Modern Women on Trial

I'm very pleased to draw your attention to the release of Lucy Bland's new book, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper.

I hope to get a chance to read it soon and post some comments here; however, having spoken to the author several times about the book during its later stages, I'm eagerly looking forward to it.

From the Manchester University Press 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.

As I discuss in The Most Remarkable Woman in England, when Beatrice Pace first came to the attention of the press in January 1928, was in many ways not the image of the 'modern woman' that proved such a magnet for comment and controversy in the 1920s. Indeed, her image as a 'traditional' woman -- a faithful, caring wife and a doting mother -- positively inflected her treatment in the press accounts surrounding the 'Fetter Hill Mystery'.

However, after her acquittal, Beatrice underwent a 'makeover' of sorts, in a sense 'becoming modern' while building her 'new life' away from the shadow of the gallows.

In her new book, Bland provides a broad contextual analysis of the narratives of 'modernity' that surrounded women on trial in the early 1920s. 

Careful readers of The Most Remarkable Woman in England will note the many citations of Lucy Bland's previous important research on images of women on trial in inter-war Britain (especially Edith Thompson and Marguerite Fahmy). This was work that I found very helpful while constructing my own analysis of the 'tragic widow of Coleford'.

Not least for that reason, I'm very pleased to see the book's release, and it certainly deserves a wide readership.

On 'lewdness', 'annoyance' and turning a blind eye

Although the investigation into the death of Harry Pace and the trial of his widow Beatrice took place far, far away from the bustle of London's streets, the case became tangentially connected to a chronic problem in the policing of the metropolis in the 1920s: prostitution.

The connection had to do with debates about police powers, which (as I've noted here before) were a hotly debated topic in the latter half of the 'roaring twenties'.

In the context of putting some final touches on another essay of mine on the police powers issue, I was very pleased to discover that an article by my friend Stefan Slater has seen the light of day in the current issue of Law and History Review: 'Lady Astor and the Ladies of the Night: The Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and the Politics of the Street Offences Committee, 1927–28'.

The article is, unfortunately, behind one of those annoying paywalls, but if you have access to a good university library (or know someone who does), you should be able to get a copy.

The abstract runs like this:

Section 54 (11) of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 criminalized the act of a common prostitute causing annoyance by soliciting in public. For the police to implement this legislation was no simple matter, as no definition of “prostitute,” or indeed “annoyance,” was scribed in statute law. Although common law aided the interpretation of this offense—the case of Rex v. de Munck (1918): “We are of the opinion that prostitution is proved if it is shown that a woman offers her body commonly for lewdness of payment in return”—in practice, identifying a “common prostitute” and defining “annoyance” was left to the discretion of the individual police officer. Although specific squads were deployed to target streetwalkers in West End police divisions, where the presence of prostitutes was more likely to cause public offense, a “blind eye” was often turned to women soliciting in the less salubrious streets of the metropolis. Local knowledge gained on the beat and the informal advice of colleagues shaped an unofficial police policy of containment and toleration.

I had the pleasure of reading a couple of draft versions of this article and also discussing it and related topics with Stefan on several occasions.  

With articles like this one and this one, Stefan is establishing himself as one of the leading historians of twentieth-century British policing.

He's also probably one of the best barmen in London. 

This is a rare combination, you will admit.

Cornish...of the Yard

It's nice when friends get the attention they deserve: our copy of the London Review of Books arrived today, and what should I find but a review by John Pemble of The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England by Haia Shpayer-Makov.

Having long been an admirer of Haia's work (like this co-edited collection here), I'm very much looking forward to reading her book, which in some ways can be seen as describing one important part of the pre-history of the Pace case: the rise of the detective. 

By the inter-war period, the mystique around those magical words 'Scotland Yard' was fairly firmly in place, and there was something of a craze for detectives' memoirs in the period.

Among them we would find one by Chief Inspector George Cornish, the lead detective in the Pace case.

Here is he is, rather living up to the image of the detective, I would think.

This image comes from his autobiography, Cornish of the ‘Yard’: His Reminiscences and Cases (London: John Lane, 1935).

We'll be hearing more about him, don't worry.