Gender discrimination and juries in the 20th century

Abstract

This article presents a comparative study of the 20th-century exclusion of women from participation on juries. It explains that until the 1970s, and in some cases even the 1990s, substantial formal limitations on jury franchise were placed on women in Ireland, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. This situation existed notwithstanding women’s equality of political franchise through the vote and despite judicial references to the centrality of the jury. While in England and Wales women were not treated differently from men in formal terms after the 1920s, property qualifications denied them substantive equality and informal limitations excluded women disproportionately. We highlight some distinctive features of the English experience as compared and contrasted with the laws and policies on jury composition operating in other jurisdictions, and ask whether the legacies left by the traditionally unrepresentative jury and the battles for gender equality offer lessons relevant to understanding jury trials in contemporary times.

Inter-gender murder in NSW, 1901–1955: Reconsidering the laws of the fraternity

“…Yet, no woman was executed after the controversial hanging of Louisa Collins in 1889 for the poisoning murder of her husband (Kukulies-Smith & Priest, 2011). As late as 1955, jury service was restricted to men, and men alone sat on the bench and served as ministers in the state executive in NSW (Choo & Hunter, 2018). Thus, in every prosecution for IGM, men determined the fate of defendants – female and male – from the decision to charge to the grant or denial of clemency.…”

Gender, intimate partner homicide, and rurality in early-twentieth-century New South Wales

“…Criminological studies show that Indigenous and recent-immigrant women currently make up a disproportionate number of females charged with IP homicide in Australia (Stubbs and Tolmie 2008;Cussen and Bryant 2015). The ranks of the police, prosecutors, and judges are still dominated by men today, but in the state of NSW, women could not serve on criminal juries and high courts until the 1970s (Choo and Hunter 2018). Nevertheless, the proposition that the criminal justice system's exclusive masculine cast exacerbated rural women's greater exposure to domestic violence in the past must be tested, using evidence and methods appropriate to study the relevance of rurality in specific historical settings.…”