This book, based on the author's University of Leiden doctoral thesis, contributes a detailed local study to questions of gender in early modern crime. In constant dialogue with the existing historiography, Kamp argues that the case of Frankfurt revises some common assumptions about the role of gender and urban environments. In particular, given the German city's especially strong focus on the patriarchal household as guarantor of public order, the urban setting did not create many new opportunities for female independence. The chapters most focused on Kamp's distinctive findings concentrate on issues of the household, sexual offenses, and mobility. Kamp builds especially on Joachim Eibach's excellent work on crime in eighteenth-century Frankfurt (Frankfürter Verhöre. Städtische Lebenswelten und Kriminalität im 18. Jahrhundert [2003]). Citing Eibach's concept of the open house, Kamp uses her findings to emphasize ways in which the household was not a protected or private space. She points to a number of ways in which assumptions about gender can obscure similarities between male and female patterns of offending.
Women, like men, primarily committed property crimes. Kamp uses offenders’ profiles of age, status, and migration to tie the crimes of both sexes to the economically vulnerable life stage between adolescence and young adulthood. Alongside the records of prosecution by urban authorities, Kamp looks at the role of informal controls that operated in households and other workplaces. She is able to trace some evidence of such controls in official records, in the mention of prior offenses that did not reach the courts.
The household was a bastion of public order, in which the Hausvater (House-father) could act as an informal arm of the authorities. It was also a scene of many of the thefts that women committed—but not, as has sometimes been assumed, because women were not active in “public.” Kamp finds that many thefts from domestic spaces by women were committed, not by women confined within the household, but by women from outside, who could move more easily than men between street and interior.
Kamp emphasizes that women's under-representation in the records for a particular crime cannot necessarily be taken as evidence that they did not commit it. In the receiving of stolen goods, for example, few women were charged, even though Kamp is able to document women's involvement in this trade, as an adjunct to their activity in the market for secondhand goods. In this case, it was the cultural stereotype of sneaky (male) Jewish traders that drove prosecutions rather than the reality.
Both sexes were subject to prosecution for sexual offenses, but as the focus of authorities turned away from adultery and toward control of illegitimacy in the eighteenth century, women were especially vulnerable. Increasing restriction of access to marriage—out of economic more than moral concerns—boosted illegitimacy, even as prosecution tightened. Kamp seeks to trace women's agency in their use of the courts to sue fathers for compensation, even though this resulted in the women's exposure to prosecution and punishment.
People without rights of citizenship or settlement in the city predominated in the criminal records—partly because of legal and cultural norms that favored locals, partly because of the precarious economic existence that prevailed among outsiders. Migrant women were especially vulnerable because they lacked the legitimating stamp of journeyman status that benefited some migrant young men. Kamp traces migration patterns among those accused: although males tended to travel larger distances, women made substantial treks as well. Both sexes were frequently ordered expelled from the city, a ready recourse for authorities before the modern turn toward incarceration. Both also returned to Frankfurt's territory in spite of banishment, largely to connect with networks of economic support. The numbers of men and women prosecuted for illegal return were roughly equal, with women slightly predominating. Despite this apparent parity, the concern of authorities about returnees was highly gendered: returning women were suspected of sexual immorality, men of connection to criminal gangs. But Kamp points to repeat offenders among women also committing crimes elsewhere—perhaps women were not as different from the men as the authorities thought.
This book's structure and argument remain those of a dissertation, but the work deserves its larger audience as a book. I cannot help mentioning my wish for better copy editing, which has become almost a routine complaint. I fault the publisher for this, but can also give praise for the very attractive cover. The book is aimed at specialists; scholars will need to consider Kamp's work as they pursue further research into crime and gender in the early modern period.
