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Women Who Kill
Women Who Kill
Women Who Kill
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Women Who Kill

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This landmark study offers a rogues’ gallery of women—from the Colonial Era to the 20th century—who answered abuse and oppression with murder: “A classic” (Gloria Steinem).
 
Women rarely resort to murder. But when they do, they are likely to kill their intimates: husbands, lovers, or children. In Women Who Kill, journalist Ann Jones explores these homicidal patters and what they reflect about women and our culture. She considers notorious cases such as axe-murderer Lizzie Borden, acquitted of killing her parents; Belle Gunness, the Indiana housewife turned serial killer; Ruth Snyder, the “adulteress” electrocuted for murdering her husband; and Jean Harris, convicted of shooting her lover, the famous “Scarsdale Diet doctor.”
 
Looking beyond sensationalized figures, Jones uncovers different trends of female criminality through American history—trends that reveal the evolving forms of oppression and abuse in our culture. From the prevalence of infanticide in colonial days to the poisoning of husbands in the nineteenth century and the battered wives who fight back today, Jones recounts the tales of dozens of women whose stories, and reasons, would otherwise be lost to history.
 
First published in 1980, Women Who Kill is a “provocative book” that “reminds us again that women are entitled to their rage.” This 30th anniversary edition from Feminist Press includes a new introduction by the author (New York Times Book Review).
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 1, 2009
ISBN9781558616523
Women Who Kill
Author

Ann Jones

Ann Jones is a journalist, a photographer, and the author of ten books of nonfiction. She has written extensively about violence against women, reported from Afghanistan, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East on the impact of war upon civilians, and embedded with American forces in Afghanistan to report on the impact of war on soldiers. Her articles appear most often in the Nation and online at TomDispatch.com. Jones’s work has received generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History (both at Harvard University), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the US–Norway Fulbright Foundation.

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I read a lot of crime fiction, so I thought I would enjoy this. Unfortunately, it was a little too "text book" for me. The tales of the injustices perpetrated against women were definitely thought provoking, but were presented so matter of factly that it was hard to get into the book. It wasn't until over half way through, when the case of Lizzie Borden was presented, that I started to enjoy what I was reading.

    This book certainly points out the inconsistencies in sentencing women throughout the past few hundred years. Political considerations swing from overly harsh punishments, to much too lenient. It was definitely eye opening. Unfortunately, this book was not very exciting to read.

Book preview

Women Who Kill - Ann Jones

001

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Opening Quotations

Introduction

Foreword

introduction to the first edition

Part 1 - foremothers: divers lewd women

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part 2 - domestic atrocity

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part 3 - spoiling maidens

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part 4 - laying down the law

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part 5 - let that be a lesson

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part 6 - totaling women

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part 7 - women’s rights and wrongs

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

notes

Acknowledgements

index

Copyright Page

001002

In memory of my mother,

Berenice Rufsvold Slagsvol,

and of Bunny,

who was killed.

O race of Adam, blench not lest you find

In the sun’s bubbling bowl anonymous death,

Or lost in whistling space without a mind

To monstrous Nothing yield your little breath:

You shall achieve destruction where you stand,

In intimate conflict, at your brother’s hand.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

There are no new arguments to be made on human rights.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the living.

—Mother Jones

introduction to the feminist press edition

Women Who Kill was first published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1980. It consisted of an introduction and six chapters. What is now a seventh and last chapter began as an afterword added at the request of the publisher of the first paperback edition, in 1981. He wanted me to write about a sensational homegrown story then monopolizing New York headlines: the case of Jean Harris, a seemingly prim headmistress convicted of the murder of her longtime lover (and drug connection) Herman Tarnower, who with the publication of his own book in 1979 had achieved a kind of fame as the Scarsdale Diet Doctor. More important, my publisher said, Women Who Kill in its original form didn’t really end.

I thought it did. It ended with a quotation from a woman who killed her abusive husband and served time for murder. As a battered woman who killed to save her own life, she (not Jean Harris) was typical of women who kill in our time, and of the reason they do. She and I were talking about how to put a stop to wife beating, and I asked her what she would do if she learned that a man was abusing her daughter. What she said struck me as important because it showed so clearly her unapologetic sense of her own identity, courage, and power. She had gained that confidence the hard way, to be sure, and at the expense of her husband; but there it was—so firm and impressive that I ended chapter six, and the book, with her words: I think I’d just take the man aside and have a little talk with him about nonviolence. And then I’d tell him who I am. The publisher said that wasn’t a proper ending. It was more like a threat.

Women Who Kill was a product of that historical moment of intense clarity and determination when, in the shadow of the war in Vietnam, scholars and writers set out to reexamine America. The sixties produced not only the war and the anti-war movement but also the intensification of the long struggle for black civil rights, the second great wave of feminism, the first battle for gay rights, strong movements for the rights of prisoners and Native Americans, an inspired and seductive counter-culture redefining sexuality and family, and some of the best political/ pop music ever. Later, conservative revisionist historians would focus on the sixties’ mindless drug culture. But dissidents of the sixties did much more than sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll; we did organizing, politics, journalism, writing, and scholarship as well. Suddenly, or so it seemed, there was black history and women’s history and Native American history. During the disillusioning doldrums of the Nixon years—which lasted even longer than his presidency—the work went on. At the end of the Nixon decade, in 1980, historian Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States—essential reading—and by giving a history to insistent uprisings in this troubled country, made clear that its rebels and dissidents were one in their desire to throw off oppression.

