This text analyses a phenomenon of international concern: the participation of women in subversive terrorist movements. It deals with four main issues: 1. women's participation in violent terrorist movements to discover the key to the psychological and sociological interpretation of their involvement in a life experience they are not traditionally associated with; 2. the different responses to "penitentism" between men and women; 3. the psychological and social interpretation of women's support of armed struggle and an inquiry - through the personal experience of the women terrorists interviewed - into the reasons for women's greater resistance to repentance; 4. the use of the leads this inquiry has furnished for prognostic purposes and to predict and create conditions that facilitate repentance.
Myth and Femininity. PART 1 DATA AND METHODS: Compilation and Analysis of Case Material; Women's Participation in Armed Subversion; "Penitentism" and Its Meaning; Survey Methods; Psychological Criteria of Interpretation. PART 2 THE PEOPLE, THE PHENOMENON AND THE CONTEXT: The Meaning of Violence; Subversive Violence and Its Socio-demographic Context; The Faces of Terrorism; Cliches and Stereotypes of Criminological Research on Female Deviance; Gender and the Criminal Justice System; The First United Nations Survey on the Situation of Women and the Administration of Criminal Justice Systems; The Chivalry Factor: Myth and Reality; Reported Causes of Female Criminality; Female Political Deviance; Psychology of "Penitentism" and the Culture of Violence. PART 3 PATH AND INTERPRETATION: The Psychological Path of the Terrorist; Female Specificity; The Two Faces of Obduracy; Women Penitents and an Explanation of their Repentance; Political Criminality and Obduracy - A Prognosis. PART 4: MEETINGS AND QUESTIONNAIRES.