By Holly Parker [Edited by Austin Steele and Fenella Jenkins]
Violence, in all its forms, has been a consistent and evolving part of European society for many years, serving a plethora of motives and purposes. The gendered nature of violence has been debated among historians, sociologists and psychologists alike, however, this essay will seek to argue that, as agreed by many historians, men have been the more significant perpetrators of violence in the early modern period, although women contributed significantly to particular crimes.[1] Looking closely at factors that contribute to this, I will aim to demonstrate how this thesis is an answer to the above question but also how the limitations, expectations and powers imposed by gender have led to this conclusion. To enable this nuance, I will narrow my investigation to four specific forms of violence: violence in the empires and homicide, which are male dominant examples, followed by the female dominated examples of infanticide or neonaticide and accusations of witchcraft.
When it came to homicide, men were undeniably the more prevalent contributor to this act of violence. Eisner’s survey of violence showed women to be responsible for only five to twelve percent of homicides in the early modern period, with the percent of female offenders almost never exceeding fifteen percent in most countries.[2] Furthermore, his study showed that among murder rates, the most frequent perpetrators were men between the ages of twenty to twenty-nine.[3] Eisner’s report, however, is limited because it excludes infanticide, since it was not considered a form of homicide until the nineteenth or twentieth centuries in places like Russia, for example.[4] In spite of this, other data sets show men to be the predominant perpetrators of homicidal violence. An example case is a coroner’s report from England looking at homicides between c. 1500 to 1680. This data shows 80.5% of murders were committed by men but also that 79.4% of victims were men.[5] The significance of this, is that it demonstrates the fact that men were drastically more involved in homicidal violence, and it indicates that there could be sociocultural causes. From this data set, alongside the knowledge of gender differences, in terms of freedoms, we can infer that men were involved in this higher capacity due to the fact that they had a much greater chance of being in situations where murder may occur. For example, disputes with other men over ownership of land or property, which women could not be involved in since they rarely owned anything, and their possessions became their husband’s following marriage.
Despite this, it is still true that men were the offenders more often than women in homicide cases, although this imbalance can be explained by ‘deeply gendered aspects’ of society that ‘provided more opportunities and motivations for men than women to engage in criminal activity’.[6] While women typically committed lethal forms of violence against a family member (including infanticide) or partner, the victims of male homicide contained a significantly higher proportion of strangers or acquaintances.[7] Women’s lives in early modern Europe were centred around the household, leaving them fewer opportunities to murder, intentionally or not, people from outside of their household. In addition to this, once again due to the gendered lifestyles of most early modern Europeans, women ‘rarely carried weapons that caused death’.[8] This could be explained by the fact that women were less often than men, in occupations that used heavy or sharp items which could be used as a murder weapon, such as a blacksmith. It may also be explained by the fact that women were simply not expected to commit such violent crimes as murder because they were not as capable of planning or following through as men were considered to be; this meant men were more likely to be accused and women dismissed as suspects.[9] A manifestation of this in practice, as well as a reflection of gendered hierarchy in the household, was the legal doctrine of ‘femme cover’ or ‘femme covert’, where a man could be held accountable for his wife’s crimes due to the idea that within marriage a woman became the possession and responsibility of her husband.[10] This would have meant that a portion of women’s homicides would have been falsely recorded as a male perpetrated crime, which could explain the significant skew in statistics seen in the work of Eisner, for example. Overall men did commit more homicides in early modern Europe but there were underlying gendered expectations and freedoms that contributed to this result, such as women not owning or having access to weaponry.
