Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic (review)

Dangerous to Know introduces two infamous women of early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Ann Carson was charged as an accessory after her lover murdered her husband; she was tried for conspiring to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania in an attempt to break her lover out of jail; she was arrested for bigamy; and she eventually found herself in court again for passing counterfeit bank notes. Carson died in prison in 1824, the victim, according to rumors, of a fellow prisoner who had purposefully exposed her to typhus. Mary Clarke met Carson when Carson hired her to ghostwrite The History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson (1822). As Branson tells it, the History weaves together the titillating details of Carson's romantic affairs, argues for female empowerment, and strives to justify Carson's middle-class position, despite her many ostensible violations of that class's norms. Clarke also wrote, years after Carson's death, The Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson (1838), a sensationalistic exposé of Carson's betrayals of those who tried to help her, as well as her persistent association with criminals.

What is notable about the stories of Carson and Clarke is that both women were born to respectable, middle-class families, and Branson begins her book by chronicling the personal failures, bad luck, and economic upheavals that led to their decline in fortune. Both women married men who failed to support them, and so they set out to support themselves—Carson through running a china shop, Clarke through editing and publishing a magazine and then through writing her own books. Although both women sought to retain their middle-class status, once having stepped away from conventional roles, they seemed almost inevitably to descend into a rather shadowy moral world. (Even Clarke spent time in jail—running her magazine from debtor's prison, a fact she carefully concealed from her readers.) Branson's expert account shows that Carson's and Clarke's lives were directed by a combination of necessity and choice: both women were driven by poverty and constrained by gender roles, yet they made choices and were "self-aware of their situation as women." (138) Perhaps the most important intervention that Branson makes with this history is articulated in her claim that "more alternatives … were available for women than our knowledge derived from conduct books, sermons, and other sources have led us to believe." (138) Less explicitly, though, Branson also discloses the incredible cost to women of deviating from the plan for women's lives laid out in those same "conduct books [and] sermons." In fact, Ann Carson's life, in particular, can be seen as a veritable moral warning to those women who did transgress the clearly incredibly powerful middle-class ideology. Having set herself up as the owner of her own business, Carson then found herself involved in adultery, bigamy, murder, kidnapping, and counterfeiting. She died in prison. Not happy consequences of the pursuit of independence.