Gender, Crime and Modernity

Orgies, murderous wives, cocaine addiction, drug-dealing, virgin births, adultery and divorce make up the sensational subject matter of the five trials examined in Lucy Bland’s book. Taking place between 1918 and 1924, each of the trials centred on women perceived to embody postwar modernity – a modernity implicated in the ‘deviant’ sexual practices subjected to such close scrutiny by both the courts and the press. Bland sets out to use this series of trials ‘as a prism through which to identify concerns about modern femininity... attitudes towards women and their sexual mores’ (p. 2). She effectively decodes the exceptional, the melodramatic and the bizarre, making them speak to wider historical developments concerning gender, race, nationhood and class. Each of these trials received extensive coverage by the rapidly growing popular press, and Bland approaches them as ‘mass cultural spectacles’ (p. 9). Newspaper reports are her main source, and as a result her engrossing narrative retains the pace and theatre of the court-room and the original reportage. The risk here is that the sensational will end up being elided with the norm, yet Bland avoids this, shifting registers throughout the book as she moves from the drama of the trials to detailed historical and historiographical contextualization. Modern Women on Trial asks important questions about the relationship between culture and the everyday, and the commercial press and its readership. It does not offer a definitive answer, but instead provides a range of fascinating insights as to how these trials entered into the public and individual imagination.

Aesthetics · Art · Drama · Femininity · Historiography · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Popular culture · Scrutiny · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law