Black Female Gangs in Philadelphia

CUBCULTURAL delinquency among females has suffered from~.7 a paucity of reportage when compared to the plethora of extant accounts concerned with male delinquency. As one source has been quick to point out (Cowie, Cowie and Slater, 1968: 44), subcultural delinquency seems not to have been explored at all in relation to females. The truth of this statement has been partially dispelled in the last few years due to the recent women’s movement for the equality of the sexes. The women’s movement has helped to spawn some studies on female criminality, such as the insightful works of Freda Adler (1971; 1975), but for the most part there is still a lack of information relative to the study of female delinquency in general and female gang involvement in specific. Over 20 years ago Otto Pollack (1950) argued that female crime is more likely than male crime to go undetected and un-reported, and he also raised the possibility that women may very well be as involved in crime as men. Despite Pollack’s thesis