Gender And Crime In Modern Europe

This work explores the construction of gender norms and examines how they were reflected and reinforced by legal institutional practices in Europe in this period. taking a gendered approach, criminal prosecution and punishment are discussed in relation to the victims and perpretrators. This volume investigates various representations of femininity by assessing female experiences including wife-beating, divorce, abortion, prostitution, property crime and embezzlement at the work place. In addition, issues such as neglect, sexual abuse and the invention of the juvenile offender are analyzed.

Meg Arnot, Cornelie Usborne

Foreword, Acknowledgements, Notes on contributors, 1. Why gender and crime? Aspects of an international debate, 2. Gender, crime and justice in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, 3. The trouble with boys: gender and the "invention" of the juvenile offender in early nineteenth-century Britain, 4. Women and crime in Imperial Russia, 1834-1913: representing realities, 5. Crime against marriage? Wife-beating, the law and divorce in nineteenth-century Hamburg, 6. Workplace appropriation and the gendering of factory "law": West Yorkshire, 1840-80, 7. Consuming desires: prostitutes and "customers" at the margins of crime and perversion in France and Britain, c. 1836-85, 8. Male crime in nineteenth-century Germany: duelling, 9. Dutch difference? The prosecution of unlicensed midwives in the late nineteenth-century Netherlands, 10. "Stories more terrifying than the truth itself": narratives of female criminality in fin de siècle Paris, 11. The child's word in court: cases of sexual abuse in London, 1870-1914, 12. Women's crimes, state crimes: abortion in Nazi Germany, 13. Gender norms in the Sicilian Mafia, 1945-86, Index