Engendered Death: Pennsylvania Women Who Kill by Joseph W. Laythe (review)

“Gender matters” (183), Joseph W. Laythe concludes in his study of women who committed homicide in Pennsylvania. Engendered Death argues that deeply entrenched stereotypes of women influenced the crimes they committed, shaped popular perceptions of their murderous acts, and often dictated the outcome of their trials. Laythe is less interested in charting patterns of violent crime or in determining criminal-justice trends in Pennsylvania than he is in informing “the reader of the wide variety of stereotypes and gender-constructions that affect our perception of female killers” (10). Society, he notes, labels women who were not considered “fragile and meek creatures who nurture and feed” (3) as deviant and treats them accordingly. The book presents a series of case studies illustrating some of the enduring popular images of women killers, such as the evil stepmother, the wicked witch, and the heartless child killer, and it explores the ways in which such stereotypes influenced newspaper coverage and legal proceedings.

Laythe pitches his analysis to a general audience and intersperses summaries of individual murders and trials with brief overviews of broader historical and criminological perspectives. He presents the case studies, ranging in length from a single paragraph to an entire chapter, in a true-crime prose style, providing subheadings such as “The Crime,” “The Hunt,” and “The Trial,” referring to individuals by their first names, and posing questions in the narrative in order to heighten the suspense. For example, in describing Edna Mumbulo’s 1930 murder of her stepdaughter, Laythe writes, “Edna and Hilda were alone. Had she planned what she was going to do next? Had she thought out all of the implications of her acts? Or was it impulse?” (17). The subtitle of the book notwithstanding, Laythe’s cases come largely from Erie, Pennsylvania (perhaps because he teaches close by), and he relies principally on local newspaper accounts to piece together the narratives of the crimes and the trials. In fact, nearly half of the book’s citations come from Erie newspapers. The murders discussed in Engendered Death are also concentrated in time; most occurred during the 1930s and 1940s or after 1990.

While the case summaries are self-contained and narrative-driven, Laythe introduces numerous historical and social-scientific perspectives to establish the wider context for the murders and the trials. These sections tend to be sweeping and somewhat stylized. In four pages, for instance, he describes changing gender roles in American history, and in another four-page section he outlines criminological theories about gender and crime. Such efforts to cover so much complex material and in ways that are accessible to general readers result in discussions that may make specialists uncomfortable. For example, Laythe explains that “when the United States was an uncharted frontier and as Americans began spilling out onto the edges of that frontier, women were called to take up the yoke with their husband. They had to be independent and hard-working. They had to be able to defend the homestead from Indian attacks” (101–2). Similarly, in his summary of legal and institutional development, Laythe writes “toward the end of the eighteenth century, as the United States entered what has become known as the Market Revolution, Americans began shifting away from that ‘communal’ welfare approach and toward rampant individualism. This phenomenon, known as the ‘Puritan to Yankee’ movement, was disastrous for those peoples most vulnerable” (145–46).

Laythe’s overall argument supports a familiar framework; few historians or social scientists would deny that “gender matters.” Although he emphasizes the social construction of gender roles, the author might have explored the social and historical context for his case studies in greater depth and nuance. Laythe stops short of examining social conditions, economic trends, or cultural currents in Erie (or in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania), for instance. Rather, his discussions of gender identity, stereotypes, and social context are cast in broad, national terms. Likewise, the book is filled with intriguing murder cases from the 1930s...