Victorian Era Women And Crime Analysis

SECTION 1

In one sense, historians have had no choice but to privilege social, cultural, and political factors when analysing the relationship between women and crime in Victorian Britain because there is no complete, impartial, and conclusive body of evidence that might fully explain that relationship. The problem predates the Victorian era. During the Hanoverian period, for example, there was no professional police force and the British government did not collect data on crime, with the result that historians have had to look to court records for such data. The “only available, relatively complete, substantial and quantifiable series of data relevant to crime” are bills of indictment, which were the formal accusations of crime made against …show more content…
One key problem is that some crimes get reported whilst others do not. As an example, assaults on prostitutes by their clients or pimps. These were seldom reported to the police, either by the women themselves for fear, shame and lack of confidence in the criminal justice system, or by “respectable” men fearing taint to their reputation by association with the “great social evil” that prostitutes were held to be at this time. As regards for female workers, they were “more likely to be physically chastised than prosecuted” before days of factory unionisation and so again would not feature on official records, although it is thought unlikely that such crimes would contribute substantially to the “dark figure.” Therefore, historians have no choice but to piece together the bigger picture from other …show more content…
In the eighteenth century, for example, legislative attempts were made to reduce the number of male primary wage earners imprisoned for debt in order to reduce the number of women and children left impoverished and liable to turn to crime. Laws were also passed to reduce the consumption of alcohol by the working classes in order to improve women’s performance of their maternal duties and reduce levels of prostitution. Such laws were complemented by political decisions to increase the number of hospitals and dispensary health centres in order to alleviate concerns about infant mortality. Essentially, there was a longstanding precedent in the British legal tradition of seeking to use legislation to improve women’s lives for the good of everyone; something that hardly reveals a “contemptuous” attitude towards women. Even the eighteenth-century principle of feme covert, which is sometimes seen as misogynistic insofar as it deprived women of a legal status of their own, was not all bad for women. It created an opportunity for any woman who had committed a non-serious felony under the guidance of her husband to gain an acquittal. This did not help the mostly unmarried women who appeared in court,