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.

• Offers a challenge to the established thesis that the criminality of men and women in the nineteenth century was strictly gendered in specific ways
• Demonstrates that women did have agency in areas of criminality and misbehaviour in Victorian Britain
• Showcases evidence and stories of women actively being criminals much more obviously like their male counterparts
• Demonstrates a movement away from stereotypes of who committed crime and why Invites analogous and comparative work to produce further examples in the same and different timescales and locations