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Beyond Deviant Damsels offers a new interpretation of women's criminality in the nineteenth century, countering assumptions that women commit crime in highly gendered ways and questioning the value of using stereotypes to analyse criminality, an approach that marginalises the importance of circumstances and individual choice.
List of contents
- 1: A Mistold Story? The Flawed History of 'Deviant' Women in Nineteenth Century British Society - Introduction
- 2: Imagining Bad Women and Fallen Angels: The Criminal and Violent Woman Portrayed in Popular Ballads and Broadsides before 1900
- 3: From the Handmaidens of Prometheus to the Heirs of Hypatia: Women, Blasphemous Sedition, and Fashioning Ideological Agency
- 4: 'Angels of the House' or 'Angel-Makers'? Problematising Murderous Mothers in the Nineteenth Century
- 5: 'The Life and Loves of a She Devil': The 'Potton Poisoner' and the Premeditation of a Serially Deviant Woman
- 6: Desperate, Desirous, or Devious? Female Thieves in Early Nineteenth-Century Wales
- 7: 'Tigerish in their Ferocity' and 'Traitors to their Sex'? Violent Female Robbers in Nineteenth Century Scotland
- 8: 'When a Man Cries, it is called Crying; When a Woman Cries it is Called Hysterics': Lady Harriett Mordaunt - Mad or Bad? Gendering the Behaviour of a 'Wayward' Aristocratic Wife
- 9: Epilogue
About the author
Anne-Marie Kilday is the Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Criminal History at the University of Northampton. She has published on various aspects of violent female criminality throughout history and in a range of different contexts. She has also published on shame and on punishment practices, and is currently completing a major monograph on the history of homicide in Britain.
David Nash is Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University. He has published widely on the history of blasphemy and has advised governments in England and Ireland, as well as the United Nations and the European Union. He has also published on the history of shame and other aspects of the history of crime.
Summary
Beyond Deviant Damsels offers a new interpretation of women's criminality in the nineteenth century, countering assumptions that women commit crime in highly gendered ways and questioning the value of using stereotypes to analyse criminality, an approach that marginalises the importance of circumstances and individual choice.
