Beyond Deviant Damsels: Re-evaluating Female Criminality in the Nineteenth Century is a very welcome, highly readable, and thought-provoking addition to the historiography and consideration of female criminality in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on empirical work and presented through case studies or microhistories of women who did not conform to stereotypes, Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash have produced an interesting discussion in which they question and counter the gendered stereotypes of female offenders created by the societies in which these women lived and replicated in previous historical work. To do so, Beyond Deviant Damsels analyzes the contemporary cultural discussion of women’s criminality in Victorian Britain through an examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ballads, looking at how these ballads were consumed by their audiences and how their messages were subsequently understood. Kilday and Nash argue that Victorian society was more open to seeing women offenders as more similar to male offenders than the historiography would suggest. This, Kilday and Nash suggest, should lead scholars to question the very role of stereotyping in the history of criminality and to free women of the “unnecessary straitjacket” (12) that stereotypes engender, particularly when creating histories.

The case studies used by Kilday and Nash center on but then go beyond women who worked with men to sell blasphemous and seditious literature, the disjointed reaction of the press and authorities to mothers who committed child murder (the “anti-mother,” 90–92), women who poisoned, women who stole to survive harsh social and economic conditions rather than being purely acquisitive, women as violent robbers, and the gendering of unfeminine behavior by women. Focusing specifically on women’s offending and societal reactions rather than their treatment by the criminal justice system more generally, Kilday and Nash demonstrate that women were more similar to men in their offending than stereotypes would suggest. Rather than confining their offending to such crimes as aiding their menfolk’s criminality by pawning or selling stolen goods, committing crimes that required little physical effort, limiting themselves to acquisitive crime, or acting in self-defense, Kilday and Nash argue that women were far more like men in their capacity for and execution of criminal deeds. Society, too, was less likely than expected to expose and try to control this criminal behavior by women. In this regard, they deliver a very important and somewhat radical message for scholars.

It would be interesting to revisit these scholarly works or the analysis of this offending in light of Kilday and Nash’s arguments. Maybe in so doing, it could be determined the extent to which their arguments could be applied in a wider setting—did contemporary societies respond to such women and their petty offending in an ungendered way as Kilday and Nash argue they might have done? Did petty female offenders act, and society respond, in the stereotypical way the historical understanding of women’s offending suggests or was it much more nuanced as Kilday and Nash argue? I suspect evidence would indeed be found that supports Kilday and Nash’s claim.

Beyond Deviant Damsels is a much-needed wake-up call to scholars interested in examining and commenting on female criminality. It warns of the danger of continuing to view and examine women’s offending through often-used stereotypes and reminds us all that women have and use agency, including when offending. It also warns that contemporary society has differential and sometimes surprising reactions that do not support the stereotypes used by scholars. By issuing such warnings, Kilday and Nash encourage the making of more modern, fuller histories, ones that acknowledge women’s diversity and individuality as modern analyses of women who offend in the present acknowledge. Histories, also, that do not assume but question the strength of patriarchy, a notion so persuasively articulated by the historical understandings of women’s offending but that may not have been as strong or influential as the historiography would have us believe, especially when women pushed against the barriers patriarchy supposedly erects. Above all, just as Lucia Zedner’s seminal work, Women, Crime and Custody (1991), first called for scholars to take seriously women’s offending and treatment by the criminal justice system in the past, Kilday and Nash’s Beyond Deviant Damsels is a call to arms for scholars who responded to Zedner to now look beyond gendered stereotypes and afford agency to women who offend not only in nineteenth-century Britain, but from that time and earlier to the present, in Britain and beyond.