Jane Champion was the first woman executed in America

And it wasn’t for witchcraft

As explored in the Dec. 6, 2019 story The baby in the suitcase, unplanned pregnancy and childbirth for single American women in the repressive 1950s was fraught with serious societal repercussions. However, 325 years earlier, in 1632 colonial Jamestown, an unplanned pregnancy could get a woman executed.

And that’s exactly what happened to Jane Champion.

According to author Ann Jones in her book “Women who Kill,” the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia was established in 1607 by an all-male “band of rogues and bachelor adventurers.” And while the first few women began showing up sporadically starting in 1609, it wasn’t until the 1620s that large numbers of women were recruited and even coerced to go to the new colony across the Atlantic.

Life was especially difficult for this mere handful of Jamestown women during the “starving times” of 1609–10, where they had no influence, no power and no rights yet were expected to manage a household and feed their families under a husband who controlled all aspects of their lives. In one extreme case, a pregnant woman was reportedly killed by her starving English gentleman husband, who felt entitled to “ripp the childe out of her woambe and threw itt into the River and…