A Case for Legal Records in Women's and Gender History

Strange, Carolyn

doi:10.1353/jowh.0.0160

jowh

2010

DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0160

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A Case for Legal Records in Women's and Gender History

Carolyn Strange¹

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Cited by 3 publications

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“On the other hand the accused is a woman…”: Women and the Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland

Black¹

2017

Law hist. rev.

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Hannah Flynn was sentenced to death on February 27, 1924. She had been convicted of the murder of Margaret O'Sullivan, her former employer. Hannah worked for Margaret and her husband Daniel as a domestic servant, an arrangement that ended with bad feeling on both sides when Hannah was dismissed. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1923, while Daniel was at church, Hannah returned to her former place of work, and killed 50-year-old Margaret with a hatchet. At her trial, the jury strongly recommended her to mercy, and sentence of death was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life. Hannah spent almost two decades in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, from where she was conditionally released on October 23, 1942 to the Good Shepherd Magdalen Laundry in Limerick. Although there is no precise date available for Hannah's eventual release from there, it is known that “a considerable time later,” and at a very advanced age, she was released from the laundry to a hospital, where she died. The case of Hannah Flynn, and the use of the Good Shepherd Laundry, represents an explicitly gendered example of the death penalty regime in Ireland following Independence in 1922, particularly the double-edged sword of mercy as it was experienced by condemned women.

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“On the other hand the accused is a woman…”: Women and the Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland

Black¹

2017

Law hist. rev.

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Pulling out the Most Colourful Threads: Revealing and Weaving Positionality into Collaborative Life Writing

Piper

Driscoll

2022

Life Writing

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“I did not mean to make away with the child, I did not know what I was about”: Autobiographical Traces of Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Trial Records

Boon

2015

EJLW

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ABSTRACTin this essay, i am interested in the possibilities and limitations of maternal autobiography in court documents. i focus specifically on the trial records of mothers charged with infanticide between 1700 and 1800. Drawing on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org), i consider these narratives both through the lenses of legal and social histories of infanticide, and in relation to Marlene Kadar et al.'s notion of "autobiographical traces," fragmentary stories that emerge when pieces of individual lives are stitched together with the historical, social and political context in which they emerged. i consider not only the limited textual interventions of the accused mothers themselves, as they took the stand to speak in their own defense, but also their silences and erasures. in addition to this, i consider the autobiographical potential of these women's actions and behaviours, as witnessed and deposed by those called to the stand. finally, i consider the stories of self that emerge from the reproductive and maternal body.

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A Case for Legal Records in Women's and Gender History

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

“On the other hand the accused is a woman…”: Women and the Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland

“On the other hand the accused is a woman…”: Women and the Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland

Pulling out the Most Colourful Threads: Revealing and Weaving Positionality into Collaborative Life Writing

“I did not mean to make away with the child, I did not know what I was about”: Autobiographical Traces of Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Trial Records

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