The Real Bad Girls Club: A History of Women and Violent Crime

During the 19th Century, in every study of serious crime ever conducted, men's and women's criminality has appeared different. Women were always accused of fewer, and different, crimes from men. Women accounted for only 21% of the defendants tried between 1674 and 1913, but this figure masks a significant chronological change. While women accounted for around 40% of the defendants from the 1690s to the 1740s (and, highly unusually, over half the defendants in the first decade of the eightee...