A People’s History of the United States includes a chapter given over to women, entitled The Intimately Oppressed. In it Zinn describes the powerful education in subjection that women received, and he finds it remarkable that women nevertheless rebelled. In the nineteenth century alone women organized industrial strikes, demanded higher education, founded schools, and joined reform movements to abolish slavery, advance temperance, stop brutality against women, improve health care, promote women’s literacy, modernize women’s dress, and rescue prostitutes; and in 1848 they convened at Seneca Falls, the first Women’s Rights Convention in the world. For a long time, I too had been thinking about women’s history and the improbable women—like housewife Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who became great leaders. But the more I read history, the more it seemed to me that few women ever got a chance to become leaders, or even to make a public nuisance of themselves. You had to have a powerful father, denied the blessing of a son, like Cady Stanton; or an influential husband, like Abigail Adams; or at the very least the strong support of a band of sisters, like the Grimkes or the Peabodys. The average American woman, as far as I could see, languished among the intimately oppressed, not calling her condition that, but calling it life and trying to make the best of it. Plenty of women couldn’t even do as well as that. But surely their lives held lessons too. It occurred to me to write a book of women’s history about ordinary women who kicked at oppression and came to a bad end.

So while Howard Zinn was writing the stories of women who banded together to fight systematic patriarchal subjection in powerful constructive ways, I was writing the stories of isolated women who used poison or a knife. Our books appeared at the same time. Years later Zinn told an interviewer that in writing A People’s History of the United States he was calling for a quiet revolution. A revolution from the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather [of] people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. As a feminist, I had a similar intention in writing Women Who Kill. I too wanted women in the workplace, in the home, and in the halls of government to take power to control the conditions of our lives. That’s what I heard—that sense of taking power—in the words of the woman I quoted to end this book the first time around: I think I’d just take the man aside . . . And then I’d tell him who I am.

I wrote the afterword about Jean Harris anyway because a new case reveals new facets of America’s history of oppression and injustice toward women. Later, when Beacon Press republished the book in 1996, I wrote some more; and the afterword grew into a seventh chapter called Women’s Rights and Wrongs. There is always something more to say about murder because people choose different kinds of victims at different times for different reasons. There are fashions in murder, and in justice too. Covering another decade makes the long view of history longer; and the long view offers peculiar instruction. Caught up in our own times, in the rightness of our ideas and the righteousness of our cause, it’s tempting to see ourselves surfing the forward edge of a great wave of historical progress. But the long view of women’s history in the United States reveals the undertow, the rips, the backwash, and only now and then at high tide a rising wave that carries far up the shore.

This book begins at the start of European settlement in North America and finishes near the end of the twentieth century. In every period different people have different opinions about what is good for women. There are different schools of thought about woman’s sphere, woman’s place, woman’s rights, woman’s suffrage, woman’s feminism, and they all come to bear upon women who kill. It’s not just women who disagree. The law weighs in, of course; and science, medicine, psychology, religion, and philosophy offer firm, obtuse opinions. New and popular disciplines—sexology, phrenology, victimology—dispense scientific theories that now seem the stuff of comedy. But women’s disagreements are troubling for they display so clearly the effects of ideological controls devised by ruling elites on what women take to be their own ideas. There are always those benevolent women who want to help others reform and adjust to woman’s proper place; those self-assured ones who chastise others for protesting the routine victimization of women and blame women themselves for being victims; those rebellious free thinkers who unreasonably take woman’s part against any oppression; and those who don’t like women very much at all. Meeting these quarrels in the past, we might better recognize them in our own time and know which side to choose.

And we might better recognize the opposition. In this book are cases of guilty women hustled to the gallows or the chair, and others just as guilty let off with abject apologies. Such apparent inconsistency in the law and justice might be confusing if we did not see, in that long view, the single unwavering consistency that guides all these decisions: patriarchal power preserves itself. I know the reference to patriarchy must strike young women as quaint at best, if not the lunatic raving of an old-fashioned feminist, but in fact patriarchy is still the most accurate word in English to describe a political, economic, social, or family system in which men control, as my standard apolitical dictionary puts it, a disproportionately large share of power. (If the single word that best characterizes the systems under which we live seems to you odd or old hat, you might want to think about who benefits from your holding that thought.) There is plenty of historical evidence that justice is in the hands of men who will do whatever it takes to maintain control over women; for what is a court after all but an instrument for interpreting and enforcing conformity to a Constitution originally written by a small group of well-heeled, land-owning white men who believed, with Jefferson, that "all men are created equal"?

As I write, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who made her early career as an equal rights advocate, is often the dissenting voice in Supreme Court decisions that primarily affect women. In cases such as Lilly Ledbetter’s charge of long term wage discrimination, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 550 U.S. 618 (2007), women would have no representation at all were it not for Justice Ginsburg’s dissent, which in the Ledbetter case, at least, moved Congress to correct through legislation the blatant injustice upheld by the court. And when Justice Ginsburg leaves the court, who can say that a president—all forty-four of whom have been men—will see the need to nominate another woman? In 2006, President George W. Bush replaced Justice Ginsburg’s colleague Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the court (in 1981), with Justice Samuel Alito, who in the following year wrote for the majority the decision denying justice to Lilly Ledbetter. Alito is a conservative Roman Catholic male, just like four other justices (three white, one black) already seated at the time of his appointment, already enjoying a disproportionately large share of power on the court even before they became a five-man majority. One woman, it seems, is more than enough.

Despite the fundamental inequality still enshrined in our courts and our laws, there have been significant changes in law and law enforcement in the three decades since this book first went to press. Today there are more women in the police force, in the courts, on the bench, in the law schools, and in the government; and although they remain in the minority, like Justice Ginsburg, they make a difference. Feminists and fair-minded jurists have succeeded in leveling many of the old discrepancies between sentences given to men and women convicted of the same offense—discrepancies I describe in the original introduction to this book—though judges still often go outside sentencing guidelines to up a woman’s punishment. These days women who kill husbands or boyfriends may get shorter sentences than do men who kill wives or girlfriends, not because of a difference in gender, but a difference in the crime: the difference between self-defense and premeditated murder.

There is now even a comprehensive law against the violence against women that continues to impel some women to homicide. After battered women and their advocates pressed Congress for years, the first Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA) became law in 1984 as part of an omnibus Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. It authorized modest funding for community-based domestic violence programs and coalitions; and for a decade that was all. Advocates pushed for more. In 1990, the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings on violence against women that were to last four years. The office of then-Senator Joe Biden drafted legislation, Congress passed it, and President Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Public Law 103-322, on September 13, 1994.

