Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64

In the decades after Irish independence, 292 women were prosecuted for murder, facing the threat of conviction and death sentencing. Within a rising atmosphere of hostility to women, moral rigidity, sexual repression and Catholic Church control, this book explores the meanings and responses to women’s lethal violence in postcolonial Ireland.

Lynsey Black is Lecturer in Criminology at Maynooth University.