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. introduction Some have also suggested that the use of shaming punishments resulted in women killing their illegitimate children.14 Deterrence can backfire. The military and the navy in some respects lived in a separate world from the public. They were generally subject to special penal codes and law courts. Prison regimes were also separated and harsh, with corporal punishment and other penalties. Prisoners, soldiers, and sailors lived at close quarters, often in direct proximity to places of execution such as prison yards, further alienating these groups from society. What happened among sailors, soldiers, and prisoners was invisible to the outside world. The crimes in focus here they committed may well have had less influence on the wider debate than the same crimes in the general population. In the nineteenth century the presence of women at executions was increasingly questioned.15 Also the women were a group somewhat separated from the generally male population of legislators and executors of the law. In a situation comparable to many soldiers and prisoners, women lacked fundamental control of their own circumstances. This was especially true of women in domestic service. Annette Ballinger, in a study of women executed in England and Wales between 1900 and 1955, argues that they all Yet even though in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries voices were raised against the execution of women in the abstract, these ideas did not apply for women whose womanhood was called into question by their acts of violence or even interest in murder.16 Women who had killed were strange creatures, not from another universe, but from far, far away. The danger, however, did not start with murder. Any woman whose actions challenged the dominant ideal of womanhood challenged 14 See e gRDPr 1740-41 p 113. 15 See e g Bergman 2001 p 98 sqq. 16 Ballinger 2000 p 2 sq (quotation p 3), Gregory 2012 p 88 sq. 23
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