The Pathologisation of Women Who Kill: Three Cases from Ireland

Abstract

Summary Women who kill are frequently subject to discourses of pathology. This article examines the cases of three women convicted of murder in Ireland following Independence in 1922 and explores how each woman was constructed as pathologised. Using archival materials, the article demonstrates that diagnoses were contingent and imbricated with notions of gender, morality, dangerousness, and class. For two of the women, their pathologisation led to them being certified as insane and admitted to the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum. However, pathologisation could be mediated by respectable femininity. The article also explores the pathways which facilitated judgements of pathology, including the acceptance of a framework of degeneracy, or hereditary insanity, and examines how women could be redeemed from the diagnoses of ‘insanity’.

Interpersonal Violence

“…However, women who worked as servants or prostitutes, and unmarried women, faced harsh punishment, demonstrating benevolence was not available for women seen as low status and/or disreputable (Callahan, 2013). Black (2020) examines discourses of pathology in cases of women convicted of murder in mid twentieth-century Ireland, arguing that such women were seen as 'difficult' rather than dangerous. The interpretations of women's pathology that circulated in the criminal justice system drew on contemporary understandings of 'degeneracy', 'feeble-mindedness' and hereditary insanity.…”

Gender, intimate partner homicide, and rurality in early-twentieth-century New South Wales

“…These studies emphasize how male criminal justice actors have historically shielded women deemed respectable, and women favored by class and racial privilege, from harsh treatment (Jones 1980;D'Cruze et al 2006;Seal 2010). In histories of the twentieth century, the tendency of courts to pathologize women's lethal violence, by defining their acts mad, rather than bad, has been noted (Black, 2018;Morrissey, 2003). The severe response to women accused of killing abusive partners has been the focus of much Australian research, which underscores that chivalrous exceptions were made only for the wealthy and conformist (Allen 1990;Kukulies-Smith and Priest 2011;Laster 1994;Piper and Stevenson 2019;Plater et al 2013).…”