Twisted Sisters

This collection of papers from the Women's History Network conference Twisted Sisters spans the medieval period to modernity. The papers look at women's involvement in crime and deviance, including infanticide, social deviance, witchcraft, and political influence in both private and public spheres of Scottish society. A new perspective is offered on accepted norms of female behavior, challenging the received view of women as necessarily restrained by the conventions of their time. The papers show that womanly emotions, so long held to epitomize femininity, have an energetic flipside in ambition, anger, radicalism, and transgression played out on the domestic and social stage-that women throughout the centuries have been actors in crime and deviance rather than mere passive recipients of punishment.