VAWA aimed to make the biased and negligent criminal justice system investigate and prosecute violent crimes against women. It offered grants to states and Native American tribes to encourage police, prosecutors, and judges to collaborate with battered women’s advocates to jumpstart the system and to provide services to victims. A new Violence Against Women office within the Department of Justice administered the multi-million dollar grants, determined to make VAWA serve women victims of violence and their children, and not merely the criminal justice system that had failed them for so long. Earlier, in 1993, Congress had appropriated money to set up some national centers to gather information about violence against women. So when VAWA funding first reached the states, four technical centers, including the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, were already in place to help criminal justice agencies and women’s advocates—linked by that crucial word collaborate—interpret the act and design projects.

The results of this carefully crafted federal program were so remarkable that Congress reauthorized VAWA in 2000, and again in 2005, with funding to continue and expand. By requiring collaboration of adversaries on opposite sides of a social problem—one side with power, the other with experience—it produced some solutions. And it saved lives. Women and their children took advantage of shelter, social services, and improved law enforcement to escape to safety and start over. But ironically the principal beneficiaries of the Violence Against Women Act are men—men who would be dead if the law had not offered abused women a better way out. A chapter on VAWA might be entitled Women who don’t have to kill anymore.

The thirty years from 1976 to 2005 saw an amazing decline in the rate of homicide among intimates—that is, spouses, ex-spouses, girlfriends, and boyfriends. But the most dramatic fact revealed by Bureau of Justice Statistics is this: The number of men [killed] by intimates dropped by 75 percent. For white men, the figure was 61 percent; for black men, a staggering 83 percent. Transpose those figures to a visual chart and the line that represents the number of black men killed by their wives or girlfriends plunges like an Alpine ski slope. In 1976 black men were killed by intimates at a rate twenty times that of 2005. The drop in the number of white men killed by intimates in the same period is only slightly less dramatic. More than half a million people were murdered in the United States in that thirty-year period—594,276 to be exact. But only 3 percent of male homicide victims were killed by their wives, ex-wives, or girlfriends.

Superimpose on that chart another line depicting the nationwide establishment of battered women’s shelters and domestic violence hotlines and you see an uncanny inverted resemblance: shelters and hotlines go up and up, male victims of intimate homicide go down almost to the vanishing point. Other factors are surely at play: stricter controls on handguns, the weapon of choice in most spousal homicides, undoubtedly helped save lives. (The Lautenberg law, passed in 1996, made it unlawful for any person convicted of domestic violence or subject to a restraining order for domestic violence—including police and military personnel—to own, ship, transport, or use guns or ammunition.) A strong economy probably made it easier for women wanting out to find jobs to support themselves. And progress on civil rights brought African American, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian women, as well as white women, the support and services afforded by VAWA. Even skeptics admitted that what women’s advocates had argued all along is true: a woman offered a better way out of a bad situation will take it.

That better way under VAWA programs increasingly included legal assistance, job counseling and training, housing assistance, and the like—all aimed at helping women become self-sufficient. Sociologists developed something called the Gender Equality Index to measure the extent to which women have parity with men in three spheres of life: economic, political, and legal. In the 1970s, terrified by the rise of what was then called women’s liberation, antifeminists predicted dire consequences. A popular and influential theory (which I discuss in the original introduction) held that if women attained equality with men they would become equally numerous and violent criminals. Law enforcement and prison officials prepared for the violent women offenders such gender convergence would produce. Fifteen years later they were still waiting, and sociologists began to notice that Those states with the highest degree of gender equality . . . also have the lowest rate of homicide by females—the opposite of what would be predicted by the ‘gender convergence hypothesis. ’ Many seemed genuinely surprised by this evidence of a demonstrable fact often denied in America: it is inequality that gives rise to violence.

The rate at which men murdered women intimates between 1976 and 2005 also went down, but not nearly as much. The number of black women murdered by husbands and boyfriends dropped by 52 percent. But the number of white women murdered actually rose steadily for more than a decade, then fell for a few years after 1993, then rose again to level off in 2005 at a point only 6 percent lower than it had been in 1976. How can this be explained? If VAWA did so much to save men, how did it fail women so badly? The answer lies in the very different motives behind the intimate homicides of women and men. The typical woman who kills a husband or boyfriend does so in self-defense, usually after repeated attacks of increasing violence, and without intending to cause death. But the typical man who kills a wife or girlfriend does so deliberately when he thinks he is losing control over her—when she asks for a divorce, hires a lawyer, goes home to her mother, or even when she merely gets a job or goes back to school. In other words, the very actions that help a woman escape—and thus become less likely to harm her husband—tip his violence beyond battering to murder. Despite clear evidence of such lethal male aggression, social scientists probing domestic violence studied battered women, not battering men, and blathered on for decades about the battered woman’s masochism and codependency and helplessness and low self-esteem. Their popular blame-the-victim theories—often developed with generous taxpayer funding from the National Institute of Mental Health—obscured the fact that thousands of battered women were just plain scared to death, and rightly so. It took a long time for the criminal justice system to even begin to realize that when a woman said her husband or boyfriend was going to kill her, she was almost certainly right. So for twenty years or more, while shelters and hotlines unwittingly protected men from women who might have found it necessary to kill them, the criminal justice system still failed to protect women from men who threatened to murder them, and did.

To this day the grim statistics stand; and those lines on the charts representing women victims do not descend. Among whites, murder of wives and ex-wives is on the rise again as traumatized soldiers return from a decade of war. And girlfriend murder has been increasing for thirty years. That’s partly because there are more live-in white girlfriends now than there used to be, and partly because the criminal justice system is no more willing or better able to protect them. Among African-Americans, girlfriend murder has decreased 66 percent, yet girlfriends remain the most likely victims in intimate homicides. Another grim fact: most spouses and ex-spouses of all ethnicities are killed by guns; most girlfriends are murdered by force—beaten to death. Today teen-dating violence zooms up the charts like the latest rapper rage. Let a celebrity beat up his girlfriend and teen girl fans will rush to blame her. Girls try to keep control by changing their behavior to manage the threat—don’t make him jealous, don’t make him mad—learning lessons of love that leash another generation to inequality.

