Nan Sloane, Uncontrollable Women: Radicals, Reformers and Revolutionaries. London, UK: I. B. Tauris, 2022, 304pp., £20.00 (hardback).
On the surface, this powerful book is about radical women in 18th- and 19th-century England. It offers a vivid account of women’s political activism, and we are privileged to hear the direct voices of women as campaigners, speakers, organizers, and “problem-raisers” (Garland 2010: 309). However, at a deeper level, it is a book about a patriarchal state and how it tyrannizes women who dare to protest and refuse to stay at home. The title, Uncontrollable Women is revealing because it speaks of the male gaze, and how leading patriarchs of the day vilified politically active women as impious, troublesome, unseemly, dangerous, and “monstrous inversions of the natural order” (p. 115).
The book focuses on radical, reformist, and revolutionary women between 1789 and 1832. The setting is England; however early chapters concentrate on revolutionary France and the activism of Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams. The book is divided into four parts allowing the author, Nan Sloane, to focus on class and political differences between the women featured. The first three chapters focus on middle-class women of the 1790s, while chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on working-class women between 1812 and 1819. A key strength of the book is that Nan Sloane deliberately focuses on non-elite women as writers, protestors, booksellers, factory workers, mothers and “sisters of the Earth” (p. 110) during some of the most turbulent periods of the 18th and 19th centuries. Parts III and IV are devoted to “female free-thinkers” (p. 11) and socialists who were opposed to the governance of the Church and State. Above all, the book is an excellent resource on the journey of women’s rights, and the idea that women are “nobody’s property but their own” (p. 224).
It is not a criminology book per se, nor does it have an explicit state crime focus, however Uncontrollable Women is an important account of state harm, structural violence, and patriarchal tyranny. Chapter 6 focuses on the Peterloo massacre of 1819, in which a crowd of 60,000 people were kettled into a field and the exits were blocked. There are remarkable descriptions of military sabres cutting through whalebone corsets, leaving women disfigured, dead, and experiencing miscarriage. The criminal justice system also relentlessly punishes and torments the women. They are harassed, imprisoned, and treated as the property of their husbands. These tyrannies are aided and abetted by leading men of the period.
The personal is political in all chapters of the book because many of the women are imprisoned mothers; some are unmarried and living with male partners; they have caring responsibilities, jobs, mouths-to-feed, and the police at the door. There are suicide attempts, miscarriages, premature births, and domestic violence. It is worth noting that working-class women had already worked for two decades by the time they were in their mid-twenties (p. 76). In addition to these hardships, the women had to endure misogynistic abuse, being described as “hyenas in petticoats” (p. 36) and “scribbling trollopes” (p. 52) for daring to speak out, march, protest, and publish. There are clear and direct parallels with modern events and injustices throughout the book, including galloping food prices, criminalization of protest, victim-blaming discourses (p. 134), and crowd-funding appeals for victims of state violence (p. 133).
One notable point is that it has an English focus. There are glimpses of Irish Republicans and French revolutionaries, but there are no Welsh or Scottish women featured in the eleven chapters. Also, at times, the book risks foregrounding male political voices over those of the women themselves. We often see the women through men’s eyes. It would have been useful to have a complete list of the women’s names alongside their hometowns to emphasize their individual stories.
These critiques aside, it is rich and well-researched goldmine on women’s political activism and their torment by an unrepentant state. A real strength of the book is that it does not excuse or whitewash the unpleasant elements of some of the women’s characters. We are given snapshots of overt racism, class contempt, sniggering at regional accents, and the lack of sisterhood in some accounts. These politically active women were not necessarily all pioneers of feminism. Nan Sloane offers a clear, rounded view of her subjects.
The book will be of particular interest those who specialize in crimes of the powerful, gender studies, and feminist criminology. It will be appreciated by researchers interested in female imprisonment and gender segregation. Indeed, there are some tantalizing glimpses of “lost” prisons including the infamous Newgate, the “luxuries” of Dorchester Gaol, and King’s Bench Prison, which is described a “notorious hotbed of anti-government feeling” (p. 157).