1st Edition
Women’s Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand
Women’s Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand offers new research and analysis of women’s offending and criminalisation in Australia and New Zealand from British settlement through to the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to women as offenders as understood in a multitude of ways, this collection highlights how women have been involved with crime and criminal behaviour, their treatment inside and outside of courts and prisons, and how women’s deviation from societal norms have attracted negative attention throughout the decades. For Aboriginal and Māori women especially, the responses were harsher than what they could be for non-indigenous women.
The chapters cover a broad range of transgressions that women have been actively involved with, including theft, drug and alcohol abuse and offences, organised crime, and homicide, as well as how women’s behaviour and their bodies have been criminalised and responded to by authorities. What this collection demonstrates is that women have often chosen to be involved with crime and criminality, while on other occasions their behaviour, innocent as it was, was not considered acceptable by contemporaries, resulting in confusion and misapprehension of women who refused to fit a mould.
Women’s Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand brings together historical and criminological methods, theories, and scholars to shed light on how Australia and New Zealand’s colonial, later state, and national governments have sought to understand, control, and punish women. This collection will be of interest and value to scholars, students, and everyone with an interest in criminology, history, law, sociology, Indigenous studies, and Australian and New Zealand studies.
Introduction: Women’s Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand
Victoria M. Nagy and Georgina Rychner
Chapter 1: Free Women and short hair: Cropping, convictism, and Reform in Van Diemen’s Land
Nicholas Dean Brodie, Kristyn Evelyn Harman, and Victoria M. Nagy
Chapter 2: A ‘Very Lamentable Case’: Indigenous Women as Defendants in the Upper Courts of Western Australia, 1830-1890
Caroline Ingram
Chapter 3: Understanding Criminality in Context: Melbourne’s Female Underworld, 1860-1920
Alana Piper
Chapter 4: Women’s Intra-Gender Homicide in Victoria
Victoria M. Nagy
Chapter 5: Complicating the ‘Unfeminine’: Agency and Insanity in Female Convictions for Murder, Victoria 1880-1916
Georgina Rychner
Chapter 6: “The Whole Community is Poisoned Against Her”: Perceptions and Motives of Female Poisoners in Late-Nineteenth-Century Australia
Mitchell Naughton
Chapter 7: ‘Female Masqueraders’ and Vagrants: Gender Diversity in the Criminal Justice System in Early Twentieth Century Victoria
Adrien McCrory
Chapter 8: Media Representations of Criminalised Women in 1950s Aotearoa New Zealand
Fairleigh Evelyn Gilmour and Chris Brickell
Chapter 9: Selective Gendered Regime of Deportation: the historical deportation of Women during the White Australia Policy Era
Marinella Marmo and Evan Smith
Chapter 10: Herstories of Alcohol and Other Drug Use and Imprisonment: Understanding Women’s Experiences of the Victorian Correctional Landscape, 1860-1920
Andrew Groves
Chapter 11: Wāhine Toa and the Korowai: Female Warriors and the Patch
Carl Bradley
The lived experience of kaupapa whānau affiliated women
Te Atawhai Nayda Te Rangi and the Mongrel Mob
Ka hao te rangatahi – lived experience growing up in a gang space in Aotearoa
Bonnie Te Ao Mihi Maihi and the Black Power
Biography
Victoria M. Nagy is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Tasmania. She completed her PhD in women’s studies at Monash University in 2012, with a specialisation in socio-legal responses to women’s poisoning offences in the UK during the nineteenth century. She has published on women’s offending in Victoria, sexual violence victimisation of women and men, and academic misconduct. Her current research focuses are on Tasmanian incarceration (historic and contemporary), the well-being needs of staff and incarcerated people in the corrections systems, and criminology pedagogy.
Georgina Rychner completed her PhD in historical studies at Monash University in 2020, specialising in the history of interpersonal crime, narratives of mental health, and the administration of capital punishment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria. Georgina has taught criminology and history at Deakin University and the University of Tasmania.
