Nearly 40 years ago, in research conducted for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Ward and his colleagues, asked ‘Are women more aggressive in committing violent crimes today than in the past?’ The reason they asked this question, and others have continued to, is the common fear that women, as the putative gatekeepers of social morality, are changing. Using data from the same prison Ward and his colleagues relied on to document the nature of women's violent offences, we examine whether and how the characteristics and crimes of incarcerated female offenders have changed. In so doing, we also seek to explain observed patterns of stability and change over the last third of the 20th century in women's crimes of violence and the moral panics that circumscribe violent criminality by women.
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