Colonialism and empire building was a process marked by conflict and violence.[11] To conquer, capture and enslave, the Europeans were not shy to adopt many violent methods to advance their own power obtaining objectives. This, however, was almost in its entirety a place for male perpetrated violence, and since there were no women allowed into the military or onto explorative adventures, this demonstrates how men could be considered more violent than women historically. These violent methods ranged and manifested themselves in various ways among the colonial powers and can be seen in texts and engravings from the time, notably those by De Bry which exposed ‘flagellation, garrotting, water torture, strappado hanging, burning at the stake’ to name just a few.[12] The reason that imperial and colonial violence was so male dominated is because there were no women in the military as soldiers before the twentieth century. Women were considered ‘beautiful souls’ incapable of the intellectual or physical strength necessary to become a soldier or ‘just warrior’ as the stereotype proclaims.[13] Gendered expectations of women as the weaker sex solidified their status as non-combatants in early modern Western societies as a whole. War itself was defined as a masculine thing, representing the show of strength and power, as well as the danger and expectation of men to protect the weaker members of society, meaning the women and children who were believed to be incapable of defending themselves. Women who acted as warriors and did partake in fighting were dramatized in the myth of the Amazons as ‘unnatural, masculine, and warmongering’. [14] Due to this, women were simply not able to partake in military violence because they could not join, and they could not be conscripted to fight in the first place. This left colonial violence to be an escapade perpetrated by men, which demonstrates how men were more violent in history, but the fact that women were banned from participating, thus certainly manipulating this statistic.
To enable a full overview of the contextual factors that contributed to the conclusion that men committed more violence than women in the early modern period in Europe, it is also important to consider female dominant forms of violence. The first example of consideration will be infanticide or neonaticide, meaning homicide of an infant below the age of one years old. Women in early modern Europe were responsible for most cases of infanticide and are highly overrepresented in the data confirming this.[15] For example, in an English coroner’s report of homicides, the victims of male murders were eighty-four percent of adults compared to the adult victims of homicide being just 48.5%.[16] Women, however, may be so highly represented in this form of violence because of legal definitions in some places which meant that infanticide was a crime only women could commit, this included Ireland and the United States.[17]
The reasons for these acts of violence, however, were complex and woven into the socially and financially patriarchal nature of life at this time. Women who were pregnant out of wedlock faced financial and, more significantly, social ruin due to the gendered, moral
expectation for women to remain pure until they found a husband who would be her only sexual partner.[18] Moral panic surrounding ‘premarital sex and bastardry’ led to laws criminalising concealing the birth of a child to limit the murder of infants after birth.[19] The reasoning for which would be to prevent the moral crusade mentality from ostracising women from society because of immorality, since they hoped to never be discovered by disposing of the evidence: an infant. Since women could not protect their honour through physical means, and rumours posed very serious dangers to a woman’s welfare in this period, it may have been a safer choice to remove the unplanned child from the equation, either by abortion or infanticide before people found out. It also goes without saying, but, since men were spending less time in the home than women and could not give birth, they had less access to children in order to commit infanticide. Furthermore, men’s reputations were much less likely to take on major repercussions following the birth of an illegitimate child as it would with a woman.
Women’s violence also extended to witchcraft, a craze which was seen by many as a real threat to the integrity of early modern life. This demonstrates the way that some women were perceived to be violent through demonic intervention and how this phenomenon came to exaggerate gender and age stereotypes.[20] Of those accused of witchcraft in early modern Western Europe, between seventy-five to eighty percent were women. This stereotype came from the belief that women were the weaker sex, far more susceptible to demonic possession and evil than men; as seen in the story of Adam and Eve at the Fall in the Bible. By the time of the Malleus Maleficarum in the late fifteenth century, it was understood that men could be witches, but the witch was ‘almost by definition a woman’.[21] Wolfgang Behringer even described the ‘classic’ witch as an ‘old, single, poor woman’, something which was also clearly depicted in visual culture too.[22] Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcuts from the early sixteenth century frequently featured witches, just as Behringer described, with added visual details for the audience. For example, the New Year’s Sheet (Figure 1) portrays three naked women assumed to be witches by their energetic, carnal poses and eyes staring wildly at the viewer in, what was intended to be, a terrifying display of conspicuous sin.[23] This was a standard blueprint of witchcraft representation in his work and for other portrayals of witches in the early modern period, but the most important thing to note is that witches in these visual representations were almost always women. Women, especially unmarried older ones, were disproportionately more likely to be accused of violence seen as the result of witchcraft. Sona
Rosa Burstein has argued that this was the case because they were those most likely to suffer from mental disorders which exposed themselves in antisocial behaviours, such as senile psychosis.[24] Therefore, witch-led violence shows us that accusations were mostly manifestations of stereotypes of older women who were suggested to be weaker to evil. The reasons behind this belief go some way to reduce the validity of the idea of women sincerely using violence in this way, thus reducing the amount of violence seen by women in early modern Europe thus accentuating the amount led by men.
