Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 edited by Manon van der Heijden, Marion Pluskota, and Sanne Muurling

Abstract

This collection addresses women’s criminality from the perspectives of history and historical criminology, recognizing that gendered expectations have long affected the prosecution, understanding, and study of crime and criminals. The authors are confident that contextualisation is “the key to understanding female crime, its representation and its variation in time and space,” and that historians of crime must therefore pay more attention to socioeconomic factors, such as social mobility, employment, and migration patterns, than has generally been the case (4). To do so effectively requires first that female criminals be identified. Hence, the research concentrates on the lower courts, where women appeared in much larger numbers than in the superior courts. The additional records on which the authors rely give the volume a mainly urban focus, but comparisons to the male experience make the findings particularly insightful and persuasive.The chapters are organized around three main themes—violence and women, prosecution and punishment, and representations of crime. But the geographical and chronological coverage is not quite as the book’s title suggests. Three largely historiographical essays (Chapters 1, 2, and 9) cover most, or all, of the period from 1600 to 1900. The remaining eight chapters, all based on extensive archival research, tend to focus on the later nineteenth century, particularly in England (Chapters 4, 6, 7, and 10) but also in Australia (without explanation for its inclusion in a book about criminality in Europe) and the Netherlands.Only two chapters adopt an early modern perspective, both offering fascinating appraisals of male and female defendants. Sara Beam’s examination of the prosecution of adultery in Geneva shows that although gender was relevant, social status and the authorities’ concern with rooting out sin were also crucial factors. Muurling provides a carefully evidenced explanation for how and why people used the accessible Tribunale del Torrone as a strategic means of conflict resolution in Bologna.Three of the chapters set out to find the vanishing females posited by Feeley and Little in 1991.1 Van der Heijden concludes that better living standards and welfare provision had a greater impact on female crime rates than did confinement to the domestic sphere. Jo Turner uses her study of female-perpetrated assault in Stafford to suggest that when council housing was built in 1901, it reduced shared living space and thus neighborhood conflicts. Lucy Williams and Barry Godfrey utilize population data to identify prisons, asylums, and workhouses as “locations and methods through which deviant women could be dealt with throughout the life cycle” (133).The two thought-provoking chapters about release from prison that discuss recidivism in detail reveal that the experiences of women and men were significantly different. Helen Johnston and David Cox find that re-offending was higher among female ex-prisoners because re-integration into financially productive society was more difficult for them. Alana Piper et al. use a large data set of individuals returned to prison in Queensland to reach a similar conclusion: Women were more likely to be chronic recidivists because of the wide range of socioeconomic disadvantages that they faced, whereas men had a greater variety of pathways into and out of offending.Two of the three chapters about “representations” focus on newspapers. Daniel Grey’s examination of reports about child sexual assault exposes attitudes toward the gender, class, age, and sexuality of both victims and perpetrators. Clare Wilkinson quantifies accounts of domestic violence in Dutch newspapers to explain why they functioned mainly as human-interest stories rather than as subjects of debate. Sarah Auspert et al. explore a variety of European discourses about female juvenile delinquency that show institutionalization to have been the most common “solution” for criminal and problem girls since the eighteenth century.The book contains an unfortunately sizable number of minor typographical and grammatical errors, but the use of footnotes and a collective bibliography of nearly thirty pages make the volume a useful addition to the relevant literature. Scholars of women and crime, imprisonment and reoffending, newspaper reporting, and the multiple factors that influenced these matters will find much of interest and value.