You don’t have to be a social scientist to figure out that the women who don’t get out alive are trapped in the worst circumstances with the deadliest men. The Bureau of Justice Statistics now says that one third of women murder victims are killed by an intimate. That’s an average figure, true of very young and old women; but of murdered women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty, more than 40 percent are killed by intimates. The figure varies with location as well; in rural areas and in largely rural gun-toting states, it’s closer to 70 percent. And of all female homicide victims, the proportion murdered by a husband or boyfriend continues to increase. Given such circumstances, thousands of women will die. And some women will kill.

The most important provision of the Violence Against Women Act was Title III, asserting that: all persons within the United States shall have the right to be free from crimes of violence motivated by gender.In those few words the federal government recognized at last the civil right of women (and men)—the provision is gender neutral—to be free from gender-motivated violence, just as thirty years earlier it had recognized the civil right of all citizens to be free from racially-motivated violence. A quarter-century and the work of thousands of women and many men, including countless survivors of gender-motivated violent crimes, produced this change: the recognition, as a matter of public policy, that gender-motivated violence is a violation of civil rights, that states have been unwilling or unable to provide equal protection to its victims, and that Congress therefore must back up the states with a federal civil rights remedy to afford victims the equal protection of law that is rightfully theirs.

Opposition to the civil rights remedy of VAWA began before the ink was dry. It came strongly from associations of judges, and it was based largely upon hoary arguments drawn originally from English Common Law and dignified by the passage of time about the line (or curtain) that conveniently divides public concerns from private matters. Private meant domestic, and domestic meant anything that had to do with women. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist opposed passage of VAWA on grounds that it would swamp the federal courts with domestic cases. Women as equal citizens seemed to be invisible to the Chief Justice and many of his fellows who saw them only as parties to insignificant domestic disputes. The Legal Defense and Education Fund of the National Organization for Women wrote in support of the VAWA civil rights provision that it conveyed a powerful message: violence motivated by gender is not merely an individual crime or a personal injury, but is a form of discrimination, an assault on a publicly-shared ideal of equality. But in 2000, in the case United States v. Morrison, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that women had no such "right to be free from crimes of violence motivated by gender."In effect, the Supreme Court came down against the ideal of equality.

It is too bad Morrison’s name is attached in legal history to the trashing of women’s hard earned and briefly enjoyed civil right to be free from gender-motivated violence. Everything the case tells us about Morrison suggests he is a macho creep, and a dangerous one. A young woman named Christy Brzonkala met Antonio Morrison and his friend James Crawford soon after she enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in September 1994. The men were varsity football players. Christy Brzonkala said that within a half hour of their meeting, they assaulted and repeatedly raped her. In the months following the rape, Antonio Morrison so often sounded off in the campus cafeteria about what he liked to do to women that a shocked Chief Justice Rehnquist had to expunge those remarks from his legal opinion, substituting only decorous ellipses.

Christy Brzonkala was upset and depressed. She brought charges before a college disciplinary board, which found Morrison guilty. (Crawford disappears from the case without explanation; and there is no record that local law enforcement was called or criminal charges filed.) The college at first suspended Morrison for two semesters, then recanted. When Christy Brzonkala learned that Antonio Morrison would return to school as though nothing had happened, she dropped out. That’s when she filed a federal civil rights suit. And that’s when the Supreme Court seized the opportunity to say that neither Christy Brzonkala nor any of her raped and assaulted and battered sisters had the civil right they claimed.

Why not? Because, said the Supreme Court, Congress had no power under the Constitution to make such a law. Congress had cited not one but two Constitutional sources of its authority. First, Congress cited the Commerce Clause that authorizes it to legislate in regard to any activity that has an impact on interstate commerce. Four years of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee had produced what dissenting Justice David Souter called a mountain of data . . . showing the effects of violence against women on interstate commerce, including estimates that the United States spends between $5 and $10 billion a year on health care, criminal justice, and other social costs of domestic violence. Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the majority, said that Congress could not regulate non-economic, violent criminal conduct that was not directed at the instrumentalities, channels, or goods involved in interstate commerce—in other words, private conduct not aimed directly at the public market. Protecting citizens from plain old non-economic violence, he said, was the province of the states, not Congress.

Secondly, Congress cited Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gives to Congress power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. The provision Congress sought to enforce through the VAWA civil rights remedy is the critical clause in Section 1: "nor [shall any State] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Wrong again, said Rehnquist, asserting an interpretation of the equal protection clause that he himself had helped to make firmly imbedded in our constitutional law, namely that it means to protect citizens only from actions of the States. He writes: That Amendment erects no shield against merely private conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful." Legal scholars have made the case, as I have elsewhere, that domestic violence is a form of terrorism, that it compels what amounts to involuntary servitude, that it is the enforcing arm of the old Common Law doctrine of coverture under which a woman is covered by her husband and not by the law, that it is the means of intimidation by which an entire class (women) is kept in subjection, and that it indeed has an immense impact on the costs of criminal justice, health care, social services, and commerce: in short, that violence against women in all its forms is a public concern, and not a private matter. But Rehnquist and a majority of his colleagues clung doggedly to the notion that violence against women is merely private conduct. Dissenting Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice John Paul Stevens, asked: But why can Congress not provide a remedy against private actors? That’s one thing women want to know.

