How violent were women ? Court cases in Amsterdam, 1650-1810
Historians have found female violence, especially serious violence, to be uncommon. However, the uncommon is worth studying in its own right. The article first defines violence and then discusses women's share in total crime. While the proportion of women committing property offenses has been c...
Guardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/chs, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Crime, Histoire & Sociétés
2009
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| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | Historians have found female violence, especially serious violence, to be uncommon. However, the uncommon is worth studying in its own right. The article first defines violence and then discusses women's share in total crime. While the proportion of women committing property offenses has been considerable in the past, women's involvement in violence has always been rather low. It may be hypothesised that the level of female violence is a function of the power balance between men and women. Unlike women's public manifestation, this balance has consistently been uneven throughout the centuries.The article then discusses the data on female violence in 17th and 18th-century Amsterdam, based on a sample of 25 assault cases and 12 homicide cases. Two exemplary incidents are presented first. From them it is concluded that the court had no tradition of dealing with serious female aggressiveness ; faced with the unfamiliar, the judges wavered from one extreme to the other. Next, the court cases are discussed thematically ; the principal findings are : (1) A sizeable minority of women made use of a knife ; in some respects they imitated male violence. (2) A few other women were tried for complicity in violence ; they were charged with encouraging the men they accompanied. (3) The ratio of female to male victims was 8 :1 ; women tended to attack other women, rather than men. (4) Female homicide differed in one respect from female assault : all but one of the homicidal incidents took place in a home, whereas in the assault file public places came to 50 %. (5) Women often sought male protection, which indicates that they did not disapprove of violence per se. It is concluded that women's violence, no less than women's abstention from violence, depended on a learning process. This is consistent with Elias' notion that in human emotions, learned ways have become dominant over unlearned ways. The women in question learned about the culture of violence through close contact with men participating in it. Yet, women did not step into the male world. Female violence was same-sex violence. |
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