Ann Jones' Women Who Kill

Reviewed by Phyllis Ehrenfeld

Women Who Kill: A Social History of Women Murderers in the U.S.A. from Colonial Times to the Present
Ann Jones
Beacon Press. 1996
ISBN: 080706775X. Paper.
448 pages; $16.00.

"Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her father forty whacks. Then she took another one, and gave her mother forty-one." Would the public forgive? Perhaps, but it helped if you were a lady. The most famous murderess in American history was found innocent in a court of law, in spite of both motive and evidence. Jones' detailed analysis of each of the cases she presents is as intriguing as a summary of a whodunit.

Lizzie's father, Andrew Borden, was a sullen and miserly man who forced Lizzie and her sister to lead lives of social isolation and boredom totally separated from the community in spite of her family's wealth and social position. Although an heiress, Lizzie lived a poor girl's life. Still, according to the defense, Lizzie had no motive, because no respectable, well-brought-up daughter could murder her father for money. Lizzie was presented to the jury as the epitome of godliness and cleanliness. For an axe murder there was an astonishing lack of blood except for a miniscule speck on Lizzie's petticoat, carefully explained by the defense as a trace of Lizzie's monthly sickness which had ended the night before the murders.

After the murders, Lizzie was twice observed descending to the cellar where a pailful of bloody towels was kept. However, respect for female modesty prevented the discussion of menstruation in a courtroom, and the bloody towels could not be used as evidence.

Ladies who appeared in courtrooms respectably dressed and tearful, presenting an image of injured if foolish innocence were protected by social taboos that were of no help for black women, sexually "loose" women, or victims of rape and seduction, who were often punished more severely than men guilty of similar crimes.

But no single case is more provocative than the explanations for either conviction or acquittal as a reflection of the social attitudes of the times.

The good, outwardly devoted wife could sometimes avoid being considered a murderess, because no matter how difficult her life might be with a husband who drank and gambled away all the money she managed to earn, it was inconceivable that she would take matters into her own hands with the easy weapon of poison.

Three defendants in famous poisoning cases were saved from punishment only by what a prosecutor called the law's chivalry. In Jones' interpretation, this unequal justice was a precarious prop for society's grand illusion that men loved and protected women, and that women, by nature, in spite of the most brutal treatment, still loved men. Any woman could easily poison any man she lived with, but fathers and husbands could not act on this fear, the fear of "household fiends." Denial was safer!

Denial, to mask the greater evil of the relations between the sexes, permitted the lesser evil of the acquittal of the guilty. In our time, until recently, wife-beating has been treated as a family quarrel, and millions of wife-beaters have had little or no interference from the law. Many battered women have repeatedly asked for help from the police and some finally have been driven to kill. Jones has used her meticulous research to demonstrate the effects of sexual stereotyping, class, and race on the way society treats women who murder. Times have changes somewhat, but the challenge still exists to unite honesty, fairness, and compassion in the social attitudes which influence the law.

Phyllis Ehrenfeld has received the Arnold Gingrich Award in prose for the most highly evaluated fellowship from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has been Editor of the American Anorexia Bulima Association for ten years. Several of her plays have been presented as staged readings in the Bergen County area.