Is it a truism that men and women have always been equal under the law? Whilst it may well be true that in this present day and age the sexes are treated with equality in British courts, it can be argued that this was not always the case. This is due to a number of factors, which include: the judicial procedure; how women were perceived by society; the types of crime they committed; and the punishments available. Let us consider each of these in turn.
The perception of women in society.
For hundreds of years, men and women were thought to have fundamentally different emotional make-ups, qualities and virtues. Thus, men were the stronger sex, and consequently were perceived to be more intelligent and possess greater courage. Women were more governed by their emotions and were, therefore, modest, chaste and compassionate.
This type of belief led to different social expectations of behaviour. Men were expected to be more violent, and self-centred, and thus more easily prone to commit criminal acts. Women were not expected to exhibit this type of behaviour and consequently, when they did fall foul of the law, they were believed to have succumbed to their emotional side.
The roles of the sexes were looked upon as completely different. Men were the providers who brought money into the house and protected their families. Women were responsible for the upbringing of the children. It is true that many women were forced to seek work, but the opportunities available to them were much reduced. They were domestic servants, teachers, nurses and worked in such trades as clothing manufacture and repair.
Men, it seems, were expected to be capable of any crime, including murder, rape, burglary, highway robbery, theft and a dozen other such felonies. They tended to be more mobile within society, whereas women were believed to be tied to the home. This, in turn, suggested that the types of crime that women might commit were based around the home, or possibly their locale. Thus, they were charged with such offences as pick-pocketing, receiving stolen goods, prostitution, keeping brothels, concealing births and performing abortions. In practice, with the exception of certain offences such as rape, women and men committed the same sort of crimes, though arguably in different numbers.
Punishment
Most readers will be aware that until the mid-1960s, certain offences could be punished by judicial hanging. Capital punishment had long been a feature of British justice, and both men and women suffered death at the end of a rope in the twentieth century. Before this, however, certain other punishments would be available to the judge, depending on the offence committed. As to how the law treated the sexes differently, perhaps some basic statistics will illustrate this point.
Research in the Old Bailey records, from 1700 to 1900, reveals details of 114, 292 criminals who were found guilty of various offences. The basic table below shows how these individuals were divided by sex.
At first glance, it would seem that far less women were found guilty of crimes, but it must be remembered that this does not mean that women committed substantially less crime than men. The figures do not include those who were found not guilty, and it may well be that juries were more sympathetic towards women. Though it is undoubtedly true that men did break the law more, there was also more reluctance to prosecute women. However, once women did face prosecution, their treatment was not substantially different to that of the men. Perhaps this can best be illustrated by a more detailed examination of these figures in relation to the punishments received in relation to each sex.
| Number | Percentage of Total | |
| Men | 100944 | 88.32 |
| Women | 13348 | 11.68 |
| Totals | 114292 | 100.00 |
| Men | ||
| Number | Percentage | |
| Guilty | 100944 | |
| Death | 6116 | 6.06 |
| Executed | 3391 | 55.44 (Of these) |
| Prison | 50064 | 49.60 |
| Transported | 29328 | 29.05 |
| Corporal Punishment | 6272 | 6.21 |
| Miscellaneous | 6677 | 6.61 |
| None | 2486 | 2.46 |
| Unknown | 1 | |
| Women | ||
| Number | Percentage | |
| Guilty | 13348 | |
| Death | 1015 | 7.60 |
| Executed | 249 | 24.53 (Of these) |
| Prison | 7313 | 54.79 |
| Transported | 3160 | 23.67 |
| Corporal Punishment | 541 | 4.05 |
| Miscellaneous | 943 | 7.06 |
| None | 376 | 2.82 |
| Unknown | 0 |
By comparing these two tables it will be seen that there are, perhaps, just two significant figures. Once found guilty, women were actually more likely to be sent to prison and, once sentenced to death, were also much more likely to be reprieved. Of course, one of those statistics is dependent upon the other since, once a death sentence had been respited, a sentence of imprisonment would be substituted. This would seem to indicate that, to a large extent, the law did treat both sexes equally, but other factors must also be borne in mind.
The first of these factors relates to the death sentence itself, for certain offences. A man or a woman found guilty of, say, the murder of a shopkeeper, would be subject to the same sentence of death by hanging. This did not apply, though, to certain types of murder.
If a man were to murder his wife, then he would still be charged with the simple act of murder and face the hangman’s noose. For a woman to kill her husband, however, was a different matter. Since women were looked upon as a kind of possession of their husbands, then they would be charged with a form of treason, known as Petit Treason, and the sentence for that was to be burnt at the stake. It is true that almost always, the poor miscreant was first strangled, by a merciful executioner, before the flames could reach her, but there were cases where this practice failed and the woman was actually burned alive. Indeed, such a case lies within the pages of this book.
As a further example, consider the types of murder usually committed. Whilst it is true that there were women who killed for gain, during robberies, for revenge etc., there were many more cases where circumstances led them to commit the crimes they did. Thus, there were many cases of unmarried mothers at their wits end, killing their new-born babies, or of female abortionists trying to assist pregnant women and killing the mother, along with the unborn child. There were also those who would dispose of children, for a fee. Whilst many of these ‘baby farmers’ were kind and considerate to the children who came into their care, others would simply kill the children as the easy way out. Many may think this practice died out in the early days of Victoria’s reign, but within these pages, I detail a case of baby farming from as late as 1903.
This book runs, in effect, from the year 1700, to the last execution of a woman in this country, that of Ruth Ellis, in 1955. One final table may illustrate for the reader just how women fared before the law in less enlightened times.
I am aware of fifty-five women who were charged with various offences and appeared at the Old Bailey in the first of those years: 1700. Here is what happened to those faceless defendants.
What offences were these unfortunate women accused? This may illustrate how women really fared within society itself. Two offences are actually not known, since the records are lost, leaving us with fifty-three women who stood in the dock. Of these fifty-three, one was charged with murder, one with bigamy, one with highway robbery, two with coining, and five with burglary. The remaining forty-three were all charged with theft. Could it be that the way society treated women led to so many falling foul of the law out of pure necessity? In short, were they forced to steal in order to survive, and so those were largely the offences which caused them to be taken to court.
Of the eight death sentences handed down, one was for murder, two were for coining and five were for theft. The two death sentences actually carried out were those of Elizabeth Green who was hanged on 31 January, for theft, and Catherine Truerniet, who was hanged for murder on 19 July.
| Number | Percentage | |
| Accused | 55 | |
| Guilty | 25 | 45.46 |
| Not Guilty | 30 | 54.54 |
| Of the 25 Guilty | ||
| Death/Respited | 6 | 24.00 |
| Executed | 2 | 8.00 |
| Branded | 9 | 36.00 |
| Whipped | 8 | 32.00 |
| Total | 25 | 100.00 |
Women may have committed less violent crime, but they were certainly a match for the men when it came to theft, burglary, forgery, coining and the like. It might be argued that the only difference was that the authorities relied heavily on the belief, that women were more emotional and so entitled to a somewhat more merciful viewpoint.
The twenty-five chapters of this book cover the stories of twenty-nine women. The crimes they were charged with range from murder, through to forgery and riot; and to fraud and theft. At least ten were executed for crimes that, in some cases, would not even end in a prison sentence today. Their stories may illustrate how women were treated by the law, but equally they may document the more enlightened attitude that the same law demonstrates today.