Beyond Deviant Damsels Re-evaluating Female Criminality in the Nineteenth Century

Using detailed case studies, Beyond Deviant Damsels undermines many of the conventional assumptions about how women committed crime in the nineteenth century. Previous historical accounts generally constructed gendered stereotypes of women acting in self-defence, being lesser accomplices to male criminals, committing crimes that require little or no physical effort, or pursuing supposedly 'female' goals (such as material acquisition). This study counters these gendered assumptions by examining instances where women tested society's boundaries through their own actions, ultimately presenting women as far more like men in their capacity and execution of criminal behaviour. The book shows examples where women acted far beyond these stereotypes, and showcases the existence of cultural discussion of open-ended female misbehaviour in Victorian Britain - leading us to question the very role of stereotyping in the history of criminality. These individual challenges to a supposed gendered status quo in Victorian Britain did not produce spontaneous outrage, nor were attempts at controlling and eradicating such behaviour coherent or successful. As such Victorian society's treatment of women emerges as uncertain and confused as much as it was determinedly moralistic. From this, Beyond Deviant Damsels seeks to re-evaluate our twenty-first-century perception of female criminals, by indicating that historiography may have been responsible for limiting the picture of Victorian female criminality and behaviour from that time until the present.

Anne-Marie Kilday, Vice-Chancellor, University of Northampton,David Kilday, Professor of History, Oxford Brookes University

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.