Twisted sisters - Yvonne Galloway Brown|Rona Ferguson

This collection arose from the Women's History Network conference "Twisted Sisters" held at Glasgow Caledonian University in October 2000. Spanning the mediaeval period to modernity, the papers look at women's involvement in crime and deviance in both private and public spheres of Scottish society including infanticide, social deviance, witchcraft and political influence. They offer a new perspective on accepted norms of female behaviour, challenging the received view of women as necessarily restrained by the conventions of their time. History has consructed a masculine narrative of violence where war, aggression, political commitment and criminality are the province of strongminded men. These chapters redefine the boundaries to include the actions of equally strongminded women. They show us that womanly emotions, so long held to epitomize femininity, have an energetic flipside in ambition, anger, radicalism, and transgression played out on the domestic and social stage; that women throughout the centuries have been actors in crime and deviance rather than mere passive recipients of punishment.