Rehnquist also insisted that under the federalist system, both criminal matters (as in "violence against) and domestic matters (as in women") belong to the states and not to the federal government. The states disagreed. Pointing to intractable judicial bias against women in state courts, they had told Congress that justice required federal remedies. Task forces on domestic violence from twenty-one states had filed reports in support of VAWA, providing masses of evidence that biased state officials and state courts did not equally protect women. Attorneys general from forty-one states had signed a letter to Congress urging passage of VAWA, and many filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court arguing against Morrison. But Antonio Morrison couched his argument in terms of states’ rights, and he won. Curiously, within a few months, the same conservative majority—Rehnquist, Scalia, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Thomas—so ardently protective of states’ rights in re Morrison would overturn the decision and deny the right of the Florida Supreme Court to interpret Florida state law in the case of George W. Bush, et al. v. Albert Gore, Jr., et al., a judicial coup that brought fellow-conservative George W. Bush to the presidency.

When Chief Justice Rehnquist threw the problem of violence against women back to the states, however, he wrote that if Christy Brzonkala’s allegations of Morrison’s brutal assault were true, no civilized system of justice could fail to provide her a remedy . . . But that remedy must be provided by [the State], and not by the United States. Taking the hint, New York City passed such a law before the year was out. The State of California followed in 2002 with a law modeled on the civil rights provision of VAWA. But now, almost a decade after the Morrison decision, the number of other states that have even considered adopting such laws can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Their inaction makes plain the need for the federal remedy the federal court disallowed. (Just as the Supreme Court’s refusal to find constitutional grounds to offer equal protection to women makes plain the need to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed almost a century ago, in 1921, and stuck in a congressional committee since it failed ratification in 1982.) Most Americans would probably agree with Rehnquist that no civilized system of justice could fail to provide . . . a remedy to citizens subjected to brutal assaults. But the American system has failed to do exactly that in cases where the brutally assaulted citizens happen to be women. So we should not be surprised that some women, sometimes—though less often now—find a violent remedy for themselves.

VAWA was necessary and long overdue, but it was essentially a law enforcement fix for a social problem fixable only by profound changes in the status of women and in the material conditions of women’s lives. Ironically, VAWA wasn’t even enacted in its own right but merely as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, an act replete with extremely regressive law and order provisions women’s advocates oppose. Women’s advocates had pressed for the criminal justice system to do its job—to arrest, prosecute, and fairly punish assaultive men—but in doing so, they inadvertently became part of a right wing law and order juggernaut—set rolling in the Reagan/Bush years, accelerated by Clinton, and driven home by George W. Bush—that greatly curtailed prisoners’ rights and expanded the death penalty. Women’s advocates had sought VAWA to meet an immediate goal: to create safety for women. But the larger goal was always social justice. With Morrison, both seemed farther away than ever.

There was more to come. Take the passage, two years after VAWA, on August 22, 1996, of a small masterpiece of Orwellian newspeak: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. This act eliminated open-ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a New Deal program that had provided temporary support to countless women survivors of violence and their children as they recovered and built new lives. Its replacement, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), gave women two years to find work and stop being needy. Women tried, and many got stuck in minimum-wage jobs. The Clinton administration, balancing the budget on the backs of poor women, counted their absence from welfare rolls as success. But within a year, nearly half a million families fell into extreme poverty, half again as poor as those living in ordinary poverty. Female-headed families were hardest hit. A decade later, in 2007, the Children’s Defense Fund found 13.3 million poor children: that’s one child in six living below the poverty line, with nearly 6 million of them, or one in thirteen, living in extreme poverty. Almost half of them live in female-headed households. Many of these women fled violence in the home only to sink into poverty with their kids; and poverty—economic inequality—bears the seeds of more violence. The Children’s Defense Fund expects these numbers to rise as families face the full impact of the recession.

Then came 9/11—by any measure a pivotal moment in the nation’s history. As the administration of George W. Bush led the country through patriotism and pretexts into a war on Afghanistan, a preemptive war on Iraq, and a limitless global war on terror, men filled the media with disputatious talk of tactics, troop levels, intelligence, interrogation, weaponry, waterboarding, strategies, missions, and more. With some exceptions, women almost disappeared from public discourse—as TV commentators, think tank experts, op-ed opinion columnists, political reporters, and analysts of international affairs and national policy. With them went other issues of special concern to women, such as pay equity, workplace discrimination, and child poverty, not to mention violence against women, pushed aside by the more pressing necessities of war. The militarized country was swathed in yellow ribbons to remind us not to question the administration but to support our troops, as if our soldiers had decided on their own to start the wars. Thus the country that had been moving by fits and starts toward greater equality and less violence lost its footing, and the first decade of the new century came to belong exclusively to the patriarchs: wealthy white men who made the wars, wrote the laws that justified them, exploited the troops that fought them, squandered the public treasury to conduct them, signed the private contracts that further enriched their class, and peddled the bunk that an American war would bestow upon oppressed women of the Muslim world equal rights—presumably like those denied to women in the United States. There were a few women (and minority men) in government at the time, and many among the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but rarely in modern memory have women (and minorities) and their concerns counted for less. As for the women of the Muslim world, though rights were inscribed on paper during the wars, most Afghan women live as before, in subjection and poverty, while many Iraqi women—formerly the most advanced in the Arab world—have been forcibly returned to the traditions of a previous century.

And now war comes home. Male soldiers sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for two, three, or four tours of duty return to wives who find them changed and to children they barely know. Tens of thousands return to inadequate, underfunded veterans’ services with appalling physical injuries, crippling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suck-it-up sergeants who hold to the belief that no good soldier seeks help. Even in the best of times the incidence of violence against women is much higher in the military than among civilians; and after war it’s worse. The battered women’s movement once had a slogan: World peace begins at home. They thought peace could be learned by example in homes free of violence and carried into the wider world. It was an idea suggested in 1869 by the political philosopher John Stuart Mill who saw clearly that what he called the subjection of women engendered in the home the habits of tyranny and violence that afflicted political life in England and corrupted the country’s conduct abroad. But as things stand, it is violence that begins at home. Children who witness violence or suffer it at home learn how effective it is; and simply by seeing who does what to whom, they learn gender inequality as well. They carry that violence into the schools, into the streets, into dating and love, and into the armed forces where it is exploited and amplified. And then they bring it home again to teach it to children of their own.

