Gender and Policing in Early Modern England

Download or read book Gender and Policing in Early Modern England written by Jonah Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the beginnings of a shift from one model of gendered power to another. Over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, traditional practices of local government by heads of household began to be undermined by new legal ideas about what it meant to hold office. In London, this enabled the emergence of a new kind of officeholding and a new kind of policing, rooted in a fraternal culture of official masculinity. London officers arrested, searched, and sometimes assaulted people on the basis of gendered suspicions, especially poorer women. Gender and Policing in Early Modern England describes how a recognisable form of gendered policing emerged from practices of local government by patriarchs and addresses wider questions about the relationship between gender and the state.