Osborne, Harvey (2016) ‘Unwomanly practices’: poaching crime, gender and the Female offender in nineteenth-century Britain. Rural History, 27 (2). pp. 149-168. ISSN 0956-7933

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Abstract

Studies of poaching in the nineteenth century have tended to understate the involvement of women in this archetypal rural crime. This article will suggest that female offending was both more significant and more widespread than previously assumed, but it will also highlight how in a variety of complex ways dominant conceptions of gender shaped perceptions of female poachers and often influenced their treatment before the courts. It will argue that alongside more widely effectual assumptions about appropriate male and female spheres and behaviours, the response of the authorities to female poachers was also shaped by powerful and increasingly culturally embedded notions about the sexually exclusive nature of hunting.

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