Book Review: When She Was Bad: How Women Get Away With Murder
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| Author | Mary Childs |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399900800310 |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
– despite all the evidence of Rose’s abusive childhood – did it prove impossible to have
any mitigating circumstances accepted during her trial? Why was her responsibility
not diminished? Why, despite being a child herself when she met Fred, who was 13
years older than her and who was already a multiple killer by the time they met, was
Rose often portrayed in the media as the ‘leading’ force in the relationship – the
‘worst’ of the two? To answer such questions a full analysis of the construction of
femininity is required. In particular we need to examine the discourses surrounding
womanhood and ‘appropriate’ female conduct and behaviour as well as the place of
identity, rationality and agency within these discourses. Space does not permit such
an analysis here, yet it is crucial to address such questions if we are to move beyond
explaining female violence through the ‘mad versus bad’ discourse and instead create
new discourses through which a fuller and feminist understanding of such violence
may be understood.
NOTES
1. Sereny herself does not claim that her research is feminist in nature.
2. ‘Did your mother give you things afterwards?’ ‘Yes, sweeties, and she was nice
to me, and she laughed.’ (Sereny, 1998: 336)
REFERENCES
Masters, B. (1996) She Must Have Known. London: Doubleday.
Sereny, G. (1995) The Case of Mary Bell. London: Pimlico.
ANNETTE BALLINGER
Social Science Faculty, Open University, UK.
PATRICIA PEARSON, When She Was Bad: How Women Get Away With Murder.
London: Virago, 1998, 288pp. £9.99 (pbk).
One of the abiding issues in criminology, and one of particular interest to feminist
criminologists, is the ‘gender ratio problem’ – the apparently low rate of female par-
ticipation in crime. Is this an artifact of recording and defining, or does it reflect deeper
differences? The central argument of this book is that female aggression has been
underestimated and overlooked in North American and British society, and that
stereotypes of passivity and helplessness are used by violent women who, as the sub-
title declares, ‘Get away with murder’.
The questions Pearson asks are important ones, but they are not new. In the 1980s
Hilary Allens’ research pointed to the phenomenon of female violence ‘rendered
harmless’ through discursive manoeuvres calculated to construct women as victims
lacking responsibility. Other feminist lawyers and criminologists have questioned the
implications of battered woman syndrome evidence, and examined the difficult ques-
tion of how the law constructs infanticide by women. These are real debates within
feminism and criminology, but the implication of Pearson’s work is that there has been
a deliberate refusal to address such issues. Time and time again she presents her posi-
tion as a corrective response to extremism and generalisation by ‘academics’ and
‘feminists’ (these two groups are nowhere defined); in doing so she presents her
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