Citation

D'Cruze S. Br. J. Criminol. 1999; 39(1): 39-55.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Publisher Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/bjc/39.1.39

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Complex issues of class and gender were highlighted when sexual and physical violence against women came up in mid-nineteenth-century local courts. In Middleton, Lancashire, despite its large female industrial workforce, these cases mostly associated working women's social identities with home and neighbourhood. They presented masculinities that contradicted the increasing respectability of working men's organization and politics. Proceedings were published to a courtroom audience and in local newspapers. Men's sexual and physical violence, often associated with leisure and drunkenness, affiliation cases and women's neighbourhood quarrels, produced a composite picture of disorder which middle-class magistrates aimed to discipline. Respectable working-class opinion must also have disapproved. Local courts gave working women a public forum to air grievances, but one that entailed a real risk to their own reputation.