Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique
July 15th, 2009 Headsman
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.
Also on this date
- 1927: Three persistent escapees
- 1907: Qiu Jin, Chinese feminist and revolutionary
- 1953: John Christie, a little late in the day
- 1685: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth
Entry Filed under: Themed Sets
Tags: gender
July 15th, 2009 at 3:04 am
[...] Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique [...]
July 16th, 2009 at 1:39 am
[...] Part of the Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique. [...]
July 17th, 2009 at 1:55 am
[...] Part of the Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique. [...]
October 8th, 2009 at 1:21 am
[...] we last paused to consider the mystique of the executed woman, we focused on political criminals whose deaths were a matter of state. (Though as we have seen, [...]
October 31st, 2009 at 1:28 pm
[...] to their frequency, just as they’ve attracted our eye for a couple of thematic collections (1, [...]