Dead Woman Walking

Executed Women in England and Wales, 1900-55

Anette Ballinger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351734592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: Between 1900 and 1950 130 women were sentenced to death for murder in England and Wales. Only 12 of these women were actually executed. Thus, 91 per cent of women murderers had their sentence commuted, whereas if we examine the corresponding figures for men, only 39 per cent had their sentence commuted. It would appear that state servants working within the criminal justice system were far more reluctant to hang women than men. However, this text argues that a closer examination of this apparent discrepancy reveals it to be a misconception which has come about as a result of the statistics regarding infanticide. That is to say - unlike men - the vast majority of women murderers have killed their own child or children. Once this is taken into account we find that women who had murdered an adult had less hope of a reprieve than men. Thus, the author shows that the large proportion of women murderers as killers of their own children has created a false impression of how female murderers fared inside the criminal justice system.

1
Introduction

Do you not know that each of you is Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil’s gateway. You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of the divine law. You are she who persuaded him whom the Devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image man. On account of your desert, that is death, even the Son of God had to die.¹

Between 1900 and 1950 130 women were sentenced to death for murder in England and Wales.² Only 12 of these women were executed. Thus, 91% of women murderers had their sentence commuted. Of these 130 women, 102 had killed a child, nearly always their own, most of whom were under one year old.³ Two of the 130 condemned women were certified insane and one had her conviction quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal. That only 9% of the total number of women sentenced to death were eventually executed clearly illustrates that women stood a very high chance of having their sentence commuted - usually to life imprisonment.

If we examine the corresponding figures for men, we find that during the same period, 1,080 men were sentenced to death, 45 of whom were certified insane, “22 had their convictions quashed on appeal, and 2 died while under sentence of death.”⁴ In the remaining 1,011 cases 390 or 39% had their sentence commuted,⁵ leaving a total of 621 men who were executed.⁶ Thus, at first glance it would appear that state servants working within the criminal justice system were far more reluctant to hang women than men. But a closer examination of this apparent discrepancy reveals it to be a misconception which has come about as a result of the above statistics regarding infanticide. That is to say - unlike men - the vast majority of women murderers have killed their own child/children.⁷ Once this is taken into account we find that women who had murdered an adult had less hope of a reprieve than men.⁸ Thus, the large proportion of women murderers as killers of their own children has created a false impression of how female murderers fared inside the criminal justice system.⁹

Moreover, even if we accept that there was a “‘natural reluctance’ to carry out the death sentence on a woman” as the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment 1949–1953 Report argued,¹⁰ that still leaves us with a total of 15 women who were executed during the 20th century in England and Wales. What was it then about these 15 women that caused the criminal justice system to overcome this ‘natural reluctance’? Why were they not regarded as deserving of a reprieve from death? What were the discourses that a member of the public gallery activated, when, after the Ruth Ellis trial in 1955, he commented that she was “a typical West End tart”?¹¹ Or in 1953 when the trial judge in the Louisa Merrifield case in his summing up speech called her “a vulgar, stupid woman with a dirty mind”?¹² Similarly, at the trial of Edith Thompson in 1922, the judge saw fit to interrupt the closing speech for the defence with these words to the jury:

… you should not forget that you are in a Court of justice trying a vulgar and common crime. You are not listening to a play from the stalls of a theatre.¹³

Questions and issues such as these have provided the motivation for initiating this research project; they form the backbone of this work and will be dealt with throughout the book.

The centrality of women’s conduct and sexuality within our culture, and how women who step outside patriarchal definitions of acceptable female behaviour come to be regarded as ‘dangerous’ women - threatening patriarchal hegemony - has been well documented by several writers.¹⁴ Women’s behaviour, both in the private and public sphere, has been and still is regulated, disciplined and controlled by a pervasive system of male definitions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ woman. The constraints which women experience as a consequence of these definitions take both a material and ideological form and restrict their lives in a variety of ways. Thus, women’s material reality is affected by child care and family responsibilities; limited financial resources; the threat and fear of male violence as well as actual violence. At an ideological level, discourses around sexuality, respectability, domesticity and pathology are crucial to the regulation and self-policing of women’s behaviour.¹⁵

