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Print and the Female Voice: Representations of Women's Crime in London, 1690–1735
Author(s) -
Shoemaker Robert B.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01579.x
Subject(s) - narrative , sociology , criminology , gender studies , history , literature , art
Between 1690 and 1735, London experienced a female crime wave. This article examines how this female criminality was represented in the burgeoning world of popular crime literature. Traditional genres of print remained wedded to conventional gender stereotypes, but the new quasi‐official genres of the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary's Accounts represented female thieves in first‐person narratives which allowed the complex motivations for their crimes to be examined. These provided the background for Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders , and led to at least one accused criminal telling her story in her own publication. In the longer term, however, such representations of female theft did not proliferate.