Women who Kill

Introduction to the Feminist Press Edition

1 introductiontothe feministpressedition Women Who Kill was first published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1980. It consisted of an introduction and six chapters. What is now a seventh and last chapter began as an afterword added at the request of the publisher of the first paperback edition, in 1981. He wanted me to write about a “sensational” homegrown story then monopolizing New York headlines: the case of Jean Harris, a seemingly prim headmistress convicted of the murder of her longtime lover (and drug connection ) Herman Tarnower, who with the publication of his own book in 1979 had achieved a kind of fame as the Scarsdale Diet Doctor. More important, my publisher said, Women Who Kill in its original form “didn’t really end.” I thought it did. It ended with a quotation from a woman who killed her abusive husband and served time for murder. As a battered woman who killed to save her own life, she (not Jean Harris) was typical of women who kill in our time, and of the reason they do. She and I were talking about how to put a stop to wife beating, and I asked her what she would do if she learned that a man was abusing her daughter. What she said struck me as important because it showed so clearly her unapologetic sense of her own identity, courage, and power. She had gained that confidence the hard way, to be sure, and at the expense of her husband; but there it was—so firm and impressive that I ended chapter six, and the book, with her words: “I think I’d just take the man aside and have a little talk with him about nonviolence. And then I’d tell him who I am.” The publisher said that wasn’t a proper ending. It was more like a threat. Women Who Kill was a product of that historical moment of intense clarity and determination when, in the shadow of the war in Vietnam, scholars and writers set out to reexamine America. The sixties produced not only the war and the anti-war movement but also the intensification of the long struggle for black civil rights, the second great wave of feminism, the first battle for gay rights, strong movements for the rights of prisoners and Native Americans, an inspired and seductive counterculture redefining sexuality and “family,” and some of the best political/ pop music ever. Later, conservative revisionist historians would focus on 2 the sixties’ “mindless drug culture.” But dissidents of the sixties did much more than sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll; we did organizing, politics, journalism , writing, and scholarship as well. Suddenly, or so it seemed, there was black history and women’s history and Native American history. During the disillusioning doldrums of the Nixon years—which lasted even longer than his presidency—the work went on. At the end of the Nixon decade, in 1980, historian Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States—essential reading—and by giving a history to insistent uprisings in this troubled country, made clear that its rebels and dissidents were one in their desire to throw off oppression. A People’s History of the United States includes a chapter given over to women, entitled “The Intimately Oppressed.” In it Zinn describes the “powerful education” in “subjection” that women received, and he finds it “remarkable that women nevertheless rebelled.”In the nineteenth century alone women organized industrial strikes, demanded higher education , founded schools, and joined reform movements to abolish slavery, advance temperance, stop “brutality” against women, improve health care, promote women’s literacy, modernize women’s dress, and rescue prostitutes; and in 1848 they convened at Seneca Falls, the first Women’s Rights Convention in the world. For a long time, I too had been thinking about women’s history and the improbable women—like housewife Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who became great leaders. But the more I read history, the more it seemed to me that few women ever got a chance to become leaders, or even to make a public nuisance of themselves. You had to have a powerful father, denied the blessing of a son, like Cady Stanton; or an influential husband, like Abigail Adams; or at the very least the strong support of a band of sisters, like the Grimkes or the Peabodys. The average American woman, as far as I could see, languished among the intimately oppressed, not calling her condition that, but calling it...