'Reasonable' Women Who Kill: Re-Interpreting and Re-defining Women’s Responses to Domestic Violence in England and Wales 1900-1965

This article makes a contribution to current debates about gender and punishment by providing an historical analysis of the judicial fate of female domestic abuse victims who eventually killed their male abusers between 1900-1965 in England and Wales. Utilising case-studies of women who stood trial for the murder of their abusive partner during this period when murder was still punishable by hanging – I argue that what at first glance appears to be a ‘lenient’ sentence, in fact came at a heavy price for which all women ultimately paid and still pay. That is the maintenance of a gender order which denied women the status of full citizenship. ‘Lenient’ sentencing is shown to be based on stereotypical images of femininity and while it may have appeared to benefit individual women it did nothing to improve the legal situation of battered women generally. These historical case-studies helpwiden our understanding of current debates about gender and punishment by re-interpreting the women’s act of violence. The paper seeks to shift the focus away from provocation, diminished responsibility and irrationality to issues of rationality and agency – without losing sight of the specific circumstances in which the killing took place, and therefore without inviting harsher punishment

Sketching women in court: The visual construction of co-accused women in court drawings

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’

Mother, Monster, Mrs, I:A critical evaluation of gendered naming strategies in English sentencing remarks of women who kill

In this article, we take a novel approach to analysing English sentencing remarks in cases of women who kill. We apply computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods from corpus linguistics to analyse recurrent patterns in a collection of English Crown Court sentencing remarks from 2012 to 2015, where a female defendant was convicted of a homicide offence. We detail the ways in which women who kill are referred to by judges in the sentencing remarks, providing frequency information on pronominal, nominative, and categorising naming strategies. In discussion of the various patterns of preference both across and within these categories (e.g. pronoun vs. nomination, title + surname vs. forename + surname), we remark upon the identities constructed through the references provided. In so doing, we: (1) quantify the extent to which members of the judiciary invoke patriarchal values and gender stereotypes within their sentencing remarks to construct female defendants, and (2) identify particular identities and narratives that emerge within sentencing remarks for women who kill. We find that judges refer to women who kill in a number of ways that systematically create dichotomous narratives of degraded victims or dehumanised monsters. We also identify marked absences in naming strategies, notably: physical identification normally associated with narrativization of women’s experiences; and the first person pronoun, reflecting omissions of women’s own voices and narratives of their lived experiences in the courtroom

Dead woman walking : executed women in England & Wales, 1900-1955

During the last two decades the subject of women who kill has been met with increasing interest from feminist theorists and activists. More recently this interest has been fuelled by high-profile cases in which battered women who have killed their abusers have been released from prison following a reduction of their sentences from murder to manslaughter. As a result of feminist challenges to these women's life-sentences such cases are gradually having an impact on the criminal justice system in general and law in particular. Such cases, however - as well as cases involving other types of murder by women - have a longer history than those which have been addressed and analysed by second wave feminists. Thus, in the first 55 years of this century 15 women met their deaths on the scaffold without the opportunity of telling their story through modern feminist discourses. This thesis offers a systematic and critical analysis of the lives, trials and punishment of the women who have been executed in England and Wales during the 20th century. It has two main aims. First, by utilising a feminist theoretical framework It demonstrates how discourses around women's conduct and behaviour, specifically in the areas of motherhood, domesticity, respectability and sexuality, influenced the outcome of court proceedings. Second, it provides an alternative 'truth' about executed women and their crimes. This alternative 'truth' can now be articulated because of the development of feminist theory and methodology and their accompanying discourses which challenge what has so far been regarded uncritically as the dominant truth, for example In sensationalised newspaper reports and 'true' crime magazines. In providing a gendered analysis of capital punishment this thesis therefore both 'unsilences' the stories of executed women, and challenges the normally 'seamless' truth about what is 'known' about violent women, and thus draws attention to the underlying contradictions which usually remain hidden beneath the surface of the apparent homogeneity of ungendered analyses