Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press

Conclusion

CONCLUSION The newspaper stories, editorials, and statements of counsel reveal much about the image of women caught up in California’s criminal justice administration system. The trials involving middle- and upper-class deceased men and their alleged slayers highlighted dominant cultural norms of the times. This culture reflected the signs and practices of journalists and lawyers represented in words and behaviors.1 Victorian values defining the feminine as existing in a domestic sphere, providing for the care of children, and educating the next generation in morality came under attack by the turn of the century. “Feminist scholars demolished Victorian ideas about female intuition, hysteria, prostitution, vapors, menstruation , masturbation, passionlessness, orgasms, pregnancy, motherhood, marriage, and the double standard.”2 Nonetheless , it is important to note that during the nineteenth century, these concepts and values exhibited remarkable tenacity. Yet the Fair retrial and the Abarta and Cook cases demonstrated that juries in the last three decades of the century were willing to accept what the Harris jury in 1865 accepted: insanity of some sort as a defense. Equally, the concept of honor CO N C LU S I O N 187 played a part in journalistic language and jury deliberations. Men valued the purity of womanhood and felt obligated to protect women. Lawyers and journalists played on the special nature of women, the elements of femininity.3 Lawyers in defense of their female clients claimed the “unwritten law” and frequently tied it to an insanity defense such as in the Abarta case.4 In addition to insanity, defense attorneys also argued self-defense. This was, according to Stanford law professor Lawrence Friedman, “ideology in action” or the “working norms of the legal system—the behavior of the actors in the system—together with what these norms and actions mean to people.”5 Newsprint and jury verdicts reflected the ideology . In the long nineteenth century, insanity and women went hand in hand. Isaac Ray, the expert on the subject and frequently cited in the Laura Fair case, believed that “the larger proportion of insanity in the American people was contributed by the female sex.”6 The early twentieth-century advances of psychology altered that perception. Class played a role in the nineteenth-century cases. The prosecution put Laura Fair into the lower class, making her assault on an upper-class attorney even more egregious. Her life on the edge of respectable society made her a threat to upper-class Victorian morality. Significantly, Crittenden’s affair with Fair drew little journalistic notice. He was the victim. His family members were victims of a brutal killing. Class as a factor in trials continued in the twentieth century. The end of World War I brought the “new woman” to American culture, and the battered woman and self-defense became closely associated in the defense of women who killed. The 1920s saw women’s sexuality transformed. “Hemlines rose and colored underwear replaced traditional white linen.”7 World 188 CO N C LU S I O N War I also “created new modes of sexual violence.”8 The “unwritten law” lost favor, and “homicidal jealousy” bound to an insanity defense gained in legal popularity. “By the 1920s that reappraisal was based on a growing appreciation of the universality of sibling jealousy, . . . the destructive effects of the emotion, and a crescendo of criticism of its value in a society that viewed women as the property of men.”9 Women in California moved, in law, quickly away from such a construct due to favorable court decisions and the provision of the California constitution of 1879 guaranteeing them access to “any legal occupation.”10 The “new woman” of the 1920s had her start in the nineteenth century thanks to pioneers such as Laura De Force Gordon. Women were no longer Euripides ’s Medea with only the power to destroy.11 Women also had economic and political power. The 1920s saw a shift in press emphasis as well as legal defense tactics. Lawyers no longer raised issues of menstruation and hysteria characteristic of nineteenth-century expert testimony . Rather counsel emphasized science and women’s activities and victimization. Reporters continued to focus on dress and female mannerisms. Yet if the defendant could pass herself off as virtuous or sympathetic, male reporters continued to pander to stereotypical female images. Reporters portrayed women gone astray far less sympathetically.12 Class continued to matter because lower-class women, living on...