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

5. War Women of the 1940s: Evolutionary Women in Revolutionary Times

CHAPTER FIVE War Women of the 1940s Evolutionary Women in Revolutionary Times World War II pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, created new employment opportunities for women, and made the country a world power. Women went to work in defense industries, joined the armed services , and flew military aircraft as Women Airforce Service Pilots. They helped the country win World War II, but after the war the country they had served disbanded their military units and denied them military benefits. Yet women now knew they could weld, fire antiaircraft artillery, and fly seventy -eight types of military aircraft. America would not be the same as women entered peacetime civilian life. So too in California. The state benefited from wartime production, but the end of the war brought economic and social adjustments. The 1950s ushered in the Korean War and the Cold War. It was a decade of anxiety. The media told women to go back to the home after World War II. Historian Elaine Tyler May persuasively argues that this emphasis on the family in the 1950s was an attempt to find security in anxious times.1 The economic boom of the war years in housing and consumerism lasted into the late 1950s. Anxiety ebbed somewhat with the end of the Korean War in WA R WO M E N O F T H E 1940S 137 1953, Stalin’s death in the same year, the creation of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, and the calming hand of the Eisenhower administration. Hollywood provided plenty of film entertainment centered on the middle-class family, the pleasures of wealth, and the dating rituals of teenagers and urban professionals.2 Regardless of image and media message, violence in women’s lives continued. Women and violence preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor. In January 1940, San Diego police searched for Beatrice Mary Cox, a former prodigy student at San Diego Teachers’ College . Cox was armed with the .22 rifle she had used to kill her mother.3 In February police apprehended Betty Flay Hardaker in Palm Springs, and the district attorney charged her with beating her five-year-old daughter to death and leaving her child’s battered body in a Montebello park wash station. A coroner’s jury found her “of unsound mind.”4 On April 4, 1940, Lolita Davis chased three of her children down and bashed out their brains with a hammer in their Los Angeles home. Barton Davis told the court that his wife “thought herself possessed of a strange ‘power’ and . . . she believed demons were coming to torture her children.” According to Barton, Lolita believed that “she was possessed of . . . a power and that she had used this power to kill [his] sister’s little girl Patty, who died.” Lolita avoided trial by killing herself. Eleven-year-old Chloe Davis told her story to Judge Fox to determine whether she could return to her father’s care. Chloe disclosed how her mother hit her with the hammer, ignited her hair, and attempted to torch Chloe, and how the child survived the ordeal by “dodging around her.” The court returned her to her father.5 The violence would continue as other female defendants stood trial for murder. 138 WA R WO M E N O F T H E 1940S Juanita Spinelli Ethel Leta Juanita “The Duchess” Spinelli was the first woman to go to the gas chamber in California. She started down the path leading to that fate in 1940, when Sacramento police arrested Juanita and her gang of four for robbery. Her daughter Lorrain “Gypsy” Spinelli, Mike Simeone, Albert Ives, and Gordon Hawkins had indulged in a robbery and burglary spree. Armed with two revolvers and blackjacks, they robbed service stations and unsuspecting motorists.6 During the enterprise they discussed another crime, murder.7 Police interrogation revealed the plot and provided the press with images of the enemy deviants. Juanita Spinelli was “the brains” of the mob. Albert Ives served as “the trigger man.” Gordon Hawkins functioned as “the driver.” Lorrain “Gypsy” Spinelli posed as the “come on girl.” Finally, Mike Simeone was “the case man.” The bumbling group of felons plotted to murder Robert Sherrad because his obsession with murder threatened the viability of the gang. To eliminate him and avoid his homicidal tendency, the group decided to give him knockout drops prior to dumping his body into...