Women often committed half of the crimes in early modern cities. Only the German city of Frankfurt showed very different crime figures. Historian Jeannette Kamp has now found the explanation.
We would be having a role today if women accounted for half of the crime. A few hundred years ago, on the other hand, this was quite normal. Men dealt more blows in quarrels and women had more trouble with the sex court, but the similarities were greater than the differences:most men and women were equally guilty of theft.
Vulnerable women
Historians have not been researching the proportion of women in the history of crime for very long. Precisely because everyone always assumed that it would be marginal. Now that this image has been tilted, they are looking for explanations. After research into London, Amsterdam and Leiden, it seems that the greater freedom in these cities had an effect on the crime rates. Poor, unmarried women who had no social network were particularly vulnerable. When the search for work in a foreign city was disappointing, it was only a small step to theft or prostitution.
However, the percentage of women in crime was not so high everywhere. How is this possible? Jeannette Kamp (Leiden University) is currently doing her PhD on criminal women in Frankfurt between 1600 and 1800. There the women enjoyed a lot less freedom than in Holland. Kamp sees the effect of this reflected in the female share of the crime figures:“The percentage of female suspects in Frankfurt did not exceed thirty percent, and that was even in peak years, such as the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). At the end of the same century it was even only fourteen percent. However, the type of crimes and the socio-economic position of the suspects correspond to those from the other cities.”
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Women in Frankfurt did not have the same rights as women in London or Holland. For example, they were not allowed to live on their own, but had to be part of a household, as a family member or maid. As a result, the women were less free, but they did have room and board, so that they fell less quickly into crime when the economy was not doing well.
Within the household, the man, the family man, was in charge of his family members and employees. “Unlike ours, the German head of the family had a semi-legal status. He had to keep his household in line and mutual disputes were resolved by him as much as possible. He beat, withheld pay or fired people. The court was only a last resort,” said Kamp. On the other hand, a maid could also sue her 'family man'. “A man had severely beaten his maid for making coffee for herself from the leftover ground coffee beans. He found this theft and the court agreed with him, but so did her. His punishment had been far too severe.”
This strict in-house regulation explains why few cases of theft by the employees such as the maidservant ended up in the city court. This dampens the numbers considerably, as theft was one of the most common crimes. Crime was probably there, but it is not reflected in the figures.
Burtwurst
Kamp came across these kinds of stories while reading the pieces of the Peinliche Verhöramt investigated, looking for explanations for the low crime rates. This urban institution was charged with prosecuting crime in Frankfurt. It was both a court and a police station that prosecuted everyday crimes such as theft and violence.
“These sources gave me a glimpse into the everyday lives of ordinary people. Because of this, I didn't see them as criminals, but as people trying to make ends meet. For example, a woman was suspected of running a brothel, whereupon she defended herself with 'I have no idea what people are doing upstairs, I'm just baking bratwurst downstairs.' That's nice, isn't it?"
More active court
Migrants also feature frequently in court records. Theft, the most common offense committed by men and women, was often their fault. “When an acquaintance had stolen something, people more often arranged it among themselves. You did go to court with a caught stranger, to have you compensated before the perpetrator had left again," explains Kamp. She discovered that women stole from houses remarkably more often than men, because they could enter strange houses without being suspicious.
“Waitresses looking for work and women beggars went door-to-door and walked in. Houses were much more open then than they are now and often there was also a shop or warehouse. So it was common for strange women to walk in and out for these reasons, and thieves would use that as an excuse to get in. When the resident walked out of the room, they took what they saw on the table.”
In the course of the eighteenth century, the figures of women committing theft even exceeded those of men. While historians often explain fluctuating crime rates by linking them to grain prices, Kamp found a different explanation. “The reasoning is that food shortages increase crime, but this was not the case in Frankfurt. I did see that the government was taking much more active action against vagrants and migrants, for fear of forming gangs. This leads to rising crime rates.”
Alimony
In Frankfurt there was another court, the consistory, which women made frequent use of, Kamp discovered to her surprise. “Unmarried pregnant women sued the future fathers when they did not take their responsibility. The woman herself was then fined for immoral behavior, but she could also enforce a form of alimony.”
The consistory was specially set up for the prosecution of sexual offences, such as extramarital sexual relations and prostitution. Sex outside marriage was forbidden for men and women, but in practice it was mainly the pregnant women who had to answer for this, as they could not deny it. “This system seems oppressive towards women at first. On the one hand it is, because this was the only way for women to come to a solution, but on the other hand they could actively use it themselves.”
Frankfurt was not the only city with such a court, they existed all over Germany. We also had such a court in the Netherlands, but here it had no legal jurisdiction. The city council of Frankfurt would rather see the unmarried pregnant women compensated in this way than that they have to live on the urban poor treasury. It was a different story for migrant women, who were unceremoniously evicted from the city.
German system
Kamp concludes that the room for maneuver was not the same for every woman. “In this kind of research you should always ask yourself whether it is a married or unmarried woman, migrants or permanent residents.” In addition, the previously given explanations for high crime rates do not appear to be valid for all women throughout Europe during this period.
“We thought that there was no strict social control in cities, but Frankfurt proves otherwise. It is therefore not true that women in cities are always freer. For other German cities we have no crime figures over such a long period or from the city government. We do not yet know whether Frankfurt is unique for Germany, but there seem to be many similarities for a German system.”
German women probably committed fewer crimes because they lived in a strict social network and therefore fell less often into poverty. But on the other hand, the crime figures are more rosy because the sentences handed out by the family fathers are not in the files of the court.