Dr Grace Di Méo

Women’s participation in organised crime has been overlooked within historical research, with studies typically relegating their roles to that of auxiliaries to male gangsters. This article explores the activities and portrayals of women involved in organised crime during the British inter-war period, focusing specifically on one of Britain’s only known all-female criminal organisations (the ‘Forty Elephants’). Examining coverage from local, regional, and national newspapers, it argues that the Forty Elephants captivated the inter-war press, with depictions of gang members reflecting the stereotypical ‘devil in disguise’; according to the media, the female gangster was a dangerous and ‘professional’ criminal who hid behind a façade of good looks, fashionable clothing and high social status. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how portrayals of the gang resonated with contemporary discussions around the emerging ‘modern woman’, reflecting concerns over women’s growing participation in social, political and economic life.

This lesson demonstrates how to create interactive data visualizations in Python with Plotly’s open-source graphing libraries using materials from the Historical Violence Database.

Historicized research on female habitual criminality provides insight into the interactions and struggles of marginalized women. Female recidivists, forming a large proportion of habitual offenders, prompted fears among Victorian and Edwardian contemporaries over the efficacy of the justice system. Recent research indicates that recidivism was a gendered process, women facing greater marginalization and stigmatization before, during and after offending than men, yet there remains little discussion focusing specifically on violent offending. This article examines violent female recidivism in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, focusing on women’s entries, desistance and persistence in violence and at how reoffending impacted their post-offending lives.

Recent decades have witnessed growing use of social network analysis (SNA) to study criminal activities, including that of co-offending. However, few studies have examined co-offending networks within a historical context. This paper focuses on group-based crime in a large English town during the Victorian period, employing SNA methods to examine the prevalence, structure and composition of co-offending relationships. Networks for property, violent and victimless crimes were partitioned to compare co-offending across crime categories. Results indicate that co-offending groups were typically segregated, although there was a loosely-organised community of property crime offenders connected by ‘brokers’ who collaborated with multiple groups. Evidence also suggests that co-offending was largely characterised by assortative mixing in regard to sex, age and marital status.

Prize-fighting culture in the Victorian period was a male-dominated arena. As such, women’s involvement in pugilism – save for their role as spectators – has been largely overlooked by historians. This article casts light on the neglected experiences of nineteenth-century female prize-fighters, drawing attention to the ways in which women engaged in pugilism as well as the methods used by reporters, police officers and magistrates to shape public perceptions of female violence. It is argued that female prize-fighters received an overwhelmingly hostile reception, their very involvement in the masculine fighting environment resonating with contemporary anxieties over public immorality, violent crime, and the emergent movement for women’s emancipation.

Recent scholarship has indicated that judges and magistrates became increasingly stringent in their treatment of male violence during the Victorian and Edwardian period. Yet it has been argued that female acts of violence were regarded as trivial and thus more readily overlooked. This article presents an alternative perspective on the judicial treatment of violent women by examining female assault prosecutions held at Exeter and Cheltenham magistrates’ courts in the years 1880-1910. By analysing patterns in the verdicts and sentences issued to defendants, it argues that magistrates adopted harsher policies towards violent women as the period progressed. The study further examines a number of circumstantial, demographic and procedural factors which may have impacted shifts in magisterial decision-making processes.