The first veterans of the war in Afghanistan returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2002. On June 11, Sergeant First Class Rigoberto Nieves fatally shot his wife Teresa and then himself in their bedroom. On June 29, Sergeant William Wright strangled his wife Jennifer and buried her body in the woods. On July 9, Sergeant Ramon Griffin stabbed his estranged wife Marilyn fifty times or more and set her house on fire. On July 19, even as Sergeant Wright was being charged with the death of his wife, Sergeant First Class Brandon Floyd of Delta Force, the antiterrorism unit of Special Forces (SF), shot his wife Andrea and then killed himself. At least three of the murdered wives had been seeking separation or divorce. When a New York Times reporter asked another master sergeant in the Special Forces to comment on these events, the man said: S.F.’s don’t like to talk about emotional stuff. We are Type A people who just blow things like that off, like yesterday’s news. The killing went on. In February 2005, Army Special Forces trainee Richard Corcoran shot and killed himself after wounding his estranged wife Michele and another soldier. He became the tenth fatality in the lengthening line of domestic violence homicides at Fort Bragg.

In January 2009, the New York Times reported that between 2005 and 2008, nine members of the Fort Carson, Colorado, Fourth Brigade Combat team had been charged with homicide after returning from Iraq. Five of the murders took place in 2008 alone; and in addition, charges of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault at the base rose sharply. In 2005, Stephen Sherwood returned from Iraq and fatally shot his wife and then himself. In September 2008, Private John Needham, who had received a medical discharge after a failed suicide attempt, beat his girlfriend to death. In October 2008, Specialist Robert H. Marko raped and murdered Judilianna Lawrence, a developmentally disabled teenager he met online. The New York Times,which reported extensively on violent crimes of all sorts committed by returning veterans, remarked that national attention to the subject was short-lived. But in February 2008 it reported finding more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or [fatal] child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans since the war began in October 2001. Earlier, in April 2000, after three soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, murdered their wives and the cases showed up on the CBS TV program 60 Minutes, the Pentagon established a task force on domestic violence. It found that soldiers rarely faced any consequences for beating or raping their wives—girlfriends didn’t even count—and in fact soldiers were sheltered on military bases from civilian orders of protection. After three years’ work, the task force reported its findings and recommendations to Congress. The date was March 20, 2003, the day the United States invaded Iraq. Members of the House Armed Services Committee kept rushing from the hearing room, where testimony on the report was underway, to see how the brand new war was coming along.

Years later the military is as much in denial as ever. It has established anger management classes, long known to be useless for men who assault their wives. Batterers already manage their anger very well—and very selectively—rarely confronting senior officers or other authority figures but routinely intimidating wives and girlfriends. SF trainee Richard Corcoran, the suicidal assailant in the tenth fatal incident at Fort Bragg, went directly from such a class to shoot his wife. The military does evaluate the mental health of soldiers. Three times it evaluated the mental health of Specialist Robert H. Marko (the Fort Carson infantryman who raped and murdered a girl) and each time declared him fit for combat, although according to his record, he believed that on his twenty-first birthday he would be transformed into the Black Raptor—half-man, half-dinosaur. After the ninth homicide at Fort Carson, the army started an inquiry there. The general in charge said they were looking for a trend, something that happened through [the murderers’] life cycle that might have contributed to this. A former captain and Army prosecutor at Fort Carson asked, Where is this aggression coming from? . . . Was it something in Iraq?

Our women soldiers are a different story. The Department of Defense still contends that women serve only in support of U.S. operations, but in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan support and combat often amount to the same thing. Women soldiers risk their lives in combat without much risk of being given credit for it, although two women, Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester in Iraq and Specialist Monica Brown in Afghanistan have won the Silver Star, a medal recognizing gallantry in combat previously awarded to only one woman, in World War II. Between September 11, 2001, and mid-2008, 193,400 women were deployed in support of U.S. combat operations. In Iraq alone, 585 were wounded, and 97 were killed. Like their male counterparts, thousands of women soldiers return from Afghanistan and Iraq afflicted with PTSD, further complicated by the conditions of their service. Although they train with other women, they are often deployed only with men. In the field they are routinely harassed and raped by their fellow soldiers and by officers who can destroy their careers if they protest. In March 2009 the Pentagon acknowledged 2,923 cases of sexual assault in the past year and a 25 percent increase in assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan; worse, the Pentagon estimated that perhaps 80 percent of rapes go unreported. Citing this new data, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert observed: There is no real desire in the military to modify this aspect of its culture. It is an ultra-macho environment in which the overwhelming tendency has been to see all women—civilian and military, young and old, American and foreign—solely as sex objects. When women soldiers come home as veterans, they too may be involved in domestic homicides, though usually not as killers, but as victims.

Shortly after Sergeant William Edwards and his wife, Sergeant Erin Edwards, returned to Fort Hood, Texas, in 2004 from separate missions in Iraq, he assaulted her. She moved off the base, sent her two children to stay with her mother, brought charges against her husband, got an order of protection, and secured assurances from her husband’s commanders that they would prevent him from leaving the base without an accompanying officer. With the help of a brigadier general whom she served as an aide, she arranged to transfer to a base in New York, but before she could leave, on July 22, 2004, William Edwards skipped his anger management class, left the base by himself, drove to Erin Edwards’s house, and after a struggle, shot her in the head, then turned the gun on himself. The police detective in charge of the investigation told the press, I believe that had he been confined to base and had that confinement been monitored, she would not be dead at his hands.

