1
130025394
Prompt: Account for the demonization of the female criminal.
Conspicuous Criminals: Visibility, Community and the Female Deviant
Historically, the demonization of the female criminal depended in large part on her
transgression from dominant discourses on morality and femininity. Long posited as the moral
guardian of the family and, consequently, the nation, women metaphorically embodied the ethical
state of their communities; the spaces they occupied and the state of their bodies were interpreted
as indicators of sexual and moral control. Because bodies needed to be visible in order to be
interpreted, the historic criminalization of the female “deviant” depended in large part upon how
she was seen by her community. Demonization emerged in the early modern period as a response
to invisible or uninterpretable behavior, whereas the Victorian era, visibility came to imply
criminality; however, in both periods, community was complicit in defining the deviant and,
therefore, the criminal.
The demonization and criminalization of women depended on a feminine ideal to define
deviance against. As the Victorian period progressed, the idealization of the mother became the
standard by which to measure criminality. Although the idolization of motherhood wasn’t unique
to the Victorians1, the “moral panic” generated in part by the release of criminal statistics in the
1830s and 1840s reinforced the stereotype of women as the moral guardians of society. Prior to
the Victorian period, the virtue of the nurturing mother was promoted primarily through the
efforts of the kirk sessions, which sought to regulate moral offences primarily through monitoring
women.2 Concurrently, the notion of the separate domestic sphere for the middle-class woman in
the nineteenth century proposed that the ideal place for the wife was in the privacy of the home.
Both ideologies implicitly sought to control female sexuality: in keeping a woman in the home,
she was necessarily removed from the public realm of the city street, which was seen increasingly
as sites of sexual danger for women and young girls.3
Both in the early modern and Victorian periods, the visibility of women and their bodies
were crucial factors in determining criminal culpability. For the kirk sessions, the female body
served as a site of anxiety because
fornication and adultery usually came to light when a woman became pregnant. Most of
the kirk sessions’ work thus came to involve the seeking out of deviant women, and then
attempting to discover the men who were their accomplices.4
1
Goodare suggests that motherhood was used as a way to distance oneself from disreputable neighbours during the Scottish
witch-hunt, 1550-1700. Goodare, Julian, ‘Women and the Witch-Hunt in Enlightenment Scotland,’ Social History 23.3
(1998), pp. 288-308.
2 Ibid.
3 Mahood, Linda, Policing Gender, Class and Family in Britain, 1850-1940 (London, 1995).
4 Goodare, Julian. “Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland,” p. 296.
2
According to Goodare, “the vigorous assault on sexual offences that characterized the Scottish
Reformation was also, inevitably, a move towards the criminalization of women.”5 Women’s
crimes were seen fundamentally as moral crimes. In the Victorian period, the association between
sexuality, criminality and morality continued in the policing of the working-class family. The
presence of women in the public sphere – specifically in the streets – became grounds for the
removal of families’ children to industrial and reformatory schools. Young girls could be
committed for “wandering,” a euphemism used when incest was thought to have occurred within
the family;6 significantly, however, it was their public presence which became the code for
concerns over unchecked sexuality. According to Mahood, middle-class reformers during the
Victorian period “did not always distinguish between ‘prostitutes’ and mill-girls, or any of the
women who congregated in the streets. Moral reformers defined women who worked in the
‘public’ sphere as potential ‘deviants’ or ‘prostitutes.’”7 The visible woman or visible child in the
urban setting came to run against the ideal of the “invisible” middle-class woman, whose virtue
and chastity was protected within the home.
While the female deviant in the Victorian period was characterized by her body’s
visibility, concealment and privacy seemed to have constituted the greatest threat to authority in
the early modern period. Because monitoring necessitated a visible subject, a body beyond
communal interpretation could more easily be construed as deviant. For example, in proving that
a woman was a witch in the period from 1550 to 1700, authorities would demand a confession of
fornicating with the Devil. In seeking proof, they submitted an accused woman to “pricking,”
which involved stripping her down and prodding her body for the Devil’s mark, a love-bite which
was believed to be insensitive to pain.8 Both the pricking process and the extraction of a
confession represented a public reveal; implicit in the uncovering of mark and narrative is the
perceived threat in unmonitored female bodies and unseen behavior. Similarly, regulating the
crime of infanticide, ‘An Act Anent to the Murdering of Children’ made the concealment of
pregnancy sufficient evidence to convict a woman of murdering her child in 1690;9 however,
oftentimes it was difficult to prove a woman had attempted to hide her condition. When the body
of the child could not be found and a woman’s pregnancy was uncertain, the mother was subject
to physical examination by midwives, who checked for lactation at the request of church elders.10
In court, the midwives’ and mother’s testimonies sometimes provided the sole means of
5
Ibid, p. 307.
