Suchergebnisse

jean walton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race,Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Duke University Press, 2001), and is currently writing a book-length study of gender and peristalsis.

When I was first invited to give this year's Marie Stopes Memorial Lecture I had to express my reservations, as my ignorance of Marie Stopes' work was, I'm afraid, profound. I was assured that the talk could simply be on any area relevant or only indirectly related to Marie Stopes' work. I assumed from this that the reason for my invitation was to associate Marie Stopes' achievements with the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. Since those days of pristine ignorance two things have happened to me. First, I have now read a certain amount on and by Marie Stopes, and second, I have read the lecture that Laurie Taylor gave here last year entitled 'Marie Stopes—The Unfinished Sexual Revolution—but also extremely annoying. Here was a man extraordinarily sensitive to the facile male chauvinism of his predecessors: those biographers who had let a stuffy nervousness about Marie Stopes' stress on her own life-long sexual needs mar their tale, often turning an adventurous and unconventional woman into a disturbed and frustrated eccentric: someone who was not a 'fuffilled' woman. In his talk Laurie Taylor more than righted the balance for he not only corrected the priggish sexism of others, and was himself unusually free from it, but, moreover, he managed to place Stopes' work in a context of serious theories of sexual revolution. In other words, on reading last year's lecture I found my task already done. It is a rare and pleasant occasion when one can defer to the anti-male chauvinism of a male critic, and I do so with great satisfaction. In fact I wish to do more than to defer to it; I wish to take advantage of it. For I want today to use Marie Stopes merely as a jumping-off point, only vaguely relating her preoccupations to those of the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. I am afraid I even want to be critical of aspects of her great achievement in spreading birth control and gynaecological health in a way for which, goodness knows, we are all most grateful today. For an active member of the Women's Liberation Movement to come and speak in honour of one of the women who in this century has done so much for women and ignore that honour or even turn it to criticism, is, I'm afraid, a dishonourable act. I feel I've been asked here in double trust and I am, in a way, going to abuse both.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 1: WOMEN AND ACTIVISM -- CHAPTER 2: WOMEN IN THE MEDIA -- CHAPTER 3: IMAGE, ABILITY, AND HEALTH -- CHAPTER 4: FIGHTING FOR WOMEN-AND AGAINST VIOLENCE -- CHAPTER 5: FIGHTING FOR POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS -- CHAPTER 6: FIGHTING FOR WOMEN GLOBALLY -- CHAPTER 7: STARTING AT HOME -- GLOSSARY -- FOR MORE INFORMATION -- FOR FURTHER READING -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX -- Back Cover

This book considers one of the main crimes with which women are associated, infanticide and child murder. Beginning its journey in the nineteenth century, the book interrogates the history of a little-known, widespread social crime to inform the present, interrogating the historical laws governing illegitimacy and infanticide as a form of moral regulation and the role of the sexed female body in justifying those laws. Female Criminality analyses the relationships between men and women, the working and middle classes, the medical establishment, media, and judges, juries and convicts, to extend the social utility of the moral panic concept by providing a causal foundation for the occurrence of moral panics. Crucially, it identifies that the 'folk devil', the subject of Britain's first moral panic concerning children, was a sexed body whose qualities were so monstrous and hellish that the image of the heartless, evil woman who can turn her hand to murder was cemented into public consciousness. So much so, the 'folk devil' became the favourite subject of psychiatry and other medical disciplines and was used by prosecutors to influence the (wrongful) convictions of mothers accused of multiple infant-murder. Exploring how cultural values attributed to the female body are still associated with mothers who commit infanticide and multiple infant deaths in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book will appeal to scholars of Criminology, Law, History and Gender Studies.