When She Was Bad

Andrea Levan is an associate professor and co-ordinator of the Women’s
Studies Program at Thorneloe College, Laurentian University.

Patricia Pearson raises important and interesting questions in this
book. She draws attention to the fact that the violence that women have
perpetrated has had little serious study and is obscured by many myths
and biases about gender. She points out that some of the feminist work
that has been done to explain women’s violent behavior, such as the
importance of a past history of abuse, could be equally applied to men.
Her work forces us to question the extent to which an understanding of
the causes of violent behavior is—or should be— used to excuse
violent acts.

Nevertheless, the book is badly flawed by a number of biases that
distort the author’s analysis. The first of these is an obvious
antipathy to feminism. At times, Pearson appears to believe that she is
discrediting feminism simply by exposing the fact that women can be
violent. She would seemingly have us believe that all feminists think
that every woman is either naturally passive, nurturing, and
nonviolent—or a victim who is not responsible for her actions. She
seems ignorant of extensive feminist debates on questions of treating
women as a universal category; of female agency (particularly with
respect to victims of rape or battery); of feminist critiques of Lenore
Walker’s theory of learned helplessness; and of concerns similar to
her own that feminists have raised about the battered woman defence. She
states that feminists have left the sentimental vision of 19th-century
motherhood intact, which is simply untrue. Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman
Born, for example, which Pearson cites, explicitly examined the anger
and rage that mothers often feel toward their children. Pearson’s own
analysis of infanticide and child battery completely misses the point,
raised by Rich and others, of the importance of understanding mothers’
behavior in the context of societal myths and expectations at variance
with their actual experience of motherhood.

Pearson correctly notes that sentimentalized images of women interfere
with our ability to see the violence that women do. On the other hand,
she seems unaware of contradictory cultural images that have demonized
women, and herself feeds into a long history of works that have
portrayed women as monsters. Pearson ignores well-documented evidence of
mother-blaming and victim-blaming directed against women. She refers in
one sentence to the murder of 20 babies in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick
Children in 1979, and the fact that “a nurse was charged but was
released.” Completely overlooked is the way that nurse Susan Nelles
was falsely accused, vilified in the press, and treated as a monster.

The overall impression left by Pearson’s book is that women are just
as violent—if not more so—than men. She does not point out that men
are still charged with about ten times more murders and violent
assaults, and fifty times more sexual assaults, than women are. She
needs to examine much more fully the social causes of violence,
including the ways it is promoted and built into our cultural
definitions of masculinity as well as femininity.