Bringing together the most current research on the relationship between crime and gender in the West between 1600 and 1914, this authoritative volume places female criminality within its everyday context. It reveals how their socio-economic and cultural contexts provided women with 'agency' against a range of European backdrops, despite a fundamentally patriarchal criminal justice system, and includes in-depth analysis of original sources to show how changing living standards, employment, schooling and welfare arrangements had a direct impact on the quality of life of working class women, their risk of becoming involved in crime, and the likelihood of being prosecuted for it. Rather than treating women's criminality as always exceptional, this study draws out the similarities between female and male criminality, demonstrating how an understanding of specific cultural and socio-economic contexts is essential to explain female criminality, both why their criminal patterns changed, and how their crimes were represented by contemporaries.
Table of Contents after the jump:
1. Introduction: women and crime in history · Sanne Muurling, Marion Pluskota and Manon van der Heijden
2. Explaining crime and gender in Europe between 1600 and 1900 · Manon van der Heijden
Part I. Violence, Space and Gender:
3. Women, violence and the uses of justice before the Criminal Court of early modern Bologna · Sanne Muurling
4. The 'vanishing' female perpetrator of common assault · Jo Turner
Part II. Prosecution and Punishment:
5. Gender and the prosecution of adultery in Geneva, 1550–1700 · Sara Beam
6. 'Find the lady': tracing and describing the incarcerated female population of London in 1881 · Lucy Williams and Barry Godfrey
7. Gender and release from imprisonment: convict licensing systems in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England · Helen Johnston and David J. Cox
8. Female and male prisoners in Queensland 1880–1899: re-entry, risk factors, recidivism · Alana Piper, Catrien Bijleveld, Susan Dennison and Jonathan de Bruin
Part III. Representation of Crime:
9. Girls, young women and crime: perceptions, realities and responses in a long-term perspective · Sarah Auspert, Margo de Koster and Veerle Massin
10. 'Monstrous and indefensible'? Newspaper accounts of sexual assaults on children in nineteenth-century England and Wales · Daniel J. R. Grey
11. Gender and Dutch newspaper reports of intimate violence, 1880–1910 · Clare Wilkinson.
Further information is available here.
--Mitra Sharafi
