Themed Set: Women Who Kill

These pages have noticed many women to fall under the executioner’s shadow.

We have noticed too how remarkably women’s crimes and women criminals and women’s sentences are “gendered”.

In matters of patriarchy, familial behavior, sexual incontinence and resistance … it’s unsurprising to find women marked as such.

Yet even in run-of-the-mill criminal scenarios — what would be run-of-the-mill for a man — female offenders stand to attract the prurient gaze, from breathless media to academic masturbation.

When 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, even in a political purge gender can be a weapon.)

Join Executed Today this time to consider a few women of less exalted criminality … and our own response to seeing them as scaffold-fodder.

On this day..