Victims and Viragos: Metropolitan Women, Crime and the Eighteenth-Century Justice System

This book considers the experiences of eighteenth-century women, in the Metropolitan area, as both the victims and perpetrators of a variety of crimes, and as participants, in different forms, in the era’s criminal justice system. In doing so, it makes extensive use of primary as well as secondary sources. The book is written so as to be readily accessible to the general reader as well as to academics, and eschews the more arcane language that sometimes surrounds gendered subjects. The eight chapters are broad enough to cover an extensive range of crimes while remaining manageable in size. Vitally, the book considers the impact of what was largely an urban, rather than rural, environment on women’s lives, and how this affected their offending and victimisation patterns.