‘A Crime of Almost Unspeakable Cruelty and Wickedness’: Gender, Agency and Murder in Scotland – The Case of Jeannie Donald
| Author | Anette Ballinger |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918778743 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
‘A Crime of Almost
Unspeakable Cruelty
and Wickedness’: Gender,
Agency and Murder
in Scotland – The Case
of Jeannie Donald
Anette Ballinger
Keele University, UK
Abstract
Based on original Scottish Archive documents, this article contributes to a major gap in
criminological research – Scottish women who were sentenced to death during the
20th century. Through the case study of Jeannie Donald, condemned to death in 1934
for the murder of her neighbour’s 8-year-old daughter, the article offers a critical
analysis of a ‘limit’ case in relation to gender – that is, a case so subversive that it
presents the ultimate challenge to idealized and traditional beliefs about maternity,
motherhood and women’s nature as passive, submissive and gentle creatures. In doing
so,itdemonstratesthatfeministanalysisdoesnotshyawayfromthecasesoffemale
perpetrators of crime so extreme that they cannot be recuperated into acceptable
forms of femininity.
Keywords
Agency and murder, gender and punishment, Jeannie Donald, Scotland and the death
penalty
Corresponding author:
Anette Ballinger (Retd), Social Policy Research Centre, Keele University, Staffs, ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: a.ballinger@keele.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(4) 429–449
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918778743
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Introduction
Since the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, feminist scholars have
generated a substantial body of literature within which the crimes of violent women
have been analysed. Such theorists have paid particu lar attention to the impact that
discourses of femininity have had on the labelling of female murderers as ‘mad’, ‘bad’
or ‘tragic victim’ – more ‘sinned against than sinning’ – to be pitied rather than punished
(Allen, 1987; Ballinger, 2008: 49; Morrissey, 2003; Wilczynski, 1991; Worrall, 1990).
Typically, these scholars have argued that the more female criminals adhere to tradi-
tional discourses of femininity, the more likely they are to be perceived through the
‘mad’ and/or ‘victim’ label, and thus treated more sympathetically than those who find
themselves constructed through the ‘bad’ category. Therefore, while acknowledging that
those women who challenge conventional femininity are more likely to be perceived as a
threat to the heteropatriarchal social order and are socially constructed through the ‘bad’
category, it is nevertheless the case that feminist work has overwhelmingly focused on
the types of violence that most easily fit into the ‘victim’ category, an obvious example
here being female victims of domestic violence who retaliate by killing their male
abusers. This type of analysis is laudable and has proved extremely important, not least
in terms of its impact in achieving legal changes for those who stand accused of such
crimes (Edwards, 2010; Fitz-Gibbon and Pickering, 2012; Norrie, 2010).
However, feminist theorists have also noted the negative aspect of this reliance on
mad/victim subject positions. While it has undeniably ‘benefited individual women on
their journey through the legal system, it has been to the detrim ent of women as a
category, since an overemphasis on women as helpless, passive victims whose actions
are unintentional’ serves to reinforce gender stereotypes in which women are regarded as
irrational and overemotional (Ballinger, 2008: 49–50). As such, this subject position has
arguably prevented substantive equality being achieved. Moreover, its existence unwit-
tingly, but unavoidably, has been essential to the counter-construction and continuous
existence of the ‘bad’ woman who has transgressed acceptable discourses of femininity
and therefore deserves harsh punishment as a result of her ‘double deviance’ – having
offended against womanhood itself as well as committing a crime. Within this context,
the deconstruction of all such stereotypical gendered subject positions is a necessary first
step in the fight for substantive equality between the sexes, involving a recognition of
women as equal human beings, capable of experiencing the entire range of emotions,
whether caring, angry or otherwise, in order to obtain full citizenship on a par with men
(Morrissey, 2003: 25).
While a substantial body of feminist literature concerned with the mad/bad/victim
subject positions has been produced in recent decades, feminist scholars have neverthe-
less been accused of avoiding ‘difficult’ cases – that is, cases in which female perpe-
trators appear to have transgressed and subverted discourses of femininity through the
specific nature of their criminal behaviour. Morrissey, for example, has observed that
‘the selection of violent women acceptable to and therefore discussed within feminist
legal theory ...depends upon the offender’s personal politics and the type of violence
committed’ (2003: 135).
430 Social & Legal Studies 28(4)
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