This book provides a well-written, wide-ranging, and very welcome introduction to an important subject—women’s experience of the criminal justice system in England since 1660. It will be an extremely useful starting point for undergraduate students, doctoral students, and academics researching or lecturing in the field because it is both accessible and critical, interesting and challenging. One of the great strengths of the book is its insistence on looking not only at crime—at formal lawbreaking—and at the criminal justice system but also at informal regulatory frameworks more generally and at the broader processes by which women’s activities often came to be defined as deviant. Chapter 1, “Counting and Explaining,” looks mainly at women’s relative absence from the ranks of recorded offenders and at explanations for this. The next four chapters examine women property offenders, violence, sexuality, and protest (which includes political activism more generally). The book then turns away from crime and toward criminal justice issues. The chapter “Women in Control?” investigates women’s involvement as decision makers in the criminal justice process, especially in the twentieth century. Chapter 7 looks at women and punishment, and the final chapter offers a case study of one area—girls and delinquency.

Although (as a survey) the book mainly summarizes research already published, some chapters such as those on women and control and girls and delinquency also include work directly based on primary sources. It certainly makes good use of the research already done to point to interesting patterns and juxtapositions. Chapter 2 presents both a good account of the growth of ideas about kleptomania as a specifically female malady and some very interesting new findings on the very different age structures of male and female shoplifters who in the mid-twentieth century were dominated by boys under fourteen and women in their forties and fifties. The chapter on women and sexuality is both well balanced and informative. Its brief discussion of the rise in the later eighteenth century of a “seduction narrative” that emphasized male rakish exploitation of women and placed the blame for female sexual transgression on the man rather than the woman helped me to make sense of the way the narratives of women from the Refuge for the Destitute archives were dominated by this particular trope. The impact of the imprisonment of middle-class suffragettes on prison reform discussions also receives very interesting treatment, and the chapter on women in control benefits greatly from Louise Jackson’s excellent research.

The book has its inconsistencies. Critiques of Malcolm Feeley’s “vanishing female” thesis are not mentioned, giving credence to a model that for the period up to 1850 at least is extremely misleading yet still often repeated. Second, the brief discussion on female homosexuality in penal contexts might be more nuanced if it acknowledged that in institutions for juvenile offenders the authorities dealt very lightly with young women in such relationships. On a more general level, there are times when one longs for the authors to press through and offer more sustained attempts to answer some of the key conundrums that research on gender and criminal justice have highlighted. The authors point out that given the structural inequalities between men and women it is surprising that the court records reveal relatively few women were accused of property-related offenses. This is not really discussed, however, and this important paradox remains puzzling. Perhaps victims were less willing to formally punish women because they (and the children dependent on them) were seen as more likely to be genuinely destitute. If so, women’s destitution may have had at least a small silver lining. The same may be true of the patriarchal assumptions (and often manifold oppressions) that framed women’s lives for most of the period studied here. The silver lining here is the extensive evidence that women were treated more leniently than men both by juries in their verdicts and by judges in their sentences. This produces, as Barry Godfrey’s work has recently pointed out, a core conundrum for those, like Lucia Zedner, who want to argue that women were disadvantaged by appearing to offend both against the law and against the conventions of femininity. It would have been good if the authors had tackled this head on. Instead, they tend to marginalize or meander around the issue and then retreat into arguing that the statistics only suggest that women have been treated with apparent leniency (25). At the beginning of the chapter on punishment, they once again summarize recent feminist arguments that women offenders have been doubly punished by penal regimes (first for the crime and then for transgressions against the dominant gender order) and then deal very weakly with all the contrary evidence to this found in the trial outcome statistics by simply referring to the “apparent lenience” toward women.

It is true of course, as the authors rightly say, that “it is not possible to claim simply that women have been punished either more harshly or more leniently than men” (141). Not every woman was treated less harshly. Moreover, in certain very specific contexts, such as women killing their husbands or young girls whose sexuality the male dominated authorities wished to control, females were often subjected to harsher punishments. This does not alter the fact that in the vast majority of cases throughout almost all of the period covered here it would have been better to be a female defendant than a male one. The evidence on the gendered differences in trial outcomes is too deep to advise any other course. I find myself wondering why we cannot look this issue in the face. Like so many other oppressive ideologies, patriarchy contained contradictions, many of which provided room for female agency and at least a few of which operated very decidedly in favor of the oppressed. Patriarchy had a plurality of outcomes within the criminal justice system as elsewhere. Toward an adult woman bringing an accusation of rape, for example, it was massively prejudiced. But for the vast majority of routine female offenders, traditions such as feme covert meant that it was much better to be a woman than a man when facing an English court, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book would have been an even better one if the authors had moved beyond the comfortable position they adopt in the conclusion, telling us to move away from “the sterile debate about whether women criminals have been leniently punished” (163), and had actually addressed some of the implications of this issue.