Bryn Mawr Women and Crime Exhibition

Bryn Mawr University have a new online exhibition of criminal British and American women entitled 'Pointing Fingers: Women, Sin, Crime and Guilt. Here's a preview of some of the stories it tells:

• Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse (c.1584–1659), who became the subject of Elizabethan drama on stage as well as off – a pickpocket, who evaded capture by dressing in men's clothing.

• May Churchill Sharpe aka Chicago May (1877-1929) - prostitute, thief, and con woman, who used "badger game," enticing men to private rooms where they would be 'interrupted' by her 'husband' or 'father' who would then rob him.

• Beautiful Rachel Cunningham from Philadelphia, who suffered from "demonic" desires and began a career of "adultery and lewd couplings...fashionable folly, vice, and profligacy" into an "over-whelming ocean of sensual pleasures."  

And if you fear for your own morals after reading about all these scandalalous women, then you can download extracts from the exhibition, including the following improving pamphlets:

Runaway Girls and Their Startling Adventures: True Narratives of Actual Occurrences with Real Names of Many Young Women who Imbibed Romantic Notions of Life, Through Reading Sensational Novels in a Class of Highly Injurious Weekly Story Papers, and Left their Homes. Philadelphia: Barclay, c. 1878.

 

Thomas A.  Faulkner. From the Ball-Room to Hell. Chicago: Henry Bros. & Co., c. 1894.