Listening to the female jurors from the aborted Lindsay Clancy trial is instructive, if nothing else. One woman complