Modern women on trial
Modern women on trial: Sexual transgression in the age of the flapper
Lucy Bland
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: Manchester University Press
Pages: 256
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155j6pn
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Modern women on trial
Book Description:

Modern women on trial looks at several sensational trials involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion in the period 1918–24. The trials, all with young female defendants, were presented in the media as morality tales, warning of the dangers of sensation-seeking and sexual transgression. The book scrutinises the trials and their coverage in the press to identify concerns about modern femininity. The flapper later became closely associated with the 'roaring' 1920s, but in the period immediately after the Great War she represented not only newness and hedonism, but also a frightening, uncertain future. This figure of the modern woman was a personification of the upheavals of the time, representing anxieties about modernity, and instabilities of gender, class, race and national identity. This accessible, extensively researched book will be of interest to all those interested in social, cultural or gender history.

eISBN: 978-1-84779-896-1
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-vii)
  3. List of illustrations
    List of illustrations (pp. viii-viii)
  4. Acknowledgements
    Acknowledgements (pp. ix-x)
  5. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-14)

    On 7th January 1923 Virginia Woolf, up from Sussex and staying in Gordon Square, London, reflected on the previous night in her diary: ‘the house was too noisy for me to sleep. People seemed to be walking. Then a woman cried, as if in anguish, in the street, and I thought of Mrs Thompson waiting to be executed.’¹ Two days later, Edith Thompson was indeed executed - hanged, along with her lover Freddy Bywaters, for the murder of her husband. After her death, Edith’s execution was widely considered a miscarriage of justice, yet at the time the jury, judge, Appeal...

  6. 1 The case of the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’: treachery, patriotism and English womanhood
    1 The case of the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’: treachery, patriotism and English womanhood (pp. 15-54)

    ‛A great battle is raging; armies are bleeding and dying; Paris is at stake; and for a week the interest of the British public has been almost entirely centred upon a trial for criminal libel.’¹ TheNew Statesmanwas referring in disbelief to a six-day trial of May–June 1918, reported exten­sively in all the British newspapers, and involving a criminal libel brought by the well known ‘barefoot’ dancer Maud Allan against the right-wing independent MP Noel Pemberton Billing, for his imputation of lesbianism. The successful German offensive of late March on the Western Front had been followed by further...

  7. 2 Butterfly women, ‘Chinamen’, dope fiends and metropolitan allure
    2 Butterfly women, ‘Chinamen’, dope fiends and metropolitan allure (pp. 55-101)

    In June 1919 theIllustrated Sunday Heraldpublished an article entitled ‘Is the Modern Woman a Hussy?’ The writer claimed that the country was being subjected to ‘a virulent epidemic of Retrospective Morality… that exasperating form of moral criticism which compares the faults of the present with the morals of the past’. He quoted a recent assertion of Judge Darling’s as one example: ‘“between the women of today and their mothers there is the whole width of heaven”’.¹ As seen in Chapter 1, a year earlier Darling had hoped that with the vote, women would ‘make it their business to...

  8. 3 The tribulations of Edith Thompson: sexual incitement as a capital crime
    3 The tribulations of Edith Thompson: sexual incitement as a capital crime (pp. 102-131)

    In late January 1923 several newspapers reported the disturbing story of a young entomologist, Gilbert Wickham, who had hanged himself from a beam in his lodgings in Barnes, South London. He had been totally naked save for a strapped-on ‘false bust’, a white hood over his head, and a rope tying his hands behind his back. In the previous months, to quote theEmpire News, he had ‘found himself gripped by the most compelling crime story of the century’ - that of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, accused of the murder of Mrs Thompson’s husband - and ‘by the time...

  9. 4 Mme Fahmy’s vindication: Orientalism, miscegenation fears and female fantasy
    4 Mme Fahmy’s vindication: Orientalism, miscegenation fears and female fantasy (pp. 132-175)

    The autobiography of Mrs Kate Meyrick, 1920s Soho nightclub owner, is peppered with references to club visits from famous names – entertainers, actresses, artists, writers. Royalty too make an appearance – the Crown Prince of Sweden, Prince Nicholas of Romania, and ‘one princely signature in the visitors’ book… associated with a grim tragedy… that of Fahmy Bey’.¹ The ‘grim tragedy’ to which she referred was his untimely death, for in the early hours of 10th July 1923, in the corridor of London’s Savoy hotel, the French wife of Egyptian Ali Fahmy had shot her husband dead.

    As told in a...

  10. 5 ‘Hunnish scenes’ and a ‘Virgin birth’: the contested marriage and motherhood of a curious modern woman
    5 ‘Hunnish scenes’ and a ‘Virgin birth’: the contested marriage and motherhood of a curious modern woman (pp. 176-209)

    In March 1923 the ,Illustrated Sunday Heraldinformed readers that news of the divorce caseRussellv.Russellhad ‘spread around the world. It has been more than a divorce case. It has been an intimate drama with the curtain rising and falling on climax after climax.’¹ The sexual innuendo here may have been inescapable, for the case had at its heart a debate over sex: how to speak it, and how to perform it. The case involved not only sex, but also aristocrats behaving badly, court-room drama, sensation, revelation - everything in fact that sold newspapers. Divorce reports were...

  11. Afterlives
    Afterlives (pp. 210-220)

    Throughout this book I have been looking not just at the female protagonists of a series of trials, but also how they were looked at, ‘explained’ and categorised by the press and other commentators at the time. I have attempted to delineate the cultural salience of these categorisations. But what happened later to these women, after their trials were over? And was there also an afterlife to the memory of each trial? These women were not merely the various ‘types’ that the press made them out to be, they were of course real people, whose collisions with the law had...

  12. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 221-238)
  13. Index
    Index (pp. 239-246)
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