Women. Crime & Justice

In “Historical Perspectives: From Witch Hunts to PMS,” the chapter of her book “Unruly Women,” Karlene Faith (1993) dwelt upon the ‘images of women’ within historical paradigm from witch-hunts to PMS. The scholar based her analysis on the histories of white Anglo-Saxon women from England and Canada in the period between the 15th and the 19th centuries. E. Comack (1996), in the turn, reflected over popular myths on the painful issue of women’s victimization. The aforestated persistent themes in definitions of women’s deviance as well as the way the ‘myths about rape’ reflect historical images of women and/or blame the victim are analyzed in the current paper.

It seems that both the authors claimed that society in its historical developmental perspective was permeated with gender prejudices and masculine chauvinism in regard to women.

Faith (1993) argued that due to male dominance underlying historical and modern societal institutions, such as family, community, church, economic structures, legal and juridical establishments, women were segregated