Introduction

sad' framework refers to three recurrent narratives mobilised to explain women's violence, which rely on stereotypes of femininity.For crime historians, this framework enables analysis of how women's violence was interpreted and how such interpretations influenced the legal process.However, women's own narratives are either absent from or distorted by this framework, creating gaps in historical knowledge of women's violence. "A hard-working and nice person"? Respectability, Femininity, and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800-2000 Daniel GreyPerceptions of infanticidal women in England and Wales over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were influenced by concerns about gender, motherhood, and respectabilityemphasising that the infanticidal woman stands apart from "other" female criminals and is deserving of special treatment.Particularly remarkable about this longstanding discourse is its routine emphasis that the guilty mother is also a victim of tragic circumstances that led to the crime and deserving of sympathetic treatment.This framing of women who commit infanticide stresses not only their "normality" prior to the offence but also their "respectability", a sharp contrast to the sometimes overtly misogynistic representation of other types of women offenders. The Voices of Violent Women in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Elaine FarrellThis chapter draws on the case files of 79 women convicted of committing violent crimes and imprisoned or sentenced to death in nineteenth-century Ireland.Taking the women's petitions as her focus, Farrell considers the women's own understandings of their violent acts, or certainly how they wished those acts to be understood.The analysis looks to how women described their crimes, and how they sought to explain and rationalise these acts.The documents reveal women's attempts to plead for some amelioration of sentence by emphasising the circumstances they hoped would secure them leniency or mitigation, in turn revealing much about broader societal attitudes to gender.The centrality women placed on their passivity saw them aligning with notions of ideal femininity.The women typically claimed innocence, provocation, manipulation and self-defence in their strategies.Women therefore tended to play down their agency, recognising the individual benefits this held for them.The chapter draws from archival research to reveal the voices of working-class women as they sought to redefine their pasts and reposition themselves in the eyes of the criminal justice system. The Many Defences of Maria Barberi: Challenges to a Victim-Based Agency Rian SuttonThe common tropes of 'mad, bad, sad' pressed into service when women commit violent acts work to deny women's agency by stripping them of their humanity, their rationality and their intentionality.Feminist scholars have identified this as a fundamental barrier in conceptualising women's violence.Sutton takes an historical case study approach to explore this question, analysing narratives of victimhood and agency in the trial of Maria Barberi, who appeared before the court in New York in 1895 for the murder of Domenico Cataldo.Barbari's case demonstrates the vagaries of gender and criminal culpability, through analysis of her initial trial, subsequent appeal and campaign for clemency, and retrial.Sutton outlines the failure of Barbari's initial defence argument, which sought to rely on an 'unwritten law' that presented Barbari as possessed of a victim-based agency, a rational woman provoked to violence to defend her sexual honour in light of her victim's sexual predation and abuse.In the first trial, this argument led to Barbari's conviction and death sentencing; she only succeeded when she was instead presented as child-like and teetering on insanity.Sutton uses the case to demonstrate that agency-based narratives in cases of women's violence are notoriously difficult to successfully deploy but are nonetheless desperately needed if we are to see violent women as fully-human volitional subjects.Understanding Women's Acts of Violence An Investigation of Forms and Drivers of Violence Perpetrated by Women in Lesotho: The case of Maseru Female Correctional Facility Josphine Hapazari Recognising that men constitute most of the perpetrators of violence, Hapazari shows in this chapter that some acts of violence are perpetrated by women.Within the framework of the interpretive research model, grounded in the approach of socialist feminism, the author discusses the importance of class and gender in explaining the acts of violence perpetrated by women.The analysis is based on desk review notes and empirical data from a study conducted in the Maseru Female Correctional Facility in Lesotho.

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