A unique selection of seventeenth century pamphlets revealing the popular press's obsessive concern with female violence—a violence that is almost always domestic—is presented in this book, along with a discussion of the texts' historical and cultural contexts. Modernized and annotated, these pamphlets vividly illustrate the precarious and often contradictory legal position of the early modern English woman. Because the early modern woman was so thoroughly defined by her marital status (either married or to be married), the crimes chronicled in this study—infanticide, child murder and husband murder—focus almost exclusively on women's roles as wives and mothers. Chosen both for the class and social issues they investigate and for their correspondence to the traditional stages of a woman's existence in those times (maid, wife, and widow), the pamphlets included in this study offer an invaluable resource for interrogating the domestic, economic, and legal condition of seventeenth century women.
"In Nature's Cruel Stepdames, Susan C. Staub presents a careful selection and discussion of seventeenth-century popular press crime pamphlets to reveal a contemporary fascination with murder by women, especially by mothers and wives. Part of the Duquesne University Press Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies Series, this collection serves as a valuable resource for students of language, literature, and women's studies. The selection of pamphlets has been thoroughly modernized and annotated, making this book especially useful to readers new to the period. In its format and focus, Nature's Cruel Stepdames can be thought to resemble Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640 by Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus.
Nature's Cruel Stepdames is organized into two parts. Part 1, "The Contexts," provides an introduction to the history of the pamphlet and to women in the popular press during the period, followed by an extensive discussion of several economic, legal, class, and gender issues central to the eleven pamphlets that constitute Part 2, "The Texts." All of the pamphlets reflect "an almost obsessive concern with female violence ... [that] is almost always domestic" (7). The selections offer a range of attitudes toward unruly women, ultimately demonstrating, according to Staub, an ambivalent attitude toward murderous women in the period (42). Staub's findings are compelling ones, and she informs them with the work of scholars including Catherine Belsey, Natalie Zemon Davis, Frances Dolan, and Christina Larner.
The pamphlets represent the conventional stages of womanhood: maid, wife, widow. To these, Staub includes the role of married mother, given the number and popularity of stories depicting extraordinary crimes committed by married mothers. The texts included in Part 2 are arranged into four sections: wives who murder their husbands; married mothers and widows who murder their children; unmarried women who kill their illegitimate infants; and the miraculous case of Anne Greene."
-- Sarah Scott, Seventeenth-Century News