Breaking the Codes

This is a cultural history of the fin-de-siecle that uses the "problem" of the criminal woman to examine both the debates around the appropriate place of women in French society and the ways in which issues of gender were central to the most important cultural transformations of the period. The author asserts that "female criminality" was a code that condensed and obscured larger concerns. She examines how crimes of domestic violence, infanticide, and abortion were interpreted in the context of broader debates about divorce, depopulation, sexuality, and women's roles in the public sphere and looks at the role of expert commentary - from the forensic psychiatrist, the criminologist, the legal scholar - in producing a normative code for female behaviour. This study demonstrates both the inadequacy of the categories of public and private in historical inquiry and the artificiality of the boundaries between high and low culture. It moves between domestic life and public courtrooms, analysing the complex responses to female crime among different constituencies and through different genres. In so doing, the author sheds light on various overlapping processes of cultural negotiation in a period of profound change.