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‘A Nuisance to the Community’: Policing the Vagrant Woman
Abstract and Figures
The charge of vagrancy dates back to medieval England. Its subjective application and minimal evidentiary requirements provided an appealing mechanism to punish recalcitrant behaviour. This article examines methods of exclusion via the application of vagrancy provisions in a small locality in New South Wales. It does so with a particular focus on one individual. By closely interrogating a wide range of public sources, the article illuminates the process of marginalisation and highlights the injustice embedded in commonplace abuses of power. In doing so, it alerts us to the disjunction between national mythology and the lived experience of its subjects.
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... The vagrant male endangered physical safety, but the vagrant woman posed a sexual threat to social order. 46 Accordingly, any woman seen 'loitering about' or drunk was assumed to have loose morals. 47 In view of Annette's criminal record and evident economic hardship, it is perhaps unsurprising that the courts assumed her to be wickedly undeserving. ...
... However, abundant evidence suggests that like many others of her class, Jane Dibbs was a passionate woman who enjoyed male company and attention. 46 admitted to paying over thirty visits to John Shepherd's office. These details Jane declared to be circumstantial, maintaining her innocence throughout proceedings. ...
... Clearly, this was no 45 Simmonds, ''Promises and Pie-Crusts' 112. 46 While Jane could take her body -and share it -where and with whom 59 Russell, A Wish of Distinction, 97. 60 Garton, 'Three Reviews', 203. 61 Levin,Embodiment,56. she chose, she could not earn enough to live in the style to which she was accustomed, or keep her children when faced with masculine legal and economic authority. ...
Abstract
This thesis analyses the ways that some colonial women achieved small measures of personal autonomy, in a context of gender constraints that saw them disenfranchised politically, economically and legally. It argues that amidst entrenched structural inequalities, the adulterous woman could exert some agency and independence when she engaged in an extra-marital affair. Through an analysis of four divorce cases, I explore how the adulterous woman challenged gender norms as she negotiated a masculine legal system. The documentary evidence for these case studies is taken from the Supreme Court archives of 1873 to 1881, when divorce was first introduced into the colony of New South Wales. I suggest that even the powerless and disempowered can at times act with agency, and that infidelity provided some women with the space in which to resist and challenge their oppression. My thesis examines the cases of four women who did indeed march to the beat of their own drum, albeit whilst battling an economic, political and legal disempowerment that severely hampered their efforts to do so.
... Additionally, homelessness, as today, was also a genuine problem, with colonial commentators observing that Melbourne was inhabited by high numbers of female beggars, most of which were concentrated among the very young and very old but could be found resident in the city year after year (Freeman 1888: 133). Contrariwise, Julie Kimber (2010) has suggested that in rural towns in Australia vagrancy charges were historically used as a means of moving 'problem' women (notably drunkards or sex workers) on to other areas. ...
This paper examines imprisonment data from Victoria between 1860 and 1920 to gather insights into the variations in incidence of women being convicted by rural versus urban courts, including close focus on the difference in types of offences being committed in urban and rural locations. This paper also details women’s mobility between both communities as well as change in their offending profiles based on their geographic locations. Our findings suggest that while the authorities were broadly most concerned with removing disorderly and vagrant women from both urban and rural streets, rural offending had its own characteristics that differentiate it from urban offending. Therefore, this demonstrates that when examining female offending, geographic location of an offender and offence must be taken into consideration.
... What, though, of its gendered dimensions? The mobility of women is often (mis) understood as a threat, both historically (Cresswell 1999;Domosh 1991;Kimber 2010) and more contemporaneously in the 20th (McDowell 1996) and 21st centuries (Hanson 2010;Silvey 2004). While geographers have charted the mobility of female travellers through diaries, letters and films (Blunt 1994;Domosh 1991;Maddrell 2009;Robinson 1990;Russell 1988), less has been said of more deviant female mobility (but see some examples in the work of Casey et al. 2007;Cresswell 1999;Rowe and Wolch 1990). ...
This paper considers the neglected mobilities associated with a sample of UK women reported as missing. Refracted through literatures on gendered mobility and abandonment, the paper argues that the journeys of these women in crisis are not well understood by police services, and that normative gender relations may infuse their management. By selectively exploring one illustrative police case file on Kim, we highlight how reported and observed socio-spatial relationships within private and public spaces relate to search actions. We argue that Kim's mobility and spatial experiences are barely understood, except for when they appear to symbolise disorder and danger. We address the silences in this singular case by using the voices of other women reported as missing, as collected in a research project to explore the agency, experience and meaning of female mobility during absence. We argue that women reported as missing are not abandoned by UK policing services, but that a policy of continued search for them may be at risk if they repeatedly contravene normative socio-spatial relationships through regular absence mobilities. By way of conclusion, we address recent calls for research that explores the relationships between gender and mobility.
... 105 Women were often arrested for vagrancy as members of pairs who were known to "go about" together. 106 Pairing off among female vagrants suggests living together was not simply a matter of convenience, but indicated close bonds between particular women. ...
