Legal History: Crime and Punishment Research Guide

A study of Irish and English convict women and their treatments during transportation and labor. Convict Maids destroys the myth that the female convicts transported from Britain and Ireland to New South Wales between 1826 and 1840 were mainly prostitutes, professional criminals and the 'sweepings of the gaols'. Deborah Oxley argues that in fact these women helped put the colony on its feet. Oxley shows that the women were generally first offenders, transported for minor offences. They were skilled, literate, young and healthy - qualities exploited by the new colony, which needed them both in the labour market and as wives and mothers. This is the first major study to analyse the backgrounds of female convicts against the general labour force. It also compares the legal systems and economies of Britain and Ireland, placing the women's crimes in context. Convict Maids draws on historical, economic and feminist theory, and is impressive for its extensive and original research.

Compelling stories about the lives of women at a time when Australia was a gaol.

In 1791 the French feminist Olympe de Gouge wrote that, as women have the right to take their places on the scaffold, they must also have the right to take their seats in government. In Death Comes to the Maiden, Camille Naish explores the issue of women's rights through the history of female execution, concentrating on three major periods of European history: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the French Revolution. She reveals the sexual prejudices experienced by those condemned to by hanging, burning or decapitation and examines the lives and deaths of figures such as Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn and Charlotte Corday. Beyond biography, Naish also considers the symbolic aspects of female execution and stresses the tragic, sacrificial and erotic literary viewpoint of such writers as de Sade, Genet and Brecht.

In this study of women prisoners in men's penitentiaries from 1865 to 1915, Anne M. Butler shows that the women, already faced with distinct gender disadvantages within western society, were subjected to intense physical and mental violence while in prison. For women of color or of lower social class, she argues, the violence was even greater and more frequent. Butler's poignant cross-cultural account draws on prison records and the words of the women themselves. She explores how nineteenth-century criminologists constructed the criminal woman; the elements of age, race, class, and gender in women's court proceedings; the kinds of violence encountered by women inmates; their diet, illnesses, experiences with pregnancy and child-bearing; prison work systems for women; and women's own strategies for response.

An analysis of Daniel Defoe's Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

Originally printed in 1914. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Includes discussions on burning, drowning, whipping, the pillory and witchcraft.

Contemporary Research on crime, prisons, and social control has largely ignored women. Partial Justice, the only full-scale study of the origins and development of women's prisons in the United States, traces their evolution from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It shows that the character of penal treatment was involved in the very definition of womanhood for incarcerated women, a definition that varied by race and social class.

This book explores how the Victorians perceived and explained female crime, and how they responded to it - both in penal theory and prison practice. In Victorian England women made up a far larger proportion of those known to be involved in crime than they do today; the nature of female criminality attracted considerable attention and preoccupied those trying to provide for women within the penal system. Lucia Zedner's rigorously researched study examines the extent to which gender-based ideologies influenced attitudes to female criminality. She charts the shift from the moral analyses dominant in the mid-nineteenth century to the interpretation of criminality as biological or psychological disorder prevalent later.

State by state view of capital punishment, and the methods in use. Using a historical framework, this book offers not only the penal history of the death penalty in the states that have given women the death penalty, but it also retells the stories of the women who have been executed and those currently awaiting their fate on death row. This work takes a historical look at women and the death penalty in the United States from 1900 to 1998. It gives the reader a look at the penal codes in the various states regarding the death penalty and the personal stories of women who have been executed or who are currently on death row. As Americans continue to debate the enforcement of the death penalty, the issues of race and gender as they relate to the death penalty are also debated. This book offers a unique perspective to a recurring sociopolitical issue.