The Women's

Executions Project

Resources and a working dataset encompassing state-sanctioned executions of all women occurring in the United States (or territories that would become the U.S.) from the 1600s to the present day

An equally important impetus of this project is to honor the years of research of Alabama's very own M. Watt Espy, who is recognized as "America's foremost historian of executions" (Equal Justice Initiative). Running parallel to the construction of WEB is an ongoing project which addresses the privileging of knowledge in academia and the publish or perish attitudes that serve to minimize the work of non-traditional researchers or those whose approach may present uncomfortable narratives. This project does challenge the misplaced reverence for the "Espy File," explained in more detail on the Project Resources page. It is the papers of M. Watt Espy housed at the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives that served as one of the primary sources for data verification.

Importantly, the department completed verification and coding for five states back in 2020. For those looking for accurate Espy File data for both men and women for Alaska, Alabama, Hawaii, Oregon, and Wyoming, please refer to their website!

This is the first platform dedicated to the scholarly documentation of all known executions of women via one dataset (WEB, the Women's Execution dataBase). With a special emphasis on variables accounting for women's experiences it is also the only platform to do so.

This website is an attempt to correct for the omission and misrepresentation of women. The goal is to produce a digitized dataset including variables like parental status, resistance to slavery, and other complexities related to the crime and identity. In so doing, emphasize the importance of M. Watt Espy in capital punishment research as well as the voluminous scholarship that focuses on the impacts of identity on criminal justice outcomes.

The number of women executed in the U.S. since the 1600s exceeds 700; a far larger number than represented in statistical reports.

437 of the executed 700 women have been identified as black and 227 as white

The number of women missing from most quantitative accounts of executed women.

195 (about 63%) of the 310 women missing from the most commonly cited dataset to this day.

from the podcast: "... about the digitization efforts of a collection by M. Watt Espy, a researcher who spent three decades of his life gathering and indexing documentation of legal executions for what would become the nation’s largest database ..."

The release of WEB is important for a number of reasons

1) To assist researchers and dedicated professionals who are working on behalf of women and revealing gendered and racial injustices. The United States judicial system is predicated upon credible, reliable, evidence. At the very least, judges, lawyers, and advocacy groups should be aware of significant flaws in the quantitative data used by the media and in the courtroom. There is no one reliable data source of women's executions that spans all of American history and encompasses women's experiences with the criminal justice system. The importance of such data are evidenced in the Brenda Andrew case.

2) To account for black women's invisibility in death penalty data. See, for example, preliminary findings on Race and Executions. Organizations like the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) caution users of using outdated data but are reliant on researchers to provide accurate historical data. This site hopes to assist in efforts of organizations like the DPIC by being a resource for those needing evidence of the role of identity in capital punishment.

3) That even if the data are not utilized, that this website might offer other avenues and resources for research. This project began with the aforementioned goal but was forced to accept the fact that all historical quantitative data analyses based on the Espy file are problematic. If one is to address "gender" and the death penalty, then scholarship requires awareness of men's misrepresentation in the file.

4) Finally, to promote existing and emerging scholarship that have sought to quantify experiences that are especially relevant to women (e.g., backgrounds of sexual and domestic violence, parental status, mental and health difficulties related to abuse, the relationships [i.e., accomplices] that contributed to the crime). Moreover, the aim is to provide a comprehensive hub for the sharing of scholarship and research.

5) My work examines those processes in academia that serve to reinforce patriarchal and racial hierarchies in knowledge production by incorporating the critical insights of Queer, Black Feminist, and Biopolitical (necropolitical) approaches. The earlier decisions made by those responsible for inputting the data are of historical interest, but it is time to not only question their continued usage despite known issues and prevalence in academic scholarship, but to address, once again, how we are asking how far women have really come? Like the cigarette industry, capital punishment is dominated by men and is part of a gendered narrative that kills, but not indiscriminately, and somehow manages to fetishize women--even in the most grim of circumstances.

6) There are a seemingly infinite number of research directions I could take but, aside from completing the dataset, the quantitative route is looking less and less attractive. With that said, I hope that some of the work I post inspires others to improve and build. The DPI sentencing study, for instance, was a project I had initially hoped to pursue and publish but relinquished. It analyzes death row sentencing using data from the Death Penalty Information Center. The goal is to show how gender, race, and geography influence who receives a death sentence and what happens to them afterward. The project argues that the small number of women on death row does not mean gender is irrelevant; instead, it suggests that the criminal legal system is shaped by gendered and heteronormative assumptions that need to be examined directly. Women and men sentenced to death were matched by county and year to create a dataset for comparison. The dataset includes 461 people: 151 women and 310 men, with federal cases excluded. Death penalty outcomes are grouped into seven main categories, such as active death sentence, executed, resentenced, exonerated, or commuted. Preliminary findings show that geography and time matter greatly. Since 1972, only eight states—all in the South—have executed women. Gender and race both influence outcomes: women are more likely than men to have their sentences reduced to life or less, while nonwhite people are more likely than white people to still have an active death sentence and less likely to be resentenced. Political context, including the percentage of women or Black women in state legislatures, may also play a role. But, the variables are too big and the method, I'm afraid, was too small. The models do not fully capture complex social and political factors. But, perhaps, another researcher will pick up this project in the future.

This project would be impossible without the diligent work of university archivists and staff at the University of Albany's M. E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives. Therefore, much of the individual datapoints cite the library's M. Watt Espy collection. And I have now actually visited the space (see The M.E. Grenander Archives Visit! ).

This site is, and will remain, a work in progress. Any omission of gratitude to any one person or organization that have made this possible is entirely accidental or simply have not made it to the website. The website's primary aim is updating data and therefore any failings of attribution are entirely unintentional. However, if you see such an oversight, please email me directly (Dr. Corina Schulze at cschulze@southalabama.edu). Substantive additions and suggestions for improvement are especially welcome.

citation preference(s)

This project was registered with Open Science Framework (OSF) on June 25, 2024. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/KTMXS.

If you are citing the project in general, (versus the dataset), please use the following:

- Schulze, C. (2025, May 29). The women’s executions project. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SB36X
- or Schulze, C. (n.d.) Executions of Women. The Women’s Execution Project, University of South Alabama, https://womensexecutionsproject.org

A special thanks to Sexes, whose open access approach to publication allowed me to "officially" introduce the website. (https://doi.org/10.3390/sexes6020027)

Website created by Dr. Corina Schulze, email at cschulze@southalabama.edu