“Woman’s Special Enemy”: Female Enmity in Criminal Discourse during the Long Nineteenth Century

The belief that women secretly hate other women is one with a long history. This article highlights the role that idea played in the myriad of literature produced about women of the “criminal classes” from the early Victorian period through to the end of the First World War, as interest in female crime and prostitution was at its height. The trope that women are each other’s worst enemies was evident in criminal discourse across transnational contexts; in particular, I explore how such narratives were received from the European and Anglo-American worlds and perpetuated in the Australian colonies during this period. It is shown that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commentators portrayed criminality as a moral contagion communicated by women—often deliberately and maliciously—to each other. The crimes most often associated with females were also depicted as being based upon the exploitation of women by other women. Descriptions of the female criminal persona emphasized their incapacity for friendship or suggested they were capable only of perverted interactions that tended towards mutual destruction. Moving across time and transnational contexts, various permutations of criminal discourses thus promoted an image in the popular imagination of female relationships as sites of danger and latent animosity, and moreover suggested that this reflected an underlying dynamic among women as a whole.