Mahood, Linda. Policing Gender, Class and Family in Britain, 1850-1940 (London, 1995).
7 Mahood, Linda. The Magdalenes (London, 1990), p.74.
8 Goodare, Julian. “Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland,” pp. 294-295.
9 Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘Maternal Monsters: murdering mothers in South-West Scotland, 1750-1815', in Twisted Sisters:
women, crime and deviance in Scotland since 1400, ed. Y.G. Brown and R. Ferguson, (East Linton, 2002), p. 158.
10 Abrams, Lynn, 'From Demon to Victim: the infanticidal mother in Shetland', in Twisted Sisters: women, crime and
deviance in Scotland since 1400, ed. Y. Galloway and R. Ferguson, (East Linton, 2002), p. 191.
6
3
determining culpability in the absence of a body. This gendered knowledge may have constituted
a threat to patriarchal authority, and contributed to the demonization of the “unknowable” female
body.
The threat posed by the female body can additionally be seen in the easing of court
attitudes towards the deviant female with increased professional knowledge of women’s bodies:
as the female body became more “knowable” through advances in medical science, the courts’
treatment of female criminals also lessened in severity. By the 1750s, more defenses were being
accepted from women who committed infanticide, coinciding with new methods for determining
the validity of women’s claims to stillbirths. The use of hydrostasy, a test of whether or not an
infant had breathed based on whether or not its lungs floated, could be performed by a surgeon in
order to corroborate such claims.11 By the turn of the century “the privileging of women’s
knowledge […] was slowly on the wane in the face of the increasing acceptance of predominantly
male medical and scientific expertise.”12 In parallel, by 1809, a statute made the concealment of
pregnancy and failure to call for help – previously a capital offence – a species of culpable
homicide, with a prison sentence of no longer than 2 years,13 and the nineteenth century saw a
greater concern for context over character when evaluating female criminals.14 The
professionalization of medicine also contributed to the establishment of hospitals and institutions
for female prostitutes in the 19th century. Statistics published on deaths caused by syphilis in
newborns, the military, and outpatients of certain hospitals resulted in calls for reform, and
medical treatment was combined with attempted social discipline for female prostitutes of early
lock hospitals in Britain.15 “Reform” and “treatment” thus provided alternative discourses to
“punishment” alongside new technologies that allowed diagnoses and treatment to take place.
The ability to know a woman’s body thus roughly correlated with the lessening of court attitudes
towards female criminals.
The demonization of women may have also related to the fact that in their crimes, they
came to represent the moral failings of society as a whole. Their deviance represented a visible
breakdown in the family in a moment in which the family unit was seen as the basic buildingblock of a nation. Kilday has demonstrated that in the period between 1750 and 1815, the
overwhelming majority of women indicted for committing infanticide were unwed domestic
servants; the act of murder itself concealed the second moral transgression of extramarital sex.16
With domestic servants working in the privacy of the middle-class home, their pregnancies could
Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘Maternal Monsters: murdering mothers in South-West Scotland, 1750-1815', p. 160.
Ibid, p. 193.
13 Ibid, pp.160-161.
14 Abrams, Lynn, 'From Demon to Victim: the infanticidal mother in Shetland', p. 199.
15 Walkowitz, Judith, ‘Venereal Disease’ in Prostitution in Victorian Society: Women, class, and the state (Cambridge,
1980), pp. 49, 65.
