‘Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions’: Criminal Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Throughout the early modern period, women were charged with being virtuous, chaste, modest, genteel, courteous and, most importantly, obedient to their male forebears and to their husbands. Contemporary didactic literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clearly advocated and supported this prescribed behaviour of moral rectitude and gendered subservience based on contemporary perceptions of the disorderly nature of women and their consequent need to be controlled by men.1 Many examples of this patriarchal sentiment are evident in Scotland; a country with a long established history of religious piety and intensity.