No Longer a Crime

THE LAW PUNISHED HER. THEN THE LAW CHANGED.

A woman sentenced to twelve months' hard labour for bearing an illegitimate child. Sixteen countrywomen imprisoned after confronting strikebreakers. A seventeen-year-old locked up in Cambridge for walking with a university man. Another imprisoned for refusing the compulsory examination a policeman had decided she must undergo.

Almost all of it was lawful.

No Longer a Crime uncovers fifteen remarkable cases from British legal history in which women were convicted, imprisoned, committed, examined or detained under laws and powers that England and Wales later repealed, abolished or fundamentally changed.

THREE CENTURIES OF CRIME, PUNISHMENT AND LEGAL REFORM

• Rebecca Goodman - twelve months' hard labour and discipline, ordered by Cornish magistrates in the 1740s after the birth of an illegitimate child that might become a charge on her parish.
• The Ascott Martyrs - sixteen working women sent to prison with hard labour during an agricultural strike.
• Daisy Hopkins - imprisoned at seventeen by Cambridge University's extraordinary private jurisdiction.
• Caroline Wybrow - caught inside the compulsory examination system created by the Contagious Diseases Acts.
• Edith Mary Roberts - sentenced to death before the Infanticide Act changed how such cases could be judged.
• Mary Jane Baynon - prosecuted in a history of abortion law that continued into the twenty-first century.
• Helen Duncan - convicted during the Second World War under the Witchcraft Act 1735.

Other cases expose the forgotten law surrounding vagrancy, attempted suicide, drunkenness, pregnancy, infanticide, mental deficiency and women's treatment by the criminal justice system.

THE CRIME COULD DISAPPEAR. THE RECORD DID NOT.

Drawing on Old Bailey proceedings, quarter sessions records, statutes, law reports, parliamentary debates and contemporary newspapers, Eleanor Kenward follows the changing English legal system from Georgian houses of correction and Victorian courtrooms to major reforms enacted in 2026.

This is not simply a catalogue of strange old laws. It is the story of what happens when behaviour once punished by the state is reclassified, decriminalised or placed beyond the reach of the law - while the convictions, prison records and newspaper reports remain behind.

For readers drawn to British social history, women's history, Victorian crime, historical court cases and the hidden history of criminal law, No Longer a Crime reveals a justice system changing one case, one statute and one forgotten woman at a time.

THE LAW COULD CHANGE OVERNIGHT.
WHAT IT HAD ALREADY DONE COULD NOT.