Women, crime, and piracy in the early modern english popular imagination

Abstract

The early modern woman pirate was ripe for popular consumption because she titillatingly transgressed gender, class, and legal norms. Now depicted as heroes and sources of female empowerment, stories of female pirates in their own time served not to advance the position of women in English society, but to reinforce their subordinate status. By comparing the English fascination with these women in popular material with real-life examples of female criminals tried in the courts, this paper elucidates the disconnect between semi-fictionalized women in print, safely consumed at a distance, and real-world women who suffered the consequences of the legal and gender transgressions which made them so popular in literature. Allowed to be heroes only in the English imagination, fictionalized woman pirates were ultimately a tool of the patriarchal state, which tolerated their popularity in print but punished their bodies in life.