In this article, the authors examine how the debate over women's executions during the nineteenth and early twentieth century funneled and in various ways processed the contrary demands of gender and capital justice. They show how encounters with capital punishment both reflected and reinforced dominant interpretations of womanhood and as such contributed to the intricate web of normative strictures that affected all women at the time. At the same time, however, the often heated debates that accompanied such cases pried open some of the contradictions inherent in the dominant interpretations and, as a result, came to challenge the boundaries that separated not only women from men but also women from each other. Rather than viewing gender as a unidirectional influence on capital punishment, the authors argue that gender is best approached as an evolving social category that gets reconstructed, modified, and transformed whenever it is implicated in social practices and public debates.
Adler, Freda.1975. Sisters in crime: The rise of the new female criminal . New York: McGraw-Hill.
2.
Allen, John W.1968. It happened in southern Illinois. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University.
3.
Baldasty, Gerald J.1992. The commercialization of news in the nineteenth century . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
4.
Banner, Stuart.2002. The death penalty: An American history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
5.
Bernat, Frances.2001. Gender and law. In Women, crime, and criminal justice, edited by Claire M. Renzetti and Lynne Goldstein.Los Angeles : Roxbury.
6.
Blondheim, Menahem.1994. News over the wires: The telegraph and the flow of public information in America, 1844-1897. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
7.
Boudreau, Kristin.2006. The spectacle of death: Populist literary responses to American capital cases. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books.
8.
Britton, Dana M.2003. At work in the iron cage: The prison as gendered organization . New York: New York University Press.
9.
Butler, Judith.1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity . New York: Routledge.
10.
Chesney-Lind, Meda.2001. "Out of sight, out of mind": Girls in the juvenile justice system. In Women, crime, and criminal justice, edited by Claire M. Renzetti and Lynne Goldstein.Los Angeles: Roxbury.
11.
Daly, Kathleen.1994. Gender, crime, and punishment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
12.
Dodge, Mara L.2002. "Whores and thieves of the worst kind": A study of women, crime, and prisons, 1835-2000. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
13.
Eisenstein, Zillah.1988. The female body and the law. Berkeley : University of California Press.
14.
Espy, M. Watt, and John Ortiz Smykla .1994. Executions in the United States, 1608-1991: The Espy file [computer file]. 3d ICPSR ed. Compiled by John Ortiz Smykla. Ann Arbor, MI : Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor].
15.
Farr, Kathryn Ann.2000. Defeminizing and dehumanizing female murderers: Depictions of lesbians on death row. Women & Criminal Justice11 (1): 49-66.
16.
Feeley, Malcolm M., and Deborah L. Little .1991. The vanishing female: The decline of women in the criminal process, 1687-1912. Law & Society Review25 (4): 719-55.
17.
Freedman, Estelle.1981. Their sisters' keepers: Women's prison reform in America, 1830-1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
18.
Frisken, Amanda.2004. Victoria Woodhull's sexual revolution: Political theater and the popular press in nineteenth-century America. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press.
19.
Gross, Kali N.2006. Colored amazons: Crime, violence, and Black women in the city of brotherly love, 1880-1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
20.
Hamm, Richard F.2003. Murder, honor, and law: Four Virginia homicides from reconstruction to the great depression. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press.
21.
hooks, bell.1981. Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston: South End.
22.
Howarth, Joan W.2002. Executing white masculinities: Learning from Karla Faye Tucker. Oregon Law Review81:183-229.
23.
Huntzicker, William E.1999. The popular press, 1833-1865. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
24.
Jones, Ann.1980. Women who kill. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
25.
Kerber, Linda.1998. No constitutional right to be ladies: Women and the obligations of citizenship. New York: Hill & Wang.
26.
Kielbowicz, Richard B.1989. News in the mail: The press, post office, and public information, 1700-1860. New York: Greenwood.
27.
Kittredge, Katherine, ed. 2003. Lewd & notorious: Female transgression in the eighteenth century. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
28.
Knelman, Judith.1998. Twisting in the wind: The murderess and the English press . Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
29.
Leonard, Eileen B.1982. Women, crime, and society: A critique of theoretical criminology . New York: Longman .
Lombroso, Cesare, and Guglielmo Ferrero . n.d. The female offender. New York: D. Appleton.
32.
Lumsden, Linda J.1997. Rampant women: Suffragists and the right to assemble . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
33.
Mackey, Philip English.1976. Voices against death: American opposition to capital punishment, 1787-1975. New York: Burth Franklin .
34.
Matus, Jill.1995. Unstable bodies: Victorian representations of sexuality and maternity. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
35.
McCorkel, Jill A.2003. Embodied surveillance and the gendering of punishment . Journal of Contemporary Ethnography32 (1): 41-76.
36.
Naish, Camille.1991. Death comes to the maiden: Sex and execution 1431-1933 . London: Routledge.
37.
Piepmeier, Alison.2004. Out in public: Configurations of women's bodies in nineteenth-century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
38.
Poovey, Mary.1988. Uneven development: The ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
39.
Pride, Armistead S., and Clint C. Wilson II.1997. A history of the Black press. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.
40.
Rafter, Nicole Hahn.1990. The social construction of crime and crime control . Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency27 (4): 376-89.
41.
---. 1997. Partial justice: Women, prison, and social control. 2d ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing.
42.
Russett, Cynthia Eagle.1989. Sexual science: The Victorian construction of womanhood . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
43.
Schudson, Michael.1978. Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers . New York: Basic Books .
44.
Shipman, Marlin.2002. "The penalty is death": U.S. newspaper coverage of women's executions. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
45.
Simmons, Charles A.1998. The African American press: With special reference to four newspapers, 1827-1965. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
46.
Smart, Carol.1977. Women, crime and criminology: A feminist critique . London: Routledge Kegan Paul .
47.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll.1985. Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America . New York: Knopf.
48.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. [1881] 1969. History of woman suffrage. Vol. 1, 1846-1861. New York : Arno & the New York Times.
49.
Strange, Carolyn.2003. Masculinities, intimate femicide, and the death penalty in Australia, 1890-1920. British Journal of Criminology43 (2): 310-39.
50.
Walkowitz, Judith R.1980. Prostitution and Victorian society: Women, class, and the state. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
51.
Welter, Barbara.1976. Dimity convictions: The American woman in the nineteenth century. Athens: Ohio University Press.
52.
Wiener, Martin J.2004. Men of blood: Violence, manliness and criminal justice in Victorian England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
53.
Zedner, Lucia.1991. Women, crime and custody in Victorian England. New York: Oxford University Press.
