This introduction deals with the historiography on women’s participation in crime in various regions in Europe in the early modern and modern period. It introduces the chapters in this volume and places them in the framework of three topics around which the debates about crime and gender have centered over the past decades: violence, prosecution and punishment, and representation. It furthermore pays specific attention to the importance of socio-economic and cultural contexts, arguing that contextualisation of women’s crime is an essential instrument for explaining why women committed crime, why their registered criminal patterns changed and how their crimes were represented by contemporaries

This chapter presents a detailed picture of the prosecution and conviction of female perpetrators of common assault during the last few decades of nineteenth-century Stafford, a medium-sized market town in central England. The analysis shows that the most likely picture for female criminality in England at this time was one of working-class, middle-aged women convicted for drunken and anti-social behaviour, and common assault. In theory, women were expected to be honest, sober and chaste. In practice, the women of Stafford were not passive and played a prominent role in the street culture of working-class neighbourhoods. By the turn of the century however, female offenders of common assault largely ‘vanished’ from the court records. This chapter suggests that it may not only have something to do with the increasing importance of policemen in resolving disputes before they turned violent, but also with the changes in the built environment. The emerging social housing replaced communal living with separate housing, restricting the conditions that formerly brought women into conflict with each other.

Popular crime reportage of sexual violence has a long history in England. Despite the fact that from the 1830s onwards newspapers and periodicals – and sometimes even law reports – were increasingly liable to skim over the reporting of sexual offences as ‘unfit for publication’, this does not mean that such reportage vanished entirely. Instead, certain linguistic codes and euphemisms were invoked to maintain a respectable discourse. Given the serious problems with gaps in the surviving archival record for modern criminal justice, newspapers remain an essential tool for understanding the history of sexual violence in nineteenth century England and Wales. Using keyword searches in digitized newspaper databases such as the British Newspaper Archive and Welsh Newspapers Database, this chapter examines the continuities and changes in the reporting of sexual violence against children between 1800 and 1900, and explores what these euphemisms and elisions reveal about attitudes to gender and crime in nineteenth-century England and Wales.

Based on prosecution data for the period 1600–1900, this chapter re-assesses existing literature to stress the importance of discontinuity and variations in female crime rates in Europe. Women’s share among criminal offenders was not static and even reached significant levels throughout the early modern period. This chapter identifies five contextual factors as having an influence on female crime rates: urbanisation, moral norms, legal norms, family systems and living standards. With regard to the nineteenth century, it suggests that the link between industrialisation, removal from the labour market and the decline of female crime rates was by no means clear. On the contrary, it seems that the rising living standards and the development of the welfare state in Europe had a greater impact on female crime rates than a hypothetic confinement to the house.

Employing a mixed-method approach to quantitative data from the Queensland Police Gazette and qualitative evidence from newspaper archives and government reviews of women’s gaols, this chapter studies women’s imprisonment in Queensland, Australia, at the end of the nineteenth century. It describes the profiles of men and women committed to prison in Queensland from 1880–1899, and the extent to which men and women recidivated. In spite of a number of methodological caveats, women were more likely to be (chronic) recidivists than men during the late nineteenth century in Queensland. This chapter argues that this can be explained in terms of their different social and economic disadvantages and vulnerabilities, related to their stigmatization, policing and institutionalization.

This chapter draws on research into the lives and prison experiences of around 650 male and female convicts who were released on licence (an early form of parole) from sentences of long-term imprisonment in England in the mid- to late nineteenth century. While both men and women were overwhelmingly committed to the convict system for larceny, their treatment differed significantly. The vast majority of convicts were released early on licence from their prison terms, even those committing very serious offences. However, female offenders were released slightly earlier and under different conditions than men. Having offended against their gender as well as society, more moral rehabilitation was deemed necessary for deviant women than for men, leading to requirements such as entering refuges or shelters. Female convicts’ internment in these institutions after being granted a licence reveals the impact of gender expectations on female prisoners in England.

Historians have characterized the prosecution of adultery in early modern Geneva in two different ways that, at first glance, seem to be at odds with one another. Some argue that women were prosecuted more vigorously than men due to a traditional patriarchal understanding of marriage that deemed a woman’s sexual loyalty to be paramount; others maintain that Geneva was a special case, distinct from most of early modern Europe, because men were prosecuted as intensively and as violently for adultery as women.  Some scholars go so far as to argue that Geneva was a “paradis des femmes” because husbands were also held accountable for their sexual wanderings. This chapter demonstrates, however, that Geneva was far more typical in its prosecution of sex crimes than most Reformation historians admit.  For a brief period, the male lovers of adulterous wives were prosecuted aggressively in Geneva.  But if we enlarge our temporal focus to encompass a larger period, and consider the gender and marital status of those punished, it becomes clear that, even in Geneva and even during the Reformation, errant wives were the primary target of adultery prosecutions.