Abstract Historical and criminological studies of female participation in gangs and organized crime have tended to focus on mixed-sex, male-dominated groups. This article offers an examination of the “Forty Elephants” gang, an all-female criminal group that operated in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on digitized newspaper sources, the study uses social network analysis (SNA) to trace structural shifts across two periods associated with different leaders of the gang. The findings reveal a shift from a relatively centralized network in the gang’s earlier years to a looser, more diffuse structure in the later period, with influence spread across multiple figures rather than concentrated in a single, dominant leader. These structural changes are contextualized within broader historical developments, including internal gang conflict, law enforcement attention, criminal justice responses, and shifts in offending methods. By combining quantitative SNA with qualitative historical analysis, the article demonstrates how digital methods can reveal overlooked patterns of female collaboration and co-offending. In doing so, it challenges stereotypes of women as marginal offenders and provides a methodological model for applying network analysis to historical crime research, where such methods remain underused.
Grace Di Méo (Thu,) studied this question.