Anne F. Logan

In Search of Equal Citizenship: the campaign for women magistrates in England and Wales, 1910–1939

In early 1920 women in England and Wales sat as Justices of the Peace (JPs) for the first time, becoming the first women to have any formal role in the country’s law courts. Less than thirty years later nearly a quarter of JPs were women, a proportion unparalleled in any other activity of civic and public life other than voting. Yet the legislation that admitted women to the magisterial bench—the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act—is usually pronounced a failure by historians. This article argues that the appointment of so many women to the magisterial bench in a relatively short period of time was a success for the women’s movement and that it was due very largely to the agency of some of the early women magistrates themselves and the efforts of the organisations to which they belonged, albeit working with the grain of reform in the criminal justice system. The article also maps the campaigners’ use of the twin concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties’ within their overall project for the advancement of equal citizenship.

Professionalism and the impact of England’s first women justices, 1920-1950

This article examines the impact of Englands first women justices of the peace (JPs) on the work of lay magistrates in the period 1920–50. It argues that the early women JPs (many of whom had been active in the womens suffrage campaign), and the organizations that they belonged to, helped to transform the institution of the lay magistracy by adopting a more ‘professional’ approach, evidenced in their willingness to educate and train themselves for their new role. In consequence, this article challenges conventional definitions of ‘professionalism’, arguing that, where the work of JPs was concerned, the boundary between ‘voluntary’ and ‘professional’ activities was less clear than might be supposed. Furthermore, the willingness of many women magistrates in particular (later followed by some of their male colleagues) to undergo training helped to ensure the survival of the lay element in the criminal justice system to the present day.

Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of womens suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Frys career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.

Women in the Criminal Courts

‘You gentlemen are totally incapable of administering justice with decency and fairness without the help of women’.1 These words of the suffragist, Nina Boyle, in 1913 encapsulate the frustration felt by feminists in the face of the overwhelmingly masculine courts of law and the male domination of penal administration. By then personal experience had brought home to a number of (mostly middle-class) women the reality of Britain’s system of justice as they faced trial in the courts and incarceration in the jail. Although their numbers were relatively small, the suffragette prisoners were anxious to share their experiences with the wider public in periodicals and prison memoirs. The courts were recollected as an alien environment devoid of feminine influence, where elderly magistrates dealt perfunctorily with ‘ordinary’ women, even if they took a little longer to decide on the fate of ladies.2 Suffragette accounts of police cells and prisons revealed unimagined levels of dirt, inadequate clothing and poor food and, significantly, an absence of women in authority. Although prisons housing women invariably had female warders (the same could not be said about police cells) there were no women governors or even medical officers.

‘Building a New and Better Order’? Women and Jury Service in England and Wales, c.1920–70

The 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act extended womens citizenship by enabling them to serve as magistrates and jurors in the countrys law courts. Yet while the proportion of women magistrates rose steadily over the next fifty years to reach almost half, even in the 1960s juries remained overwhelmingly male, largely as a result of the continuation of outdated rules concerning jury qualification which remained unreformed until the 1970s. This article analyses the reasons for the delay in reforming the law on jury composition and examines attempts by feminists to bring about change. It argues that the continued tendency among the legal profession and others to regard the criminal law as ‘a mans world’ was especially salient in delaying further reform of juries, but that by the 1960s a combination of efforts by womens organisations and changing cultural attitudes enabled the achievement of gender equality on juries. It also contends that the eventual reform was a success for womens organisations associated with ‘first-wave’ feminism which highlighted the jury issue in the early 1960s.

Women in the Penal System

‘It is not always realised that the prison system was made by the people of this country and that, if anything is amiss with it, we citizens and voters are accountable, not those who bear the burden of putting our laws into operation.’1 These words of a former Lady Inspector of Prisons published in 1922 reminded readers that the country’s penal system was a proper matter of concern for electors, including recently enfranchised women. As Elizabeth Crawford has recently noted, one long-term consequence of the imprisonment of suffragettes during their struggle for the vote was the development of a campaign for improvements in prison conditions.2 Of course, the concern and interest of middle-class women reformers in the penal system had other, deeper roots, extending at least as far back as the era of Elizabeth Fry and her ‘lady’ colleagues, who visited women in prison almost a century before the suffrage struggle reached its height. Many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century-women, not just feminists, regarded social welfare issues — especially those such as the treatment of female prisoners that had strong moral overtones — as quintessentially the province of educated women: notions of what constituted ‘womanly work’ were shared by suffragists and anti-suffragists alike.3 For example, the Duchess of Bedford, president of the Lady Visitors’ Association from 1900 to 1920, committed herself to social work with the women in Aylesbury Convict Prison, yet she was less than sympathetic towards the hunger-striking suffragettes.4

