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.
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Oct. 8: Rachel Wall, pirate
Oct. 9: Aileen Wournos, serial killer
Oct. 10: Susan Newell, the last woman hanged in Scotland
Oct. 11: Margaret Waters, baby farmer
Oct. 12: Pauline McCoy
On this day..
- 1980: Necdet Adalı and Mustafa Pehlivanoğlu, September 12 coup sacrifices
- 1946: Walter Grimm and Karl Mumm, judicial murderers
- 1852: Adam Wimple, his executioner's lodger
- 1586: John Lowe, John Adams, and Robert Dibdale, English Catholics
- 1926: The Lowman lynchings
- 1946: The Neuengamme camp war criminals
- 1760: John Bruleman, weary of life
- 1295: Thomas Turbeville, undercover knight
- 1982: Khosrow Khan Qashqai
- 1354: Cola di Rienzi, last of the Roman Tribunes
- 1927: Martyrdom of Five Christeros
- 1789: Rachel Wall, female pirate
- 1997: Ricky Lee Green
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