Women behaving badly
Lucy Worsley is fascinated by historic female criminals
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- Rosie Millard
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Your new radio series, Lady Swindlers, is a follow-up to your Lady Killers series — have you ever done anything illicit yourself?
If you’re asking whether I have a criminal record, then the answer is no! But I did once steal an easel from London’s Somerset House. We were filming a pair of paintings there and we needed two easels, but we only had one. I had seen some in the restaurant, so I went and “borrowed” one. The next thing I know, the security guard’s radio crackled and a voice said, “A blonde woman has just stolen an easel from the restaurant, do you know where she is?” I have never done anything like that ever again! And yes, I returned it.
You’re best known for your TV work; why did you choose to make this for radio?
We are able to cover stories which would never get made on TV because they’re not mainstream. This isn’t about kings and queens, it’s about individual women who nobody has ever heard about.
Each episode deals with an extraordinary woman — from 1920s shoplifter Alice Diamond to Mary Baker, who, in 1817, pretended to be the fictional Princess Caraboo from a far-off island kingdom…
My Lady Swindlers all do something that they aren’t expected to do. All swindlers operate with stereotypes – you expect one thing, you get another. Perhaps there’s a thing about looking meek and unthreatening that women use to their advantage. One of our subjects is Madame Rachel. Part of the reason she was pilloried was not so much about her crimes, but her transgression of succeeding in the male world of business.
Why was having an all-female team on the series so important to you?
In “true crime” shows, often the woman is either dead, or running through woods, naked, with a killer on her trail. We thought it would be fun to fip that and have women experts doing the talking. Our in-house historian is Professor Rosalind Crone of the Open University, who knows everything about prisons. We then have Professor Lorraine Gamman of Central Saint Martin’s, who is founder of the Design Against Crime Research Lab, which helps protect shops against shoplifting, for example. She is so fabulous! She freely admits her father was a thief. Speaking to her makes me realise I live in a middle-class bubble and there are areas of the world I don’t know.
You also had an all-female team for Lady Killers. Has this been commented on?
Absolutely, yes. One complaint we got was from someone who wrote in and said, “Where is the balance? All these experts are female! What’s gone wrong?” From a genuine person!
What was your response?
What’s gone wrong is centuries of patriarchy! I own the fact that we use women who are in bad places as a way in, but we do this with a particularly female gaze and tell these stories as feminists. It gives us confidence to look for details and attitudes, which can help us learn to live our own lives better today. One of the prevalent attitudes today is that somehow, we are better than people of the past. Actually, the answer is that no, we are not.
Do we look at female criminals using a different moral scale?
Yes, I think we possibly do – and possibly should. You can’t always condone what these criminals did, but you can see why they did it. Given that they are living in a world which is made by and for men, they come from a position of the underdog.
Do you think women ought to be given custodial sentences?
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I’d say the consensus of experts is that putting a woman into prison for a short sentence is very damaging. And that any punishment is dwarfed by the damage done to her children, to her job, to her accommodation, to the wider community.
Authors
Rosie Millard
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