advance feminist research and debate in key areas in a form suitable for students, academics and researchers but also accessible to a broader general readership. As far as possible books adopt an international perspective, incorporating comparative material from a range of countries where this is illuminating. Above all they are interdisciplinary, aiming to put women's studies and feminist discussion firmly on the agenda in subject-areas as disparate as law, literature, art, religion and social policy.
The purpose of this paper is quite simple: it is to focus on an obscure and largely ignored area of human behaviour, namely deviance in women. It is suggested.(a) that the problems associated with this neglect may, in themselves, be interesting from a sociological point of view. (b) that the topic has both intrinsic interest for the sociologist today and that it has wider relevance to, for example, aspects of social structure. (c) that, in so far as it is an example of possibly curious counter-tendencies to certain widespread trends in deviance, it may be of especial interest.The deviance of women is one of the areas of human behaviour most notably ignored in sociological literature. This apparent lack of interest is remarkable for a number of reasons:(a) deviance in general (i.e. in practice either male and female deviance together or simply male deviance alone) has long aroused considerable interest. Since Durkheim (1938: ch. 3) argued that 'deviant' or 'pathological' behaviour has social as well as individual aspects, the sociology of deviance has been an important and developing field of sociological theorizing and enquiry. Therefore the general unconcern with the potential deviance of approximately half the members of any human society is surprising. (b) Interest in the changing position of women as it has affected marriage, the family and the division of roles within it has been considerable and has been productive of a vast range of studies, from, moreover, almost every known 'type' of sociologist: from American functionalist theoreticians to the more empirically-minded British.1 (c) As will be indicated below, differences between the patterns and manifestations of male and of female deviance were long ago observed (see
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