Treacherous Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper

My proposed book is an interdisciplinary study in cultural history. Several sensational British court trials are taken as a prism through which to explore anxieties regarding women's sexual morality in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. At the end of the war, buoyed by the acquisition of greater independence, confidence and skills, many women now came up against resentful veterans profoundly transformed by trench warfare. 'A barrier of indescribable experience' was how Vera Brittain saw the gulf between the sexes. One manifestation of this gulf was a spiralling divorce rate and widespread concern with women's supposedly 'freer' sexual behaviour. How are historians to interpret the nature and level of this concern?
I have chosen to look at sensational trials not only because the debates within the law court and on the pages of newspapers reveal contemporary attitudes towards women and morality, but also because the widely read press reportage of such trials was a central site for contesting and negotiating the boundaries between the moral and immoral, the normal and the deviant. I analyse all aspects of these trials, not simply the trial transcripts, but also police archives, court records, press reportage and commentary, letters to the press, public opinion polls, memoirs, fictional spin-offs. In this period of the heyday of the 'dailies', reports of sensational trials were the staple of popular newspapers, and were a central form of popular cultural entertainment and spectacle. In making the private world of domesticity, sexual relationships, and marriage shockingly public, these reports generated lively discussion which spilled out beyond the confines of the page into public debate.
To identify the main sensational court trials involving female defendants, I examined The Times, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror for the period 1918-1924 - the war's aftermath, when social and political dislocation was at its height. I selected six cases; they were all tried in London, for they attracted the greatest press coverage. The themes threading through the trials included patriotism, nationalism and sexual perversity, drugs, 'race', miscegenation and Orientalism, the 'modern woman', sensation seeking, assertive female sexuality, and appropriate marital behaviour. I aim to demonstrate that all six trials entailed some notion of women as both traitorous - to their country, men, the 'white race', marriage, motherhood, domestic harmony, social order - and sexually transgressive - through 'sexual perversity', inter-racial sex, active sexual agency or adultery. The female defendants were labelled by the press, usually negatively, as 'flappers', 'modern women', 'women of a very low type', 'sexually perverse', 'sterile' or 'promiscuous' women. Furthermore, each trial, in the court proceedings, and in its reportage and commentary, manifested a critique of aspects of popular culture and modernity pertaining to women's leisure and lifestyle: cheap fiction, cinema, dance, night clubs. The trials became vehicles not simply for the passing of judgement on an individual or particular type of woman, but a castigation of women more broadly, particularly their pursuit of independence and sensation. I shall also demonstrate that the focus on women's behaviour simultaneously expressed concern about modernity, mass culture, class, race and nation.
Although there is a fair amount written about women in the British inter-war period as a whole, there is relatively little on women and morality in the early 1920s. My book will thus fill a gap, contributing to scholarship in the history of gender and sexuality, women's history, and social and cultural history generally. Presented accessibly, it will also appeal to the general reader.