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Female criminality in York and Hull 1830-1870
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Grace, Susan |
| Copyright Year | 1999 |
| Abstract | FEMALE CRIMINALITY IN YORK AND HULL 1830-1870 Legal, literary and cultural discourses reflect a confusion of attitudes towards female criminality. Nineteenth-century women were both seen as more evil than offending men but paradoxically were also viewed as incapable of criminal action. Using a methodology which brings together both linguistic and discursive analyses of legal and literary representations and empirical research this study examines female criminality in York and Hull in the forty-year period from 1830 to 1870. In particular the thesis focuses upon the quarter session offences, the vast majority of which were thefts. It also contextualises those crimes within the framework of assize and petty session crime. An important objective is to redress the imbalance created by many previous studies which have highlighted the sexually-related offences of women and to establish the participation of women in less overtly gendered crime. York has been analysed in depth, but regional differences in the justice system and its treatment of women have been uncovered by comparison with the borough of Hull. The analysis shows that the proportion of female quarter session crime was higher than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, but that such crime progressively decreases over the period examined. This is partially, but not wholly attributable to administrative shifts. Constraints created by the image of woman as incapable of crime may have assisted in this decline. Previous studies have neglected to examine statute and common law in its relation to nineteenth-century female offenders. The period clearly saw a masculinization of the law and of the justice system. Initially the study of the common law understanding of `feme covert' suggests a chivalric approach to women. However, ultimately it merely serves to emphasise that such devices arose where women were regarded as 'nonperson' and denied of their own legal status. The masculinization was not an uncontested shift but it became the dominant one. Confusion over the criminal culpability of women resulted in a stasis in justice system policy that has existed to the present day. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2474/1/DX205125.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