Back in North Carolina, near Fort Bragg and the nearby Marine base at Camp Lejeune, military men murdered four military women in nine months between December 2007 and September 2008. Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach, eight months pregnant, went missing from Camp Lejeune in December 2007, not long before she was to testify that a fellow Marine, Corporal Cesar Laurean, had raped her. In January, investigators found her burned body in a shallow grave in Laurean’s backyard. By then, Laurean had fled to Mexico, his native country, and been apprehended there; but Mexico does not extradite citizens subject to capital punishment. On June 21, the decomposing body of Specialist Megan Touma, seven months pregnant, was found in a motel room near Fort Bragg. In July, Sergeant Edgar Patino, a married man and the father of Touma’s child, was arrested and charged with her murder. On July 10, Army Second Lieutenant Holly Wimunc, a nurse, failed to appear for work at Fort Bragg and neighbors reported that her apartment was burning. Days later her charred body was found near Camp Lejeune. She had been in the process of divorcing her estranged husband Marine Corporal John Wimunc and had a restraining order against him. He and his friend Lance Corporal Kyle Ryan Alden were charged with murder, arson, and felony conspiracy. On September 30, Army Sergeant Christina Smith was walking with her husband Sergeant Richard Smith in their Fayetteville neighborhood near Fort Bragg when an assailant plunged a knife into her neck. Richard Smith and eighteen-year-old Private First Class Mathew Kvapil, the hired hit man, were charged with murder and conspiracy. What is so striking about these intimate homicides is their lack of intimacy. They are plotted and carried out with the kind of ruthless calculation that must go in to any military plan of attack. All are designed to eliminate an inconveniently pregnant lover and an unwelcome child or to inflict the ultimate control on a woman about to escape. And some, in good soldierly fashion, enlist the help of a buddy. On military websites you can read plenty of comments of comradely support for the homicidal men who heroically offed the bitches.

I mention all these things—the Supreme Court’s denial of equal protection and equal rights to women; the federal cut off of financial support to poor families; the ever increasing numbers of women and children living in poverty; the militarization of American life; the consequent exclusion of women from the public forum; the exploitation of service men and women within a system that maintains inequality and amplifies misogyny; the brainwashing that teaches soldiers to kill abroad and the neglect that leaves them to it at home—because all these things, coupled with the financial collapse of the country, establish the ideological climate and the material conditions for more violence to come. Already women are trying to defend themselves from the rising tide. There will surely be more crimes like that of Alicia Bartholomew who shot and wounded her violent husband, a Marine veteran of Iraq. In 2008, a Kentucky jury acquitted her of attempted murder on grounds of self-defense.

It’s only fair to mention that some women commit other atypical kinds of homicide, and not in self-defense. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977, they pay a heavy price. By 2005, sixty-three women had been sentenced to death and eleven had been executed, some for multiple murders. Karla Faye Tucker, as a young drug addict, joined her boyfriend in beating to death a biker friend and his female companion; she was executed in Texas in 1998. Judias Buenoano killed her husband, her son, and a boyfriend for $240,000 in insurance; she was executed in Florida in 1998. Mary Kay Plantz hired her teenaged boyfriend and his pal to kill her husband for $300,000 in life insurance; she was executed in Oklahoma in 2001. Betty Lou Beets, a sixty-two-year-old-great grandmother, shot two of her five husbands and buried them in the yard. Although police reported she had been raped by her father and abused by almost all of her husbands, she was executed in Texas in 2000. Sixty-one-year-old Lois Nadean Smith was executed in Oklahoma in 2001 for killing the former girlfriend of her son. Wanda Jean Allen, the first African American woman to die in this wave of executions, had served time for killing a woman and was put to death in Oklahoma in 2001 for killing a second woman who was her lover. Twenty-eight-year-old Christina Marie Riggs was executed in Arkansas in 2000 for smothering her two young children. She had tried and failed to kill herself. Lynda Lyon Block, fifty-four, once a Humane Society volunteer, got involved with a right wing patriot movement and shot and killed a police officer in a Walmart parking lot in Opelika, Alabama. She died in the Alabama electric chair in 2002. Aileen Wuornos, billed (mistakenly) as America’s First Female Serial Killer was executed by lethal injection in Florida in 2002 for murdering seven men, each of whom had picked up the Highway Hooker. Frances Newton, an African American convicted of shooting her drug-dealer husband and two children, was executed in Texas in 2005.

In the last chapter of this book, I’ve written about Velma Barfield, the first woman executed (in 1984) in this recent contagion of killing authorized by our courts and carried out by our government in our name. Look into her case or the cases of any of the other executed women, and you’ll find a catalogue of childhood neglect, abuse, rape, incest, assault, exploitation, alcohol, drugs (illegal or prescribed), traumatic head injury, brain dysfunction, mental retardation, poverty, minimal education, abandonment, loss, shame, shattered hope, attempted suicide, and scarcely a single solid human relationship along the way. There are things terribly askew in every one of these lives, just as there are in the lives of so many men who wind up on death row. They are put to death not because they are the most dangerous people—they could be held in prison, which some women find safer and more supportive than life outside—but because they are literally defenseless in the face of state-sponsored violence.

A great many people understand this. Protesting the imminent execution of Betty Lou Beets, the abused Texas great-grandmother, the president of the European Parliament wrote in 2000 to then-Governor George W. Bush: On the eve of the third millennium, it has become archaic and morally unacceptable that large civilized nations such as the United States, which enjoy considerable influence in the world, should not yet have realized that the time has come for them too [like the nations of Europe] to end this barbaric practice. Bush disregarded the message. Two years later his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, lifted a stay of execution and enabled the state to take the life of its most notorious inmate, Aileen Wournos. During a decade on death row, she had become a grotesque symbolic figure, larger than life. To men she was a nightmare fantasy: a butch lesbian who—they imagined—killed men to get off on it, as male serial killers do when they murder women. To many women who believed she killed to defend herself from rape or murder, she was an avenging hero—like Louise in the classic 1991 film Thelma and Louise, but real. Carla Lucero, who wrote and composed the opera Wournos, probably spoke for many women when she said: I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner. I don’t really condone killing, but you do have to wonder, Why did this take so long? But when the Wournos story—a lifetime of sexual abuse and human neglect—reached the movies, Hollywood gave actress Charlize Theron an Oscar for making plain that the monster she portrayed was just a deeply damaged human being. That was not to encourage murder, but the opposite—to encourage art, and human understanding, and perhaps mercy.

