During the Eighteenth-Century women were widely viewed as the naturally more virtuous sex and moral guardians of the family and wider society. Yet criminal women were also subjected to harsher sentences than men for crimes that went against feminine nature as well as the law. A wife who killed her husband could be burned at the stake for example, but a husband who murdered his wife would be hung. This talk explores cases from London's Old Bailey court and asks how and why attitudes to female felons changed during the Georgian period.
£10 in-person; £6 Zoom
Address
Doubly Deviant Women? (1)
Town Hall
AL1 3DH
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