In conclusion, men did commit more violence in the early modern period than women, which can be seen through homicide rates and colonialism. The representation and accuracy of the data displaying women’s violence is, however, highly flawed, as the statistics provide an extremely two-dimensional picture of the reality. This means that the reasons for such high rates in male homicides, for example, are not considered; these range from women not having access to weaponry, to the legal doctrine of ‘femme cover’ which saw men taking accountability for women’s crimes. Moreover, the fact that women were limited to the household and could not join the military also limited their chances to interact with others in a violent capacity. Where women are overrepresented in violence was in acts like infanticide, which can be explained by the fact that men were not the ones who had to hide a pregnancy, due to their biological incapability to fall pregnant, and also their decreased pressure to uphold their reputations, since they had access to multiple ways to defend it in ways that women did not. As such, it cannot be said that men by nature were more violent than women, but simply that through the expressions of gendered expectations in early modern culture, economy and society, men had greater opportunities for violence.
Figure 1 Hans Baldung Grien, New Year’s Sheet, c. 1514
Notes
[1] Greg T. Smith, “Long Term Trends in Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, in Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 139.
[2] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, p. 142.
[3] Manuel Eisner, “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime”, Crime and Justice, 30/1 (2003), pp. 112-115.
[4] Daniel J. R. Grey, “Crimes Related to Sexuality and Reproduction”, in Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 235.
[5] Krista Kesselring, “Bodies of Evidence: Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in Early Modern, c.1500-1680”, Gender & History, 27/2 (2015), pp. 247-8.
[6] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 139.
[7] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 145.
[8] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 141.
[9] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 144; Barry Godfrey, “A Historical Perspective on Criminal Justice Responses to Female and Male Offending”, in Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 160.
[10] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 141; Godfrey, “Criminal Justice Responses to Female and Male Offending”, pp. 160.
[11] John Smolenski, New World Orders: Violence, Sanction and Authority in the Colonial Americas (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 6.
[12] Molly Tun, “Colonial Cruelty: The Expression and Perpetuation of Violence in Theodor de Bry’s America”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 95/2 (2018), pp. 158.
[13] Helen Carreiras, Gender and the Military: Women in the Armed Forces of Western Democracies (London; Taylor & Francis, 2006) pp. 5; McBeath, VL (2020) “Victoria Era Women’s Rights”. VL McBeath. <https://valmcbeath.com/victorian-era-womens-rights/#.X9anCOZxdEZ> [Accessed 11 December 2020].
[14] Carreiras, Gender and the Military, pp. 5.
[15] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 143.
[16] Kesselring, “Bodies of Evidence”, pp. 247.
[17] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 144.
[18] Godfrey, “Criminal Justice Responses to Female and Male Offending”, pp. 234.
[19] Smith, “Female and Male Involvement in Crime”, pp. 143; Godfrey, “Criminal Justice Responses to Female and Male Offending”, pp. 234.
[20] Judith Bonzol, “The Medical Diagnosis of Demonic Possession in an Early Modern English Community”, Parergon, 26/1 (2009), pp. 115-140.
[21] Norman Cohn, Europe’ s Inner Demons: The Demonisation of Christians in Medieval Christendom (London; Pimlico, 1993).
[22] Alison Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany”, Past & Present, 173/1 (2001), pp. 50.
[23] Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Illinois; Chicago University Press, 1993) pp. 330.
[24] Rowlands, “Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany”, pp. 52.
Bibliography
Bonzol, Judith. “The Medical Diagnosis of Demonic Possession in an Early Modern English Community”. Parergon. 26/1. 2009.
Carreiras, Helen. Gender and the Military: Women in the Armed Forces of Western Democracies. London: Taylor & Francis, 2006.
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Godfrey, Barry. “A Historical Perspective on Criminal Justice Responses to Female and Male Offending”. In Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Grey, Daniel, J. R. “Crimes Related to Sexuality and Reproduction”. In Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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Tun, Molly. “Colonial Cruelty: The Expression and Perpetuation of Violence in Theodor de Bry’s America”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. 95/2. 2018.
Wiltenburg, Joy. “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism”. The American Historical Review. 109/5. 2004.
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