Research Activity and College Events

The Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities, Speaker Series, 2012-2013

Edith Thompson and Traumatic Collective Memories of Capital Punishment

The hanging of Edith Thompson in 1923 for the murder of her husband demonstrates how the execution of women in twentieth-century Britain was culturally troubling. Rumours that her hanging was horribly botched and that her ‘insides fell out’ began to circulate shortly afterwards. It was also rumoured that Edith had spent her final hours in screaming hysterics until she was heavily drugged, with the result that she was carried to the scaffold unconscious. These horror stories continued to circulate in the 1940s and 50s, and were employed by abolitionists to highlight the barbarity of the death penalty. The horror generated by Edith’s execution was connected to cultural unease with punishment of the female body. Although female executions were few in number, certain high profile cases were flashpoints for deepening ambivalence about capital punishment.

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