Women’s agency, activism and organisation

ABSTRACT Agency, activism and organisation have been central and constant themes in women’s and gender history. They provide useful lenses through which to study women’s interaction with the social world. Both separately and in combination, they constitute a valuable analytical framework for the study of women’s lives, culture and experience in past societies by foregrounding and articulating historical challenges made to patriarchy, social structure and the status quo. Agency highlights the individual action/social structure explanatory dichotomy whilst activism and organisation help focus on the specific ways in which women have challenged, resisted, overthrown or gained entrance to social structures and institutions that had tended to ignore, exclude, disadvantage or penalise them.

Making Socialists: Mary Bridges Adams and the fight for knowledge and power, 1855–1939JANE MARTIN

mostly in passing, alerts the reader to the question but leaves it unexplored. He does take up social and historical questions, those surrounding Near Eastern slavery, for example, and the manner in which trade in women flourished in the Abbasid era. But these comments largely occur in an opening chapter: Caswell disappoints in not integrating the biographies of select singers—the stuff of two successive chapters—with the wider context. He is also not altogether helpful on matters relating to performance. As we have them, the words, phrases, lines of verse, are torn from their context, as Caswell himself rightly points out. The typically brief, pithy, and, yes, often hackneyed texts were mostly sung/performed and it seems safe to assume that, in context, which is to say, the cultural ‘sessions’ (majlis, pl. majalis) organized in Baghdadi courts and fine houses, the verse took on greater hue and depth. I should disclose that I reviewed the work in manuscript; I am quoted on the back cover, praising Caswell for his effort to bring the singers’ verse into sharper focus. This is the book’s chief merit. The consistent support, indeed close and deeply learned evaluation, of Geert Jan van Gelder, his doctoral advisor at Oxford, where this project first came to light, is evident throughout; Jan van Gelder’s stamp on the book’s style and organization is clear. Nowhere, however, is he properly acknowledged. If this was Caswell’s choice, then shame, if the publisher’s decision, then ill considered. In either case, a glaring misstep.

Women in the Professions, Politics and Philanthropy 1840–1940 KATHERINE BRADLEY & HELEN SWEET; The Feminine Public Sphere: middle-class women in civic life in Scotland, c.1870–1914 MEGAN SMITLEY

from Habib. Still, Habib’s volume presents fascinating primary sources that will inspire other scholars to pick up where she left off, both in terms of deconstructing the texts with which she wrestles, and in terms of mining other texts for comparison. Moreover, her assertion that Middle Easterners—and those engaged in the debate over how to understand Middle Eastern sexualities—must confront the history of pre-modern homosexualities to better understand modern attitudes is a timely call, particularly given the human rights issues at stake in contemporary debates about homosexuality in the Middle East.

Feminism and Criminal Justice Reform

On 27 July 1920 a deputation of representatives of organisations jointly lobbying over the government’s proposals for reform of juvenile courts in London met the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary. The government’s bill (which aimed to concentrate the handling of cases involving young people in a few specially established juvenile courts in the capital where they would be heard by lay men and women Justices of the Peace [JPs] accompanying the stipendiary magistrates) was facing opposition in parliament and from the Metropolitan (stipendiary) magistrates, a group of qualified barristers who were employed to adjudicate in the capital’s busy courts of summary jurisdiction. The deputation included representatives of the Howard Association, the Labour Party, the National Council of Women (NCW), the Penal Reform League (PRL), the Standing Joint Committee of the Industrial Women’s Organisations (SJCIWO), the State Children’s Association, Wage-Earning Children’s Committee and the Women’s Local Government Society1