Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press Book

This book consists of a whistle-stop guide to a number of women hanged for murder during the early and mid 19th century in England and sets them within a social (and feminist) framework. The book charts the changing public and judicial attitudes towards murder and towards women. Earlier in the century, women were assumed to be intellectually inferior to men, governed by emotion rather than logic, and at the mercy of their reproductive system. There was therefore some paternalistic sympathy for them, in certain circumstances; if the poor things couldn't help it, they could hardly be blamed!

The murder by a woman of her own children, for instance, and even (until the later part of the century) the practice of baby-farming, was not a threat to male-dominated social order. The woman who poisoned her husband, on the other hand, was very much a threat to the established order and was generally reviled. To murder a husband was not just murder but petty treason - a betrayal of trust of a superior being by a subordinate one.

Many of the women who killed did so for material gain. In some cases, this amounted to sheer greed, as in the case of women who bumped off elderly (and not so elderly) relatives in order to claim burial club money. In other cases, women with too many children and very little money chose to quietly kill off some of their children. It is a response to poverty that shocks modern sensibilities, but as Judith Knelman notes, many Victorian murderesses were emotionally flat, even indifferent to the fate of their victims, and possibly this was the result of the lack of moral education (and education generally) afforded to women (and, in particular, poor women).

Until quite late in the 19th century, babies and children had few rights and were barely regarded as individuals. A change in public opinion, assisted by newspaper exposes, resulted in the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, but the practice of baby-farming persisted. A woman would pay for her child to be 'adopted' by an outwardly motherly and caring woman, on the implicit understanding that the child would be quietly done away with.

A similar blind eye was turned for a long time towards the abuse (and in some cases murder) of servants by their employers. Because the justice system and newspaper readership consisted of people whose households contained servants, the idea persisted that the socially and intellectually inferior servant (particularly the downtrodden maid-of-all-work, often recruited from the workhouse) did not deserve the same protection afforded to her employers. As with the practice of baby-farming, newspaper agitation and a couple of sensational trials went some way towards redressing the balance.

Whilst the broadsides from earlier in the century cashed in on sensational murder trials, with lurid illustrations and ballads, the newspapers did indeed play a part in improving legal protection for children and servants. Nevertheless, it took a long time for attitudes to change to the point where women murderers (or alleged ones) were treated as individuals rather than the stereotypical madwomen, whores or witches, and this can be seen in public attitudes towards Florence Maybrick. This was, Knelman says, 'the first time that public opinion gave an accused murderess the benefit of the doubt'. Whether or not Maybrick was guilty, the case highlighted the need for legal reforms, and led many people to begin to have doubts concerning the use of the death penalty.

[February 2011]