Though there has been much work on the change in attitudes towards violence since the late eighteenth century, little attention has been paid to the gendered profile of its development or the consequent differential cultural understandings of criminality manifested by men and women, as well as the wider contextualization of violence within society.





This book examines the gendering of violence from the late eighteenth century onwards and reflects on the extent to which gender expectations have continued, into the twentieth century at least, to shape the attitudes of legislators, legal personnel, and the criminal justice process towards types of violence and types of perpetrators of that violence.