Women Who Kill
Women Who Kill

Author: Ann Jones

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 1558616527

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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).

Under Household Government
Under Household Government

Author: M. Michelle Jarrett Morris

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-01-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0674071417

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Seventeenth-century New Englanders were not as busy policing their neighbors’ behavior as Nathaniel Hawthorne or many historians of early America would have us believe. Keeping their own households in line occupied too much of their time. Under Household Government reveals the extent to which family members took on the role of watchdog in matters of sexual indiscretion. In a society where one’s sister’s husband’s brother’s wife was referred to as “sister,” kinship networks could be immense. When out-of-wedlock pregnancies, paternity suits, and infidelity resulted in legal cases, courtrooms became battlegrounds for warring clans. Families flooded the courts with testimony, sometimes resorting to slander and jury-tampering to defend their kin. Even slaves merited defense as household members—and as valuable property. Servants, on the other hand, could expect to be cast out and left to fend for themselves. As she elaborates the ways family policing undermined the administration of justice, M. Michelle Jarrett Morris shows how ordinary colonists understood sexual, marital, and familial relationships. Long-buried tales are resurrected here, such as that of Thomas Wilkinson’s (unsuccessful) attempt to exchange cheese for sex with Mary Toothaker, and the discovery of a headless baby along the shore of Boston’s Mill Pond. The Puritans that we meet in Morris’s account are not the cardboard caricatures of myth, but are rendered with both skill and sensitivity. Their stories of love, sex, and betrayal allow us to understand anew the depth and complexity of family life in early New England.

Executing Race
Executing Race

Author: Sharon M. Harris

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0814209750

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Executing Race examines the multiple ways in which race, class, and the law impacted women's lives in the 18th century and, equally important, the ways in which women sought to change legal and cultural attitudes in this volatile period. Through an examination of infanticide cases, Harris reveals how conceptualizations of women, especially their bodies and their legal rights, evolved over the course of the 18th century. Early in the century, infanticide cases incorporated the rhetoric of the witch trials. However, at mid-century, a few women, especially African American women, began to challenge definitions of "bastardy" (a legal requirement for infanticide), and by the end of the century, women were rarely executed for this crime as the new nation reconsidered illegitimacy in relation to its own struggle to establish political legitimacy. Against this background of legal domination of women's lives, Harris exposes the ways in which women writers and activists negotiated legal territory to invoke their voices into the radically changing legal discourse.