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  • "PMS Made Me Do It" and Other Gendered Legal Defenses
  • Diane Miller Sommerville (bio)
A. Cheree Carlson . The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 189 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00.

Courtroom dramas have long gripped the imagination of the American people. The proliferation of criminal trials in today's media—television, cinema, fiction—has its roots in a long-standing tradition of popular fascination with men and women whose deviant or criminal actions played out on a public stage for all to see. Trials, the more sordid the better, entertained nineteenth-century Americans who devoured stories of murder and lust that were churned out by newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, and cheap novels. Considerable scholarship has been devoted not merely to covering such historic trials and crimes in all their grisly details, but also to explaining Americans' voracious consumption of these accounts. A. Cheree Carlson's contribution to the literature of crime and legal history, while eyeing such trials, has a much narrower focus.

On one level, this is a very simple book about storytelling. The study is grounded in a half dozen of the most notorious, infamous, or well-known trials involving women in the latter half of the nineteenth century (and one occurs in the early twentieth century). The alleged "crimes" vary: murder, insanity, performing abortions, and marital fraud. The author, a rhetoric scholar, relies on these trials to show how both the defense and prosecution teams employed rhetorical devices and strategies to craft stories that would persuade audiences—all male, all-white juries—of either the guilt or innocence of the female principals. Central to their narratives is the ubiquitous and elastic ideology of womanhood. Deciding which aspects of "womanhood" to emphasize or ignore, lawyers from opposing camps drew from the same ideological quiver but cast their interpretations differently, in ways they hoped would resonate with the lived experience of jurymen. That two competing sides at times utilized the same tropes about womanhood for differing ends leads Carlson to conclude, rightly, that the construction of gender is complex, laden with tensions and contradictions that are exploited skillfully by lawyers. The larger significance [End Page 499] of Carlson's study, as she sees it, is that these legal narratives, grounded in gender, often rendered verdicts that challenged cultural assumptions we presume many male jurors possessed about the proper roles and behavior of women. Carlson assumes that the reader will be surprised that all-male juries often favored the women in these courtroom dramas.

Take, for instance, the case of Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, whose minister-husband in 1860 committed her to an Illinois asylum. Packard, a strong-willed woman with an independent streak, hardly the ideal Victorian woman, challenged both the spiritual and marital authority of her husband by converting to Swedenborgianism. To save face and to recover credibility, Reverend Packard had his wife involuntarily committed on the supposition that a wife who so egregiously defied her husband must be insane. In Illinois, as elsewhere, the procedures and standards for determining a person to be "insane" were incredibly lax, especially for women and children. Married men possessed considerable legal power to institutionalize their wives. Because Elizabeth Packard violated a key expectation of gendered behavior—submission to one's husband—she risked community disapproval.

By rejecting the religion of her husband and by publicly challenging and exhibiting anger at him, Elizabeth Packard abrogated her obligation of wifely submission, allowing her husband to claim she was mad. However, aided by her coming-of-age son, well-meaning neighbors, and sympathetic lawyers, Elizabeth Packard mounted a legal challenge to her husband's efforts. In the courtroom drama that unfolded, both Mrs. Packard's lawyers and those representing her husband crafted narratives based on traditional notions of womanhood. Reverend Packard's attorneys attacked his wife's domestic and maternal duties as wanting: she abhorred housework and cared too much for her children, as evidenced by her excessive distress when they became ill. Hence, Reverend Packard's camp fell back on traditional notions of domesticity and femininity to characterize Elizabeth's failings as a wife and mother as evidence of insanity...

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