Results suggest that an adequate understanding of female offending must consider the impact of neighborhood, peer, and addiction factors that affect both males' and females' participation in criminal violence. In addition, different combinations of these factors appear to contribute to the initiation of violent offending, depending on the age of onset. Early initiation into violent crime was accompanied by participation in a wide variety of other offending behaviors and deviant lifestyles. In contrast, those women who began their violent offending later did so in the context of a criminal career that, until the beginning of drug abuse, was more specialized and focused on typically nonviolent, female-congruent activities such as prostitution and shoplifting. Tables, footnotes, appended table, and 83 references (Author abstract modified)