ExecutedToday.com

Our tour through the world’s condemned has made the company of many a woman, but our hobby is a noticeably gendered one: whether as common criminals, fallen royals, political prisoners, war criminals, or any other subset of the execution-prone, women who face the headsmen map differently in the public conscience than men.

If the distinctions are none other than those that structure every social transactions, the dramatic tableau of the scaffold raises the stakes, sharpens the gendering, be she whore or madonna, black widow or holy maid.

Often, condemned women excite more sympathy, even romantic longing; occasionally, a crime’s inversion of femininity redoubles their opprobrium. A few criminal categories — abortion, witchcraft — are, for lack of a better term, female-gendered by default.

Though this series hardly marks the last women for these pages, three very notable cases in very different situations offer a vantage point not only on female and male through history, but on one’s own response to the spectacle of the executed woman.

• July 15: Princess Misha

• July 16: Anne Askew
• July 17: Charlotte Corday

Also On This Date

• 1685: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth