DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17487467
title: The Women's Executions Database
title: The Women's Executions Project
title: 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

description: Presented here is a dataset containing all known executions of women carried out under civil authority. Many studies that mention gender use a dataset that estimates that about 365 women were executed in the U.S. between 1608 and 2002. The number of women executed in the U.S. since the 1600s is, in fact, higher than 700. The goal is to produce a dataset that encompasses experiences most relevant to women (e.g., histories of trauma, parenthood) in addition to providing variables that will allow for evidence-based quantitative research.

My priority is to verify the preexisting dataset and add new variables as I come across them. The data that currently exists is incomplete but is the best collection (thanks mainly to the data collection efforts of the M.E. Grenander Archivists and Librarians at the University of Albany and are therefore ready for preliminary analysis. With that said, requesting a different format (SPSS or STATA) and/or clarification on specific items will only help me so do not hesitate to contact me. Until I have completed my application with zenodo, please refer to the larger project in which the data are housed: The women's executions project.
description: The Website that the data are housed on is 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 website hopes to account for black women's invisibility in death penalty data. 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. 

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.