Criminals, Idiots & Minors: Victorian Women & The Law
How is a woman like a criminal or a child? In what ways is she intellectually or developmentally disabled? Social reformer Frances Power Cobbe posed these questions in her 1869 essay “Criminal, Idiots, Women and Minors.” The answer, she said, lay in their shared legal status. In this course we will read essays like Cobbe’s in conjunction with case law and legislation on marriage and divorce, property and inheritance, education, and disease in order to examine how legal narratives shaped Victorian women’s, and men’s, identity. Together these readings will provide a context and counterpoint to novels of the period that plot the practical consequences of this legislation on men’s and women’s lives and which imaginatively projected alternatives to the “legal fictions” about women. Readings will include legal statutes, trial reports and legal opinions, social commentary and, of course, novels by Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and others. This course satisfies the interdisciplinary literacy requirement for the major, and is an elective for the English minor and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.
