On Women and Fraud (first of a potential series)

I was excited to see the title Confidence Girl as an option to watch instantly via Netflix, because I've rarely found a film in which a woman was running a con or perpetrating fraud on her own. I probably should have expected less, because despite the film's title, the titular character seems in no way to run anything and is decidedly not on her own. In fact, if anything, she is the movie's moral redemption, and her only independent actions involve giving herself up to police. We could dismiss Confidence Girl as a typically sexist 1950s Hollywood film ("she'll take you for all you've got and you'll love it!"), but I suspect ther is more to this than socially-sanctioned sexism.

In fact, I suspect there is a lot more. Though women seem to lie, cheat, and steal as much as men do, there appear to be far fewer famous female forgers (say that five times fast!) and impostors than there are male ones. I'm so far afraid to conjecture a reason for this and I don't even have stastistics to prove it, but I've been mentally developing a project (dare I say paper or even dissertation?) that will help realize some of my ideas. Stay tuned for updates!