Troublesome Women

The historiography of the criminalised and incarcerated in the United States is riddled with archival silences and gaps; not only are reliable archival sources on crime and punishment often scant, those on nineteenth-century women can be elusive. In this book, however, Erica Rhodes Hayden upsets the idea of the archival silences on what she calls ‘female crime and punishment’. Her impressive archival research in Pennsylvania examines 6,035 cases from across sixteen counties, exploring women’s relationships with the criminal justice system in the early nineteenth century. In six chapters, she presents a detailed account of the previously obscured criminalisation and incarceration of women in antebellum Pennsylvania, offering an important book for scholars of the criminal justice system, gender and crime, and legal history. Hayden argues that her many examples of women in the criminal justice system trouble dominant historical narratives about the social, cultural and political roles of antebellum women. In

Criminology · Political science · Punishment (psychology · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Psychology · Social Psychology