ABSTRACT
As a historian, retroactively identifying women who might be said to belong to the criminal underworld is a loaded task. For many female offenders processed by the justice system, criminal offending was a transitory episode. However, they were exceptions, from leading figures of crime to inveterate petty offenders constantly at the socio-economic margins of society. The question then arises as to how the experiences of these people can be investigated and captured without reinscribing nineteenth-century values and methods of definition. To simplify, was there an underworld and if so who is encompassed by the term? Is deciding whether someone was part of such a grouping necessarily a subjective exercise, or can objective criteria be developed to assist such identifications or quantitatively define the underworld’s limits at any given point? Drawing on police, court and prison records from Melbourne across 1860–1920, this chapter will reveal the diversity and amorphous nature of Melbourne’s female underworld by creating a profile of the city’s criminal women.
