Abstract
Magistrates’ records from the English town of Portsmouth show the town’s women to have been exceptionally violent. Women accounted, on average, for just over 31% of all assaults on record for the years 1653 to 1781. We used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to compare the fighting styles of men and women and to examine the extent to which these were gendered. Particular attention was paid to levels of violence between pairs of brawlers. The most common form of violence was male-on-male (2,666 cases), followed by female-on-female (1,690), male-on-female (1,675), and female-on-male (299). Of these pairings, female-on-male assaults were the most violent, as measured by the types of weapons used by the aggressors, and female-on-female pairings were the least violent.
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Funding was provided by grant 410-2000-0467 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors are profoundly grateful to the gracious and highly capable staff of Portsmouth’s Museums and Records Service, including, most notably, Michael Gunton, Diana Gregg, Donna Malcolmson, and Sarah Speller. Special thanks also go to the team of volunteers who transcribed the town’s sessions papers, thus greatly facilitating our entry of the same into a database. They were, in alphabetical order, Kate Beatty, Barbara Gower, Ursula Heinrich, Pam Honeysett, George Hothersall, Marjorie Hothersall, Una Lowe, Betty Richardson, Marjorie Ripper, and Brenda Whorton. There was one other volunteer: an inmate at the Kingston Prison just outside Portsmouth. Back in Toronto, several more people assisted in entering the records into a database. They were, in alphabetical order, Joanne Cordingley, James Hewitson, Allyson Lunny, Yvonne Pelletier, and Victoria Vaag.
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Warner, J., Graham, K. & Adlaf, E. Women Behaving Badly: Gender and Aggression in a Military Town, 1653–1781. Sex Roles 52, 289–298 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-2673-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-2673-6