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Wed 12 April
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Thu 13 April
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Fri 14 April
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Sat 15 April
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Friday 14 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
G-10 CRI10 Gender Violence and Domesticity
B32
Network: Criminal Justice Chair: Krista Kesselring
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Johanna Annola : “Risky” Women and Forced Labour: Spinhouse Women in Nineteenth-century Finland
This paper discusses deviant women who were regarded as a societal risk in nineteenth-century Finland and put in spinhouses – workhouses specifically intended for women – to learn how to make their living with honest work.

By looking at the contemporary legislation, the paper aims at discussing the attitudes towards ... (Show more)
This paper discusses deviant women who were regarded as a societal risk in nineteenth-century Finland and put in spinhouses – workhouses specifically intended for women – to learn how to make their living with honest work.

By looking at the contemporary legislation, the paper aims at discussing the attitudes towards deviant women in general. Why were they regarded as a risk, and why was forced labour considered as the best cure for them? In addition, the paper asks whether it is possible to reach the experiences of these “risky” women in the surviving documents of a spinhouse in Turku, Finland. What was their take on “risk”? (Show less)

Anna Kantanen : Intimate Partner Homicides at the End of 19th Century and the Beginning of 20th Century
The history of violence in relation to gender, marriage and family have expanded in the past years, yet gaps remain in our knowledge of what were the characteristics of spousal homicides in Northern Europe. Some studies have suggested that from the nineteenth century onwards one can notice a qualitative as ... (Show more)
The history of violence in relation to gender, marriage and family have expanded in the past years, yet gaps remain in our knowledge of what were the characteristics of spousal homicides in Northern Europe. Some studies have suggested that from the nineteenth century onwards one can notice a qualitative as well as quantitative change in homicides within marriage and homicides committed within domestic sphere. In my paper I analyze characteristics and motivational factors of lethal intimate partner violence in Finland at the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century. The main sources consist of homicide cases from the Courts of Appeal and digitalized newspapers. I compare violent crime datasets from three different Courts of Appeal which enables me to do wide regional comparison. I study if these homicides were spontaneous acts of violence or premeditated killings and analyze the motivational factors behinds these crimes. During the analyzed period, Finnish society was changing towards modernity, and these legal and cultural changes influenced women’s status and rights (for example, universal suffrage was received in 1906). Even though homicides represent the worst culmination of conjugal conflict, I explore, what the source material reveals of marital difficulties and general gender dynamics.

Key words: intimate partner violence; history of crime; history of violence (Show less)

Vivien Miller, Katherine Watson : Toxic Masculinity? An Anglo-American Comparative Study of Nineteenth-Century Criminal Poisoning by Fathers
This paper uses criminal poisoning by fathers in Victorian England and the Unites States in the late nineteenth century as a means of examining two related issues in criminal justice history: male motivation for a crime typically associated with women, to consider differences and similarities; and the legal, media, and ... (Show more)
This paper uses criminal poisoning by fathers in Victorian England and the Unites States in the late nineteenth century as a means of examining two related issues in criminal justice history: male motivation for a crime typically associated with women, to consider differences and similarities; and the legal, media, and popular reactions to such cases.
At the height of the mid-nineteenth-century English poisoning panic in 1849, the executions of George Howe and Rebecca Smith for the murders of their infant children could not have elicited more dissimilar reactions. Howe was reviled as a man “by no means possessed of right feeling” and decried for his refusal to confess, while Smith was viewed with sympathy even though she had admitted killing eight of her own infants; her husband, meanwhile, was publicly vilified for a “total absence of feeling” and readers left in no doubt that he was the cause of her “many and severe privations.” The differing tenor of the media reports reveals a key feature of the popular response to violence in the home. Fathers and mothers who poisoned their children did so for similar reasons, but as Victorian society increasingly demonised violent men, fathers were generally viewed less sympathetically than mothers. However, women who failed to uphold the virtues associated with their role as ‘domestic angels’ were subjected to even harsher condemnation.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the motives for and understanding of criminal poisoning by fathers was complicated by the issue of race. In October 1895, in the small rural settlement of Milner, Georgia, African American preacher and plantation worker, Tom Speer, deliberately poisoned his wife and children, one fatally, with rat poison following a marital argument. The “fiendish” crime and technological changes driving newspaper syndication ensured this crime story reached Americans in many states, during a period of considerable anxiety over male domestic responsibilities and masculinity generally and rising Black crime rates in particular. Amid economic, racial, and political turbulence in the decades after the Civil War, Americans learned, largely from newspapers, of fathers/husbands of different racial and immigrant groups who annihilated their families out of revenge and jealousy, and of fathers who poisoned their children and then themselves, due to poverty and failed businesses, grief over the death of the wife and mother, and because they were “tired of life.” As in England, these groups of male poisoners were increasingly demonised during the second half of the nineteenth century. (Show less)

Rachel Newell : ‘The Same Injury was not Done as in the Case of a Man’: Female Bigamy and Society in Ulster, 1880s-1920s
In July 1912, a young woman named Agnes Dickey was charged with bigamy at the Belfast assizes. She had married her second husband, Robert Dickey, in March of that year even though her first husband, Samuel Nevin was still alive. Nevin had not supported Dickey. He had pawned furniture and ... (Show more)
In July 1912, a young woman named Agnes Dickey was charged with bigamy at the Belfast assizes. She had married her second husband, Robert Dickey, in March of that year even though her first husband, Samuel Nevin was still alive. Nevin had not supported Dickey. He had pawned furniture and spent money on drink. She had not seen him in four years by the time she married her second husband. Robert Dickey, the second husband, promised to stand by her. In the court room her lawyer suggested that in this case, involving a woman, ‘the same injury was not done as in the case of a man’. The judge agreed. Bigamy was perceived as a male crime, carried out against women rather than by them. In Ireland as elsewhere, the majority of offenders were male. Yet, there were a number of women, like Agnes Dickey, who were brought before the assizes and quarter sessions in Ulster on bigamy charges. Through witness depositions and newspaper reports their stories give a glimpse into how society in late Victorian and Edwardian Ulster viewed not only female bigamists but also marriage, sexuality and the agency of working-class women. This paper will use those witness depositions and newspaper reports alongside prison records to illuminate how and why women in Ulster committed bigamy. It will also question how they, their communities and the judicial system perceived their crime and how this changed through a tumultuous period of Irish and world history. (Show less)



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