In recent decades, historians have produced a wealth of scholarship demonstrating the importance of the exploration of domestic contexts and familial dynamics to the development of understandings of women's historical experiences. However, the home lives of a particular group of women—those on the criminal margins of society—warrant further investigation. The study of such women challenges the hetero-orthodox assumption that women's relationships with men have historically been more important than their relationships with one another. This article suggests that men were often fleeting figures in the families of criminal women. Male absence encouraged women from criminal subcultures, instead, to draw together to form female-centred households. Such living arrangements were further facilitated by the general instability in the home lives of criminal women caused by financial uncertainty, periodic incarceration and crackdowns by authorities, as well as by separations from their natal families and a high degree of personal mobility. These issues are explored through archival material from late nineteenth- and early twentieth century Melbourne, and through the writings of prison poet Janet Dibben.
During the 1830s, the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act were crafted to prevent crime, revolt and insurrection in the colony of New South Wales. These statutes contained exceptional methods to police and control colonial populations and suspended legal safeguards designed to protect the population from abuses of power. Supporters of the laws argued that extreme measures were necessary due to the emergency of the occasion. Understanding the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act’s enactment and operation, as well as the purposes they were designed to serve and the liberties they infringed to achieve these ends requires attention to local circumstance. A fine-grained analysis, rooted in the peculiarities of life in colonial New South Wales and anchored by the law’s operation on the ground is needed to understand the malleability of British law at this place and at this time. In this article, I argue that rather than a select criminal contingent, the New South Wales’ authorities increasingly feared that the composition of the colony threatened their colonial enterprise. The Bushranging Act of 1830 and the Vagrancy Act of 1835 contained wide coercive and discretionary powers to mitigate the extent of this threat.
A major obstacle in the political work of housing the homeless is convincing voters and lawmakers that housing is a right and should be available to all without conditions. This paper seeks to assist that project by showing that the tension between rights and conditions has a history. It focusses on the pivotal 1940s, which saw the first major investment in public housing and the first surveys of two relevant problem populations—“the problem family” and “the homeless”. Those surveys used the language of eugenics, psychology and moral censure to perpetuate conditionality, while the call for housing as a right invested in the agency of “the people”. And the people wanted to be heard. Analysing the complex ways in which conditions on housing operated at this turning point enlarges and variegates the canvas on which contemporary understandings draw. It not only offers sobering insight into how the entrenching of marginalisation occurred but also informs the sense of contingency that might nourish serious reform.
Cambridge Core - Legal Philosophy - Self, Others and the State - by Arlie Loughnan
Women charged with offences against good order in Perth and Fremantle from 1900 to 1939 faced institutionalised sexism through the courts, police, and legislation. While men were also criminalised for good order offences, women suffered a double punishment. Charged with drunkenness, being idle and disorderly, and vagrancy, female offenders were further outcast by a public discourse stereotyping them as “bad” women. The extent to which they were able to negotiate and contest this stereotyping was limited, but a subtle negotiation of female identities was possible. This article suggests that female criminal lives offer alternative ways in which to understand women negotiating the politics of respectability and characterisations of the “bad” woman.
_ This article reviews the on-going debates on the use of criminal justice systems to manage homelessness. Many scholars have argued that countries have responded to the growing visibility of homelessness with exclu-sionary measures that have sought to restrict the rights of homeless people to occupy and inhabit public spaces and which prohibit behaviours such as sleeping in public or begging. These restrictions are manifest through the enactment of specific laws targeting the homeless and policing practices (including private security), often with the consequence of incarceration. It seems that homelessness is increasingly criminalised either through segrega-tive incarceration amongst the growing prison populations in Europe and North America, or rendered invisible through spatial restrictions. Driven by the ideology of neoliberalism, this process started in the United States and has become increasingly influential in Europe as evidenced by recent restrictions in some member states on sleeping in pubic places and begging. The article challenges some of the assumptions underpinning this master narrative and suggests that the 'punitive turn' is variable and that local circumstances may be more influential in shaping responses to homelessness than neoliberalism. It also suggests that punitive response to vagrancy and anti-begging legisla-tion and policies are not novel, but rather have a long history.
The study builds on a representative sample of more than 2,500 court cases against vagrants in the Duchy of Brabant between 1767 and 1776. Individual evidence on social background and whereabouts has been quantitatively processed to provide qualitative insight into the “why” and “how” of their movements. Transcending the judicial framework and historical and historiographical biases, these “vagrants” are shown to have displayed various patterns of mobility that fit intelligibly within the wider framework of migration history and theory. By exposing the varied scope of the concept of “vagrancy” in meaning and policy practice, the article argues against its continued ubiquitous (and often dismissive) use in historiography as if it refers meaningfully to a distinct marginal social category, which not only often reiterates the biases of a distorted elite view, but also obstructs a more unified and insightful understanding of patterns of migration in history.
The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”
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