Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

representative of regional stoicism: “To let her stand before the world as the prosecution has pictured her would be unjust to Miss Borden, to all her family and to all New England women.” She questioned whether the animosity against Lizzie was a result of her not playing the expected role of emotional female and “because she does not wave a tear-wet handkerchief in public.”

McGuirk’s interview was dismissed by local reporters as “a magnificent ‘fake,’” but elsewhere she was lauded as “Mrs. McGuirk, that able and enthusiastic newspaper woman.”

This defense, of a woman, by a woman, was significant as women didn’t serve as jurors in the early 1890s.* The Sixth Amendment, which required criminal defendants face “an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed,” hadn’t been interpreted to mean the pool could or should include women. Female jurors had been tried in Washington and Wyoming but the experiments were short-lived, and now the concept was more of a joke, the snickering, for example, about one female juror being “sequestered” with eleven people of the opposite sex. Borden’s guilt or innocence would be argued by male lawyers, in front of a male judge, and determined by a panel of twelve men.

The jury question, similar to that posed by journalism, came down to objectivity. Could women—given their fundamental nature—be unbiased and impartial? Or did the fact of their bodies mar their ability to reason? Historian Francis Parkman didn’t think they were fit. The government had enough problems with hasty decisions that ignored consequences. “This danger would be increased immeasurably if the most impulsive and excitable half of humanity had an equal voice in the making of laws,” he wrote in the North American Review. And it would be impossible for a man to argue with a woman because he couldn’t strike back, “literally or figuratively.” This made women’s speech particularly dangerous: “A man’s tongue is strong only as the organ of reason or eloquence; but a woman’s is a power in itself.” Dividing up qualities between the sexes, he listed “the essentially masculine one of justice.”

The entire legal system was hostile to women’s participation. When a female lawyer applied to try a case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in 1876, the chief justice argued against her, saying he wanted to protect those of her sex from hearing about “indecencies” such as “sodomy, incest, rape, seduction, fornication, adultery, pregnancy; bastardy, legitimacy; prostitution, lascivious cohabitation, abortion, infanticide, obscene publication, libel and slander of sex, impotence, divorce. . . .” He glossed over the fact that almost every one of the listed activities required a woman’s involvement.

Those in favor of women on juries pushed back in a variety of ways. No one should be barred from participation in the government of the society in which she lives, one argument went. A second suggested that women offered some quality currently missing from an all-male jury box, maybe a particularly feminine sympathy. A third proposed that perhaps just by moving through the world in a female body, women had some needed perspective on seduction (gaining sex with a promise of marriage that is then revoked) or rape, or abortion.

And Borden’s trial in particular, where the nature of womanhood was a central theme, made people question banning one sex from the jury box. Suffragist Lucy Stone saw the Borden case as a turning point: “Slowly, perhaps, but surely, the idea is growing that a jury ought to be composed of men and women, and that a woman especially should have a jury of her peers, not her sovereigns, as in the case of Lizzie Borden.”

Chapter 9

1892

A Place to Speak Freely

Woman in stepping from the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in the domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak,—to undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, is merely completing the circle of the world’s vision.

—Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, 1892

The same summer when the press would convulse over the Fall River murders, major papers were ignoring a multistate crime wave. Lynching was on the rise, growing more ornate and cruel, incorporating elaborate torture—burning, shaming, mutilation—a display of dominance that perpetrators celebrated by taking photos and souvenirs. By one count, lynchers killed 150 in the first nine months of 1892.

The initial years after the Civil War had been filled with optimism for a new society, as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments made formerly enslaved men and women full citizens and gave Black men the right to vote. Initially, federal troops stationed in the South protected these rights. But after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, when these troops left, much of the optimism left with them. The newly formed Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black citizens, uprooting them from their homes, stealing or destroying their belongings. Legislatures passed Jim Crow laws separating Black rail cars and schools from their white counterparts. Literacy tests and poll taxes frustrated attempts to vote. And in 1892, more men and women, mostly Black, would be lynched than ever before. Despite the growing violence, northern papers rarely reported the murders. Or if they did, they painted them as something far away and irrelevant to life in Boston or New York, or justified by claims of rape.

One reporter paying close attention, though, was Ida B. Wells. Though only twenty-nine, Wells already had a lengthy and varied writing career by the summer of 1892. As early as 1889, the Journalist profiled Wells, who wrote for papers like The Living Way in Memphis, the New York Age, and the Little Rock Sun, as part of a feature on African American female reporters. The Journalist highlighted her nerve, her appeal to readers of both sexes, her advocacy for her race, and her nickname—“Princess of the Press.”

Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly right, 1891. Illus. in: The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, by I. Garland Penn., 1891. (Library of Congress)

Though stunt reporting was on the upswing, Wells and the