ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate that the fate of the 15 women executed during the 20th century can best be understood by employing a specific feminist theoretical framework. Although individual historical materialists have included specific chapters on women’s punishment, this ‘adding’ of women to already established revisionist theoretical frameworks has done little to challenge the fundamentally androcentric nature of existing knowledge. In order to understand the process of punishment as experienced differentially according to gender, a feminist perspective which puts gender-sensitivity at the forefront of analysis is needed, which involves “the deconstruction of the categories of masculinity and femininity.” The power to punish lay with husbands, fathers and men of the church and was thus easily identifiable: in the days when civil and ecclesiastical authority were conjoined, individuals formally invested with power were charged with the correction of recalcitrant women whom the family had somehow failed to constrain.