While the lives of all women are affected by these discourses, they become particularly visible when criminal women face the courts. For example, research carried out by Pat Carlen has shown that “single women, divorced women and women with children in Care … [are] more likely to receive custodial sentences than women who, at the time of their court appearances, are living at home with their husbands and children.”¹⁶ Similarly, barrister Helena Kennedy has observed that a woman appearing in court in “bovver boots and a spiky hair-do” is likely to be judged more severely than a woman “in a broderie anglaise blouse and M&S skirt.” In other words it is very important for a female defendant to “‘soften’ herself to conform with the judge’s stereotype of appropriate womanhood by presenting an image of docility.”¹⁷ The mere fact that a woman has broken the law ensures that she will be regarded as someone who has failed to fulfil gender role expectations, and if this is overlaid by a refusal to demonstrate her commitment to conventional female roles in her personal life, especially in the areas around sexuality, respectability, domesticity and motherhood, she can expect to find herself at the receiving end of the full force of what Carlen has termed ‘judicial misogyny’.¹⁸ In this book I argue that every one of the women in my 15 case-studies fell well short of gender role expectations and, through a series of complex and sometimes contradictory processes, fell victim to cultural misogyny in general and judicial misogyny in particular.

How certain perceptions of female murderers are produced and how these perceptions come to be regarded and accepted as true at the expense of other versions of ‘the truth’ about these women and their crimes, is a crucial issue if we are to understand why 15 women were legitimately killed by the British state in the name of its people. In her book Offending Women Anne Worrall addresses two central questions: “Under what conditions do certain people claim to possess knowledge about female law-breakers?” and “What is the process whereby such claims are translated into practices which have particular consequences for female law-breakers?”¹⁹ Following Worrall, I intend to apply these questions to my case-studies. My aim is to create a bridge of understanding between the reality experienced by these 15 women at one end, and, at the other, a different version of that reality which was created as a result of the wealth of professional discourses surrounding them as their cases were processed through the criminal justice system. In the words of Worrall “members of muted groups, if they wish to communicate, must do so in terms of the dominant modes of expression.”²⁰ If they cannot accomplish this, defendants become disqualified as speakers - their accounts become muted.²¹ It is my intention to expose, explore and analyse the differences between how these women viewed themselves and the circumstances which led up to their crimes, as opposed to how, after their accounts had been mediated and ‘translated’ into the legal and medical discourses of the courtroom, they were viewed by state-servants, the media and the public.

No-one can ever claim to ‘know’ the reality of these women’s lives or exactly how they felt - before, during and after the crimes of which they were accused and at their subsequent trials. As Maureen Cain states:

… anyone producing knowledge occupies a relational and historical site in the social world which is likely to shape and set limits to the knowledge formulations produced.²²

Yet, by employing a feminist standpoint epistemology which argues for research that is located in and proceeding from “the grounded analysis of women’s material realities”²³, it is possible to present alternative accounts to those put forward by judicial or medical personnel - accounts which I maintain are closer to these women’s experiences than those which were to become official versions of ‘the truth’. My examination of these 14 cases (one was a case involving two women, hence 15 women, 14 cases), indicates that medical and legal discourses emphasised the ‘wickedness’ of the women’s actions while minimising and marginalising their personal circumstances. The starting point of my account therefore will be to locate these women within the structural categories of social class, gender and sexuality and the material and ideological impact of these structures on their everyday lived experiences - their life histories. Moreover, these life histories can only begin to be understood after social processes such as poverty, education, domestic violence, motherhood, domesticity and respectability become part of the analysis. These are issues which, in varying degrees, had great bearing upon the lives of the 15 women in this study, and thus played a part in providing the context within which their crimes were committed and can best be understood. At the same time I shall show how difficult it was for the women to argue their cases on this terrain. This is because the wealth of feminist discourses around the different aspects of women’s oppression within patriarchal society developed over the last three decades were not yet available in the first half of the 20th century and could therefore not be articulated. In stating this I do not wish to undermine or ignore the important achievements of first wave feminism. First wave feminist campaigners were successful in achieving the implementation of several pieces of important legislation culminating in equal voting rights for women in 1928.²⁴ The work of first wave feminists was both crucial and essential in establishing legal rights for women and in working towards the goal of legal equality between the sexes. Yet women of later generations were soon to realise that legal equality does not ensure substantive equality, nor does it bring an end to the predominance of patriarchal ideologies and discourses. First wave feminists can thus be seen to have laid the foundations on which second wave feminists can - and indeed already have built. This involves identifying all the discourses which play a part in the oppression of women, a process which is by no means complete.²⁵ But as we identify the many relationships which have bound us down we can apply our new-found knowledge retrospectively - to women of the past. This is what I intend to develop in my analysis of executed women. These women had simila...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From Antiquity to Modernity: A Social History of Capital Punishment and Gender
• 3 Beyond Traditional and Revisionist Theory: Feminist Theory and the Power to Punish
• 4 Women as Child-Killers: Four Case-Studies
• 5 Women Killing other Women
• 6 Women Who Kill their Male Partners
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Index