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This is a study of the one hundred fifty females among the two thousand eight hundred felons of New York County examined at the Court of General Sessions last year. The usual reasons for the low incidence of females (four per cent) as compared with males are mentioned: women are less capable of physical aggression, are more protected by our society, are economically and psychologically dependent. However, further study reveals psychopathological mechanisms. According to the findings of Simonds and Bromberg in The Female Offender, an unpublished manuscript, the proportion of aggressive crimes (murder, manslaughter, assault) is higher among females than among males: twenty per cent to twelve per cent respectively. This is explained on the basis of the close association of aggressive behavior in women with their libidinal life, so that emotional deprivations are reacted to explosively. Examples: women who kill their paramours out of a 'sibling-like' rivalry; women who kill their homosexual love object, thereby unconsciously destroying their own homosexual craving; women who commit infanticide, thereby relieving unconscious Oedipal guilt; women who commit larceny in order to acquire the means of attracting a father figure, etc.
Whereas among males the highest incidence of felonies occurs between sixteen and twenty-five years of age, i.e., the period of greatest economic strain, criminality among women rises after the age of twenty-five, when mounting emotional frustrations reawaken the Oedipal conflict. The fact that the boy's entry into the economic field puts him unconsciously into competition with his father is overlooked.