16 Kilday, Anne-Marie, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, pp. 70-73.
11
12
4
suggest liberties taken by the husbands or “young masters” within the household: Mahood writes
that the “clandestine prostitute” in the figure of the domestic servant was viewed as a greater
threat to respectable society than her more overtly operative brothel-keeping sisters.17 In the
early-modern period, illegitimacy itself was viewed as a communal offense:
The bearing of illegitimate children damaged the community collectively if the
community found itself having to support them. In prosecuting incest or fornication, the
authorities were drawing on feelings of collective outrage or disgust in order to impose a
new moral order.18
In the same period, women accused of homicide were more frequently convicted by the Judiciary
Court than men accused of the same crime, a phenomenon with an explanation in the gendered
nature of murder: the fact that women committed 88% of family homicides in this period, and
that ¾ of the homicides committed by women left the husband as victim, again suggests that
court attitudes may have been responding to the violation of a domestic ideal and the threat posed
by women to the sanctity of the family. 19 In the urban setting, the emergent figure of the
prostitute represented sexual transgressions within the city itself: Judy Walkowitz writes that
street-walkers were cast as “the public symbol of female vice” and “as symbols on conspicuous
display of lower-class and sexual disorder.”20 The prostitute “represented a threat to the
patriarchal family, and was regarded […] as a constant temptation to middle-class sons.”21 The
laboring female thus symbolized vice not only amongst the lower, but the middle and upper
classes as well.22
The demonization of female criminals necessitated communities’ participation in
determining criminal reputation through observation. Nash and Kilday write that infanticide “was
very much a communal offense in the early modern period […] members of the local community
[…] were called upon to expose the behavior, character and particular actions of the women
accused of killing their newborn infants.”23 Similar communal practices of monitoring female
bodies and constructing their reputations seem to have informed most crimes committed by
women in the early modern period; D’Cruze writes that “surveillance combined with gossip as a
prime arbiter of reputation […] Gossip served to regulate behavior and monitor the observance of
norms of sociability and conduct.”24 Victorian child-savers calculated the risk posed to children
17
Ibid, p. 64.
Goodare, Julian. “Women and the Witch-Hunt in Scotland,” p. 296.
19 Kilday, Anne-Marie, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland, pp. 51-52.
20 Walkowitz, Judith, ‘Urban Spectatorship’ in The City of Dreadful Delight (Cambridge, 1980), p. 21.
21 Mahood, Linda, The Magdalenes, p. 64.
22 Walkowitz, Judith, ‘Social science and the Great Social Evil’ in Prostitution in Victorian Society: Women, class, and the
state (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 33-34.
23 Nash, David and Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘The Shame and Fame of ‘Half-Hangit Maggie’: Attitudes to the child murderer in
early modern Scotland’ in Cultures of Shame: Exploring crime and morality in Britain 1600-1900 (London, 2010), p. 49.
24 D'Cruze, Shani, Crimes of Outrage: sex, violence and Victorian working women, p. 60.
18
5
primarily by evaluating a mother’s moral character, which was established by observation and
testimonies from neighbors. According to Mahood,
girls were frequently incarcerated because their mothers […] were said to be generally
unfit, prostitutes, brothel-keepers, drunkards, immoral, mentally deficient, cohabitating
with men and having too many illegitimate children or illegal abortions, criminal
inclinations or venereal disease.25
Community wasn’t just involved in establishing a norm against which deviance is defined; rather,
it had an active role in establishing criminal identity and reputation. Demonization, in some cases,
seems to have defined the female deviant prior to her being found “criminal” by the justice
system; reputation, as constructed by a community, prefigured criminalization.
With increased urbanization, old patterns of observation seemed to be replaced in part by
print culture; narratives of crime came to define normalcy and deviancy for the growing workingclass reading public. By casting the female criminal as deviant, “fallen” and masculine,
newspapers replaced spectacles of shame, such as public executions, with sensational and
melodramatic narratives which functioned as “reveals” of otherwise unobserved behavior.26
Shame was needed “to subject unruly women to the accepted values of patriarchy,”27and
according to Knelman, the British press worked to further those values:
The message of the degradation of immoral women was popularized through dramatic
and fantastic newspaper coverage of crime. Already serving as entertainment for the
masses, crime could be made to provide moral instruction. In this the law, society, and the
press seemed in harmony.28
Shaming and moral instruction additionally occurred through broadsides; the public documents,
which frequently featured infanticide, “[argued that] the degrading and shameful punishments
meted out […] were entirely appropriate and just”29 and served to “publicly humiliate the convict,
and render them […] obviously exposed before their peers.”30 Print culture thus functioned as
surveillance, trial (in which evidence is uncovered or revealed), and punishment through public
shaming. Presented through clichés, aphorisms, and the use of familiar stereotypes, news stories
also functioned similarly to gossip,31 re-creating the atmosphere of town life in cities where
neighborhood ties may not have been as strong. The communal reading of the paper in pubs and
the sharing of newspapers helped form a community distinguished by its common interest in
25
Mahood, Linda. Policing Gender, Class and Family in Britain, 1850-1940, pp. 109-110. Emphasis added.
