Debauched, Desperate, Deranged: Women Who Killed, London 1674–1913 by Carolyn A. Conley

Abstract

Conley draws from the rich resources of The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913 (ed. Tim Hitchcock et al.) to present an overview of the prosecution of women for homicide over a span of centuries. Conley begins with the premise that “changes in the types of homicides for which women were prosecuted as well as the official responses and media coverage of these crimes reflect, parallel, and occasionally challenge social, legal, and cultural changes in women’s status, opportunities, and stereotypes” (1). Working from contemporary publications that summarized proceedings at London’s central criminal court and their reports on1,408 women charged with involvement in criminal homicides, Conley argues that women who killed went from being depicted as wicked but fully morally and legally responsible agents to being portrayed most often as vulnerable victims of physiological factors beyond their control. In chapters that divide the material into four temporal blocks—1674–1753, 1754–1833, 1834–1873, and 1874–1913—Conley traces declines over time in the prosecution of women for homicides outside the home and for the killings of infants and of children. She detects more consistency in the rate of prosecution of women for spousal killings, but the emergence of far more sympathetic responses from juries and judges as time passed. Verdicts of insanity became ever-more common.The book purports to offer both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the phenomena involved in the incidence, prosecution, and punishment of women’s homicides. Much of the book consists of short summaries of accounts drawn from the published Proceedings, sometimes enriched with supplementary contemporary publications. A particularly effective passage, for example, looks at how the published description of a woman involved in a killing—Deborah Churchill, executed in 1708—changed from agent of evil in 1714 to victim of passion in 1779. The utility of the quantitative analysis is weakened, however, by the failure to provide raw numbers in all but a few cases. After stating that the data set includes 1,408 women, Conley thereafter provides only percentages and rates, which do not allow readers easily to assess the size or significance of changes or researchers to draw comparisons with the phenomena that she identifies. She writes, for example, that from 1874 to 1893, 69 percent of mothers who killed legitimate children were deemed insane, whereas only 22 percent of women who killed illegitimate children received the same verdict—interesting perhaps, but without raw numbers, just how interesting remains unknown. The nagging suspicion is that the raw numbers behind these percentages must be exceedingly small.Conley’s decision to include women charged as accessories is defensible, but, again, without raw numbers to allow some disaggregation, comparisons across time and place become more difficult. It might mislead unwary readers, too. Conley’s observation early in the book about eighteenth-century women charged for killings with swords resonates differently when she later explains that in all or most of these sword-wielding episodes, the woman was a bystander. Readers might benefit from a more detailed description of the source base and its changes during the period studied (for example, the Proceedings became an “official” publication only after 1778). Reminders that what is being counted and described are not the actual court records but summaries of the trials mediated by print (and then by digitization) might also be useful.The book conveys much of interest, but it is likely to be of limited utility to specialists. It has greater value as an engaging introduction to the riches of the Old Bailey Proceedings and to the history of women’s homicidal violence. Even for specialists, however, the reminder that both the incidence and prosecution of homicides changed over time in ways inflected by cultural and social gender norms might be salutary.