Murderous Women: True Tales of Women Who Killed

Andrea Levan is Co-ordinator of Women’s Studies at Laurentian
University.

As Jones quite rightly points out in the introduction to this book,
women murderers are particularly interesting. Recent feminist
scholarship on female offenders has focused on such questions as why
some women resort to violence in defiance of sex role norms, or how
violent behavior is assessed differently in men and women. In
particular, the recent understanding that many violent women were
themselves the victims of extreme violence has created a new sympathy
for them. While the actions of a battered woman who kills her husband
(spousal murder makes up about 60 percent of all homicides by women) are
not condoned, those actions are made more comprehensible by a feminist
analysis, and it becomes clear that the burden of responsibility is
shared by society and other individuals. Thus, this book, which examines
a number of case histories of women murderers, could have been extremely
interesting.

Unfortunately, Jones does not provide any meaningful analysis of the
stories he tells. Instead, the book reads like a cheap tabloid,
sensationalizing the events, simplifying the motives, and offering trite
and often unjustified conclusions. Jones notes that at one time “women
murderers were regarded as freaks . . . their study almost a branch of
demonology”; he assures us that today such generalizations are “so
much poppycock.” Despite this disclaimer, however, he reduces the
women he describes to the most blatant and misogynist stereotypes. For
example, Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, is
described as “a brassy London bar girl who sought entry to the world
of fast cars and fast company”; Jean Harris, a complex and articulate
woman convicted of the murder of diet doctor Herman Tarnower, becomes
“a type familiar throughout the history of female homicide, the woman
scorned,” and “a new sort of hero, the feminist avenger.”

The book is also marred by many unsubstantiated conclusions or asides.
For example, though he tells us that women murderers are comparatively
rare, Jones also speculates that, having almost exclusive care of
children and the aged, women may get away with murder much more often
than is believed. And after recounting the story of Clara Ford, a black
woman in turn-of-the-century Toronto tried and acquitted of the murder
of a younger white man, Jones concludes that there was “little
doubt” of her guilt. Ford is described as having given the
“performance of her life” in the courtroom, “enthralling” the
jury. Jones invents his own theory about her motive—a theory that is
unsubstantiated by any evidence.

Similar examples abound. The women described in these stories are
surely deserving of more attention, but they have been done little
service by this book. More careful documentation, more sensitivity to
the factors in the lives of these women that led them to violence, and
more acknowledgment of how sexism and racism contributed to the
treatment they received are all desperately needed. Their lives cry out
for a serious feminist analysis. Instead, they are sensationalized and
stereotyped.