D'Cruze, Shani, Crimes of Outrage: sex, violence and Victorian working women, pp. 176-180.
27 Nash, David and Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘Private Passions and Public Penance: Popular shaming rituals in pre-modern
Britain’ in Cultures of Shame: Exploring crime and morality in Britain 1600-1900 (London, 2010), p. 37.
28 Knelman, Judith, ‘Class and Gender Bias in Victorian Newspapers,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 26.1 (1992), p. 34.
29 Nash, David and Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘The Shame and Fame of ‘Half-Hangit Maggie’: Attitudes to the child murderer in
early modern Scotland,’ p. 50.
30 Ibid, p. 58.
31 D'Cruze, Shani, Crimes of Outrage: sex, violence and Victorian working women, p. 177.
26
6
news of the day, including that written about female criminals; thus, demonization continued to
rely on the complicity of community in “reading” and interpreting the female body.
Even while deviancy shifted from the invisible or concealed woman to the woman of the
streets, it continued to imply suspicious behavior and potential criminality in both the early
modern and Victorian periods in Scotland. The shifting emphasis on the deviant as a public figure
may partially account for the increasing emphasis on reform rather than punishment in the
nineteenth century: what was visible could be diagnosed and treated, whereas what was hidden
had been beyond regulation and treatment. As “normalcy” came to be increasingly defined by –
and as – middle-class culture in the Victorian period, sensationalist news coverage sought to
further complicity amongst the working class as it defined normalcy and deviancy. Through both
periods, it was the female body, as a symbol of moral order and potential disorder, which
contributed to the construction of a woman’s reputation, and thereby determined her delineation
as maternal or monstrous.
7
Bibliography
Abrams, Lynn, 'From Demon to Victim: the infanticidal mother in Shetland', in Twisted Sisters:
women, crime and deviance in Scotland since 1400, ed. Y. Galloway and R. Ferguson, (East
Linton, 2002), pp.108-203.
D'Cruze, Shani, Crimes of Outrage: sex, violence and Victorian working women (London, 1998).
Goodare, Julian, ‘Women and the Witch-Hunt in Enlightenment Scotland,’ Social History 23.3
(1998), pp. 288-308.
Gordon, Eleanor and Nair, Gwenyth, Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain: The Story of
Madeleine Smith (Manchester, 2009).
Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘Maternal Monsters: murdering mothers in South-West Scotland, 17501815', in Twisted Sisters: women, crime and deviance in Scotland since 1400, ed. Y.G. Brown
and R. Ferguson, (East Linton, 2002), pp.137-155.
Kilday, Anne-Marie, Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland (2007).
Knelman, Judith, ‘Class and Gender Bias in Victorian Newspapers,’ Victorian Periodicals
Review 26.1 (1992), pp. 29-35.
Mahood, Linda. The Magdalenes (London, 1990).
Mahood, Linda, Policing Gender, Class and Family in Britain, 1850-1940 (London, 1995).
Nash, David and Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘Private Passions and Public Penance: Popular shaming
rituals in pre-modern Britain’ in Cultures of Shame: Exploring crime and morality in Britain
1600-1900 (London, 2010), pp. 26-46.
Nash, David and Kilday, Anne-Marie, ‘The Shame and Fame of ‘Half-Hangit Maggie’: Attitudes
to the child murderer in early modern Scotland’ in Cultures of Shame: Exploring crime and
morality in Britain 1600-1900 (London, 2010), pp. 47-67.
Walkowitz, Judith, ‘Urban Spectatorship’ in City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of sexual
danger in late-Victorian London (London, 1992), pp. 15-40.
Walkowitz, Judith, ‘Social science and the Great Social Evil’ in Prostitution in Victorian Society:
Women, class, and the state (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 32-47.
Walkowitz, Judith, ‘Venereal Disease’ in Prostitution in Victorian Society: Women, class, and
the state (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 48-66.