Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press

4. The Haves and the Have Nots: Women on Trial during the Great Depression

CHAPTER FOUR The Haves and the Have Nots Women on Trial during the Great Depression The Great Depression of the 1930s endangered the material dreams of many Californians living outside the prosperity of Hollywood’s movie industry and the corporate factories in the fields of California agribusiness. It was a period characterized by labor unrest with agricultural strikes in the Imperial Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, and other centers of corporate farming. Longshoremen successfully orchestrated a general strike in San Francisco in 1934, and the entire city shut down for days in support of their “boys.” Corporate California organized to counter the gains of labor, yet New Deal programs brought socialism to a state that had initiated a general old-age pension system.1 The 1930s also ushered in Hollywood’s Golden Era of escapist motion pictures, providing millions the opportunity to forget their troubles and experience happiness in a darkened theater. The film industry’s short history reflected societal attitudes toward gender beginning with D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), a movie that extolled the virtues of white America while discrediting African American contributions to the nation. Further, the movie lauded revenge for rape.2 Griffith reiterated the themes of defilement and retribution in Broken 114 T H E H AV ES A N D T H E H AV E N OTS Blossoms (1919) and The Greatest Question (1919). Victor Seastrom echoed similar themes in The Wind (1928), as did Alfred Hitchcock in Blackmail (1929).3 However, Blackmail features a more liberated woman on the silver screen in the character Alice. Alice represents an emancipated woman empowered by the vote wanting social and sexual power. Unfortunately , she kills a man with a carving knife and is arrested, convicted, and incarcerated.4 D. W. Griffith used Victorian sentimentality to convey a “fallen man” plot in The Mothering Heart (1913), in which a man swept away by success falls into the clutches of an “idle woman” who ruins the marriage, but a pious woman rescues the fool in the end.5 Films during the Great Depression depicted a variety of women ranging from Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934) to John Ford’s Ma Joad in the film version of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1940).6 Cleopatra tells the true story of a powerful woman brought down by passion, whereas fictional Ma Joad exudes a quiet strength and dignity despite the hardships faced by Dust Bowl refugees seeking employment in California. In clear contrast to Ma Joad was Lily (Jean Harlow ) in the Red Headed Woman (1932). Lily works her way through bosses and up the status ladder, in the process destroying her marriage. She runs off with a new rich boyfriend and goes unpunished in Paris.7 Nevertheless, the so-called Okies, like lower-class women defendants who stood trial for murder during the Great Depression, were often dismissed as marginal people. Regardless, journalists lumped concerns about disorderly women like Louise Peete together with feminists in the courtroom in good times and bad.8 In the print media the Los Angeles Times often portrayed women at the end of a rope or dying in the electric chair. A T H E H AV ES A N D T H E H AV E N OTS 115 February 22, 1930, story reviewed women legally executed in the United States on the eve of Eva Dugan’s execution in Arizona. Dugan was the twenty-seventh female to die for her crime. “The first recorded instance of execution of a woman [in Pennsylvania] is that of Elizabeth Himby, who was hanged in West Chester, Pa. on September 3, 1808.” Pennsylvania also hanged Elizabeth Moore on April 21, 1809, and Susana Cox on May 9, 1809, “for choking to death her newly born baby.” Margaret Houghtaling swung on October 17, 1817, in Hudson , New York, for “strangling her child.” Other New York women followed her to the gallows. Of national notice Mary Surratt died from the noose on July 9, 1865, for her part in the Lincoln assassination plot. Martha Melerhoffer perished in 1874 in New Jersey for killing her husband. Catherine Miller lost her life in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, for conspiracy to murder her husband by poisoning. Roxana Druse died at the end of a rope in Herkimer, New York, for killing her husband. Elizabeth Potts hanged with her husband...