The book begins with an account of the scientific attitude adopted by some of the first men of criminology. The first chapter considers how the early criminologists studied the criminal man (not the criminal or conforming woman) as a scientific object in a distanced, dispassionate manner, as well as how they used scientific arguments to justify their particular concerns and practices. This chapter also documents the extensive empirical research of feminists who examined the workings of the criminal justice system, as well as the scientific experiments of their fellow criminologists. The second chapter discusses criminology's shift in the 1970s toward a more appreciative understanding of the offender, one which accorded him the same subjectivity as the researcher. Feminist interventions into this appreciative criminology, however, were to reveal the limitations of this new way of thinking about crime, because a similar authority was not accorded women. Feminists documented the interior worlds of women and questioned the adequacy of the existential stories told by men. The third chapter observes a bifurcation in the preferred methods of criminology. The second part of the book shifts from the historical to the contemporary. Two chapters address some of the techniques and strategies that can now be used in a modern feminist criminology. One chapter deconstructs the crime of rape; it questions the orthodoxy that the sexual natures of men and women are necessarily complementary and offers different, more dissident accounts of female sexuality. A second chapter undermines conventional understanding of the dominant male, drawing on the more subversive portrayals of women and men to be found in feminist crime fiction. Chapter notes, a 224-item bibliography, and a subject index