ABSTRACT
In 1895, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph commented how “Poison is pre-eminently a woman’s weapon. From Lucretia Borgia to Martha Needle, all the most famous poisoners were women”. The comment came in a report of the high-profile trial of wife poisoner George Dean. The insinuation was that Dean must have been innocent of the crime he was accused of, as he was a man and men were less likely to use poison. This study examines homicidal poisonings tried between 1860 and 1920 where the defendant was a woman, using data collected for New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria. This chapter will show that while in reality male poisoners vastly outnumbered women in Australia, the press and courts of the nineteenth century continued to view poisoning as a woman’s crime. This in turn affected how female defendants were treated by the media and legal system.
