“Woman's Special Enemy”: Female Enmity in Criminal Discourse during the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The belief that women secretly hate other women is one with a long history. This article highlights the role that idea played in the myriad of literature produced about women of the "criminal classes" from the early Victorian period through to the end of the First World War, as interest in female crime and prostitution was at its height. The trope that women are each other's worst enemies was evident in criminal discourse across transnational contexts;in particular, I explore how such narratives were received from the European and Anglo-American worlds and perpetuated in the Australian colonies during this period. It is shown that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century commentators portrayed criminality as a moral contagion communicated by women -often deliberately and maliciously -to each other. The crimes most often associated with females were also depicted as being based upon the exploitation of women by other women. Descriptions of the female criminal persona emphasized their incapacity for friendship or suggested they were capable only of perverted interactions that tended towards mutual destruction. Moving across time and transnational contexts, various permutations of criminal discourses thus promoted an image in the popular imagination of female relationships as sites of danger and latent animosity, and moreover suggested that this reflected an underlying dynamic among women as a whole.~

Differential support for female supervisors among men and women.

“…-Cesare Lombroso (1893) Historians have traced back the lay belief that women generally dislike each other more than a century (Piper, 2016), and this popular view persists today (Chandra, 2014;Hoogervorst, 2014;Sanchez, 2012). Mainstream media often portray women as unsupportive of each other at work (Akbari, 2015;Khazan, 2014;Lepore, 2014;Rezvani, 2012).…”

There is always a next witch: Creative intuition and collaborative female relationships in fairy tales

“…Women are our own worst enemies, prone to bitching, gossiping and backstabbing; secretly we all hate each other (Moss 2014, Piper 2015, Raymond 1986. Men are 'mates' while women are 'mean girls' or 'frenemies'; our rivalry is natural, innate and unhealthy (Dyrenfurth 2015, Piper 2016. The psychological concept of 'schemas' provides a useful way to understand the persistence of such framings and the manner by which they may influence how creative writers craft fictional narratives and, in particular, the representations of relationships between female characters within them.…”

‘Us Girls Won’t Put One Another Away’: relations among Melbourne’s prostitute pickpockets, 1860–1920

“…The author, like most of his contemporaries, suggests that such relationships were ultimately destructive and corrupting. 5 Yet it is implied that Emily genuinely believes she has helped both Julia and Mary, if only to what she thinks is the best of workingclass women's limited options at the time. The story thus intimates the existence of important informal networks of support among prostitutes, ones that also facilitated women's property crimes.…”