Policing Women examines for the first time the changing historical landscape of women's experiences of their contact with the official state police between 1800 to 1950, in the Western world.
Drawing on and going beyond existing knowledge about policing practices, the volume discusses how women encountered the official police, how they experienced that contact, and the outcomes of that contact in the modern Western world. In so doing, it is an original and much needed addition to the literature around changes in policing, women's experiences of the criminal justice system, and women's experiences of control and regulation. The chapters uncover such experiences in a geographically spread range of countries across Europe, US, Canada and Australia. Importantly the collection focuses upon a crucial epoch in the history of policing, a 150-year period when policing was rapidly changing and being increasingly placed on a formal level. Bringing together scholarly work from expert contributors, this unique volume draws to the fore women's experiences of policing.
It will be of great use to students on undergraduate and postgraduate criminology and history courses, working on the history of crime, historical criminology, the history of criminal justice, and women's history.
About the Author: Jo Turner is an Associate Professor of Criminology at Staffordshire University. Her research interests centre around the criminal justice system both contemporarily and in the past. Her key publications are J. Turner (2019) 'A Shocking State of Domestic Unhappiness' male victims of female violence and the courts in late nineteenth century Stafford, Societies, 9 (40); and J. Turner (2020) 'The 'Vanishing' female perpetrator of common assault' in M. van der Heijden, M. Pluskota and S. Muurling (eds.) Women's criminality: patterns and variations in Europe, 1600-1914. Cambridge, UK: 72-88. Jo was the lead editor of A Companion to the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, published in 2017.
Helen Johnston is Professor of Criminology at the University of Hull. Helen has undertaken extensive research on imprisonment, licensing/early release mechanisms and criminal justice institutions. She is interested in how people experienced criminal justice institutions either as suspects and offenders or as employees. Helen is also interested in crime heritage and the preservation, presentation, and dissemination of crime heritage in museums, archives, and heritage sites. She has been Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on a range of funded research projects supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust. Her most recent book is Penal Servitude: Convicts and long-term imprisonment, 1853-1948 (2022) co-authored with Barry Godfrey and David J. Cox.
Marion Pluskota is an Assistant Professor in Social History at Leiden University. Her fields of interest are crime, sex work, and urban history from the 18th to the early twentieth century Europe, with a specific focus on the use of different (urban) spaces for criminal purposes. She is the director of the project 'Dangerous Cities: mapping crime in Amsterdam and Leiden, 1850-1913' and the follow-up project 'Gevaarlijk Amsterdam: criminaliteit in kaart, 1850 - 1905' funded by the KNAW. She has published extensively on sex work and gender relations in crime; her key publications are M. Pluskota, 'Petty Criminality, Gender Bias, and Judicial Practice in Nineteenth-Century Europe', Journal of Social History, Volume 51, Issue 4, 2018, 717-735; 'Governing sexuality: regulating prostitution in early modern Europe' in Bert de Munck and Simon Gunn (eds), Powers of the City, Urban Agency: New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe Since 1500 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
