Sex Maniacs or Gullible Girls: The Neutralisation of Expressions of Sexuality in Women Sentenced to Death in Post-Independence Ireland

The paper seeks to demonstrate and explain how the sexuality of women sentenced to death in post-Independence Ireland was problematised, negated and demonised, and how the construction of condemned women’s sexual identities influenced the criminal justice response to their cases. The research employed discourse analysis, informed by feminist epistemology, as a means of interpreting and critiquing the construction of death sentenced women, and to elaborate how the meaning-making power of language was used to reinforce and perpetuate gendered social processes in twentieth-century Ireland. The research drew on archival sources in the National Archives of Ireland, particularly those produced by the Department of Justice, and by the various criminal justice institutions, such as the police, and the prisons. The research also used contemporaneous press reports of cases, accessed via digital databases. The paper argues that expressions of female sexuality in post-1922 Ireland were deeply troubling to those in positions of authority, and that the expression of female sexuality was routinely condemned or denied, and the women demonised or pathologised. Sex was not considered a rational choice for the women within the sample. Instead, appropriate femininity was constructed as sexually passive. The research contributes to the under-researched body of scholarship on women and crime in Ireland, and further contributes to the existing literature which has explored how discourses of Catholicism and nationalism saw the retrenchment of Irish women’s position in society during this period, and the symbolic entwining of womanhood and purity.