Proof of Guilt: Barbara Graham and the Politics of Executing Women in America by Kathleen A. Cairns (review)

As of January 2014, there were 3,070 people on death row, sixty-three of whom are women, and gendered analyses of capital punishment ask us to consider how gender scripts play a role in who is sentenced to death. In this regard, Kathleen Cairn’s argument in Proof of Guilt is quite compelling. For Cairns, Barbara Graham is more than just an executed woman; she is a cultural icon. Therefore, her execution is a key event in the political and cultural history of capital punishment. In 1955, California executed 31-year-old Graham for her participation in the 1953 robbery and murder of Mabel Moynihan. Her trial and eventual execution in the gas chamber captivated the American public, and her death continued to galvanize death penalty opponents through the film I Want to Live! (1958). In Proof of Guilt, Kathleen Cairns asks why Graham was so captivating, and concludes that Graham’s physical beauty and sexual persona made her a complicated figure.

Cairns locates Graham’s story within a matrix of cultural events like film noir, Communism, shifting gender roles, and the changing role of the press in the law. In newspaper accounts, Graham is depicted alternatively as a femme fatale, a sexually indiscriminate user of men, and a victim of horrific abuse by an uncaring mother and unscrupulous men. By ending Graham’s story halfway through the book, Cairns’s form enacts her argument that Graham “lives” on after her death. Public opinion about Graham is shaped by gendered newspaper accounts and journalistic photography. Right up until her death in the gas chamber when her “soft brown hair” and “rouged crimson lips” are described by the San Francisco Examiner, Graham is described as a beauty. Cairns contends that the trial was as much about whether or not Graham was a sympathetic defendant as it was about the facts of the case. To convince readers further, the book includes a variety of photographs of Graham. Even after her death, beauty and sympathy continued to be debated about Graham. For example, the film based on her case I Want to Live!, unlike other movies of the time that featured guilty women, was about an innocent woman who is railroaded by the prison system. While Cairns makes a compelling argument, at times the book risks replicating the objectification of Graham that it seeks to critique. For example, Cairns describes Graham’s form-fitting clothes and curvaceous body in the section describing her trial preparation.

The execution of women in America continues to be an important topic for scholars of law and feminism. Proof of Guilt uses the story of one woman to evaluate the power of beauty in death row narratives and makes an important contribution to capital punishment history. In later years, women like Karla Fay Tucker and Wanda Jean Allen would challenge the country’s notions of gender and justice, and Cairns elucidates how these ideas came about. Clearly, capital punishment continues to be a debated political act.