That’s also what I had in mind thirty years ago, writing this book on the crest of what seemed a great wave of social change, delivering social justice. I wasn’t prepared for the backwash. Now as I write we live in a different country, under the military/industrial/congressional complex President Eisenhower warned us against. That complex is another name for patriarchy: the conjunction of the interests of powerful men—their greed, their violence—and the systems they have put in place to defend them. There is nothing just or democratic about patriarchy. Nothing equal. It defends the interests of the few at the expense of the many. It is antithetical to the professed ideals of the nation and to the well-being of women, children, and all men who would willingly trade the urge to dominate for liberty, justice, and peace. Yet patriarchy survives—not simply by force, but by fear, lies, and hypocrisy, using symbols and slogans as ideological controls to win the complicity of the rest of us. God Bless America. The American Way of Life. The American Dream. The Greatest Nation. War on Terror. Under God. Bring ’em on! And yes, Sex and the City, Mr. Right, Love Conquers All, Post Feminism. Mission Accomplished. As Aileen Wuornos is reported to have said, They have to tell us something.

I’m as relieved as the rest of the world that the United States is now under new management, but as I write in the early, hopeful days of President Barack Obama’s administration, the systems of patriarchy stand firm. Howard Zinn reminds us of the lesson of history: that democracy does not come from the top. Nor does equality. Change seems to be up to us. In Women Who Kill I wrote about the patterns of homicide in this country, so different for women and for men, and so predictable, arising from their separate and unequal lives. Thirty years later, the numbers have changed, but not the patterns. I suggested then that these homicidal patterns might be shadows of profound cultural deformities. We know well what they are: misogyny, inequality, poverty, discrimination, violence. We can change them, if we will.

A.J. Ossabaw Island March 2009

foreword

Five years ago in a women’s literature seminar, a student depressed by reading The Awakening, The House of Mirth, and The Bell Jar, complained: Isn’t there anything a woman can do but kill herself? To lighten the mood I quipped, She can always kill somebody else, and realized in the instant that it was true. I have been working on this book ever since.

It has caused embarrassment. Tell people you’re writing a book about women who commit murder and they make some joke about lady-killers or walk away muttering weird. For both the killer and the killed, murder is one of the few human acts that cannot be ameliorated or revoked; yet no one seems to take it seriously. Books about murder (with the exception of some serious attempts at understanding, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song) fall mainly into two categories: bone-dry academic criminology aimed at diagramming criminal patterns, and presumably helping to prevent crime; and grimly amusing homicidal anecdotes in the vein popularized in this country by Edmund Lester Pearson. For the most part, academic criminologists ignore women while the popular crime writers describe murderesses in books with snappy titles like Fatal Femmes and The Deadlier Species. Yet almost anyone who stops to think about it realizes that women’s homicides are different. Unlike men, who are apt to stab a total stranger in a drunken brawl or run amok with a high-powered rifle, we women usually kill our intimates: we kill our children, our husbands, our lovers. This fact is not amusing. But that these homicidal patterns might be shadows of profound cultural deformities—and thus worthy of serious consideration—seems not to have occurred to many.

But joking, you will say, is merely a psychological defense against the undeniable fact that people—you and I—are capable of murdering and of being murdered. We laugh because we are afraid. True enough. And this book is mostly about fear: the fears of men who, even as they shape society, are desperately afraid of women, and so have fashioned a world in which women come and go only in certain rooms; and about the fears of those women who, finding the rooms too narrow and the door still locked, lie in wait or set the place afire.

But are such women a fit subject for serious historical (or herstorical) study? Historians often assume that women have not significantly acted, but have been acted upon. Women are history’s great blob of putty. So we have books—accurate and valuable books—on how women have been defrauded and oppressed by medicine, psychology, capitalism, the law, the universities, and our own mothers. Other historians, believing that some women did act, and from enlightened self-interest at that, have given us women in the antislavery movement, in the suffrage movement, in the labor movement: women like the Grimkés, Anthony, Cady Stanton, Goldman, Eastman, Mother Jones, who have said and done great things on behalf of themselves and others. Yet our great women are few. This year more women will kill their children than will be appointed to the judicial bench. More women will kill their husbands than will sit in the halls of Congress. A baby girl born tomorrow stands a chance of growing up to stick a kitchen knife into an assaultive husband; but her chances of becoming President are too slim to be statistically significant. The story of women who kill is the story of women.

This book does not proceed in a straight line. It consists of a series of studies, mostly historical, approaching the subject of women and murder from different angles. They are intended to dispel some false notions and to examine the connections among women, society, and killing. My aim has not been to get through the topic but to get at it.

I have not sought out obscure cases since they are often fascinating in their own right but reveal little about their times. Instead, I write mostly about prominent cases that obviously hit a social nerve. I recount some individual cases such as the Borden parricide because they are historical landmarks or (like the cases of Ruth Snyder and Alice Crimmins) representative of broad social concerns; and I discuss groups of cases that cluster about a single prominent issue, such as infanticide in the colonial era or woman’s self-defense in our own.

In presenting cases I have had to mediate between my sources and my readers. That has been complicated because where murder is concerned people not only forget things and misunderstand—as all of us do in the best of circumstances—but they also lie a lot. I compared as many different accounts as I could lay hands on and produced a version as close to the truth as I could get, though it is only fair to say that I have read and retold history as a feminist. Where circumstances make it impossible to penetrate to the truth I have said so. And I have made up nothing. Indeed, because murder can so easily be sensationalized or sentimentalized, I have taken some pains to stick to the bare facts.

Some definitions are necessary. I use the term feminists throughout the book to refer to women who identified themselves with and spoke on behalf of women’s rights. Feminism encompasses a broad range of opinion, but usually I

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