'Gall, Gallantry, and the Gallows'

Anna Linders' interest in capital punishment dates to her arrival in the United States more than 20 years ago.

Friday, Feb. 1, in a Department of Sociology colloquium, the associate professor of sociology will share thoughts from research for her paper titled "Gall, Gallantry, and the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Social Construction of Gender, 1840-1920." The session is from 3 to 4:30 p.m. at Taft House at Stratford Heights, Lower Level, 2625 Clifton Ave.

Linders has taught at UC since 1998. After earning a bachelor's degree in psychology at Stockholm University, she received her PhD from State University of New York at Stony Brook.

"I grew up in Sweden, where their last execution took place in 1910, and hence had trouble understanding the persistent use of the death penalty in the United States," she said.

Subsequently, she noted, she dealt with capital punishment, and also abortion, in her dissertation, a comparative historical analysis of what she calls "moral politics."

"Although the dissertation did not directly address the gender aspect of capital punishment (but certainly of abortion), I realized early on – after reading 19th-century execution accounts – that there was a gender story to tell around capital punishment as well," she said. "This paper represents my first stab at analyzing the gender of capital punishment."

As a starting point, Linders said, she is using dominant ideas about womanhood to identify some of the ways in which women became problematic as capital criminals. The "characteristics and traits that both sanctified and controlled 19th-century women, however imperfectly," she states in her paper, "made them unlikely and troublesome candidates for capital punishment for two different sorts of reasons, both elaborated in the conflicts surrounding female executions."

The Taft Research Center has been extremely important to Linders' work, she said, in that it has funded not only conference trips but date-collecting trips to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Former UC graduate student  Alana Yoder provided "invaluable coding help," and is listed as a "Galls, Gallantry and the Gallows" co-author.

In terms of views on capital punishment, Linders finds the United States interesting "not only because it is the only modern western nation that currently executes people, but also because it was on the forefront of the movement to abolish capital punishment in the 19th century."

In fact, Linders added, three American states (Michigan, Rhode Island and Wisconsin) did abolish the death penalty around 1850, and have never reinstituted it.

"The controversy over capital punishment has not been persistent over time, however, but has flourished during some periods (1840s, the Progressive Era, the 1960s) and receded during others, albeit with variations across the states," she said. "But it is also true that some cases throughout history have generated a lot more debate than other cases, and Timothy McVeigh clearly was one of those cases. Apart from the horrific nature of his crime, what made this case so interesting and controversial was the questions it raised about the audience of executions, which is another major interest of mine and one I'm currently writing a book about."