Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland

This book offers important new insights into the relationship between crime and gender in Scotland during the Enlightenment period. Drawing on rich and varied court records, it explores female criminality and judicial responses to it in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, against the backdrop of significant legislative changes that fundamentally altered the face of Scots law. Using a series of case studies of homicide, infanticide, assault, popular disturbances and robbery, the author argues that Scottish women were more predisposed to violence than their counterparts south of the border, and considers how far this intersected with and reflected a wider drive to `civilise' popular behaviour and to promote a more ordered society. Challenging feminist interpretations that see women principally as the victims of male-controlled economies, institutions, and power structures, the book calls for a major re-evaluation of the scope and significance of female criminality in this era. ANNE-MARIE KILDAY is Principal Lecturer and Head of the Department of History at Oxford Brookes University.