Women who Kill

4. Laying Down the Law

4 layingdownthelaw 209 1 “You have granted that woman may be hung,” said Wendell Phillips to his fellowmen, and “therefore you must grant that woman may vote.” It was as simple as that. Either women were the peers and equals of men, and in that case should enjoy all civil and political rights equally with them, or women were (as men repeatedly maintained) an inferior caste; and in that case, any woman tried by a jury of men was automatically deprived of the right to trial by a jury of her peers. Feminists argued that men simply could not have it both ways. For the men the choice was no choice at all, for to concede either point was to lose ground—and that would never do. The inconsistency of their position was rather embarrassing, but certainly not unbearably so—considering what there was to lose to those implacable women so relentlessly consistent in their demands. The New York State Woman’s Rights Committee laid out the agenda at the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1860: “We now demand the ballot, trial by jury of our peers, and an equal right to the joint earnings of the marriage copartnership. And, until the Constitution be so changed as to give us a voice in the government, we demand that man shall make all his laws on property, marriage, and divorce, to bear equally on man and woman.” “A citizen can not be said to have a right to life,” the feminists argued, “who may be deprived of it for the violation of laws to which she has never consented—who is denied the right of trial by a jury of her peers—who has no voice in the election of judges who are to decide her fate.” As things were, women could not get simple justice. “It is not to be denied,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued to the New York legislature in 1854, “that the interests of man and woman in the present undeveloped state of the race, and under the existing social arrangements, are and must be antagonistic. The nobleman can not make just laws for the peasant ; the slaveholder for the slave; neither can man make and execute just laws for woman, because in each case, the one in power fails to apply the immutable principles of right to any grade but his own.” In the courts of law in particular, how could a woman receive just treatment from “men who, by their own admission, are so coarse that women could not meet 210 them even at the polls without contamination?” Feminists demanded “in criminal cases that most sacred of all rights, trial by jury of our own peers. The establishment of trial by jury is of so early a date,” Cady Stanton explained with that reasonableness so maddening to her opponents, “that its beginning is lost in antiquity; but the right of trial by a jury of one’s own peers is a great progressive step of advanced civilization. . . . Hence, all along the pages of history, we find the king, the noble, the peasant, the cardinal, the priest, the layman, each in turn protesting against the authority of the tribunal before which they were summoned to appear. Charles the First refused to recognize the competency of the tribunal which condemned him: For how, said he, can subjects judge a king? The stern descendants of our Pilgrim Fathers refused to answer for their crimes before an English Parliament. For how, they said, can a king judge rebels? And shall woman here consent to be tried by her liege lord, who has dubbed himself law-maker, judge, juror, and sheriff too?—whose power, though sanctioned by Church and State, has no foundation in justice and equity, and is a bold assumption of our inalienable rights.” The embattled social fathers would not give way. Some of them undoubtedly came to believe their own propaganda. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the excuses that originally justified confining woman to her sphere had taken on the authority of scripture. Men insisted that woman must be secluded from the world because she was by nature more delicate, more sensitive—all in all a finer creature. And after a time, convinced by their own florid rhetoric, some believed that woman was indeed the better half. (Women, for reasons of their own, tended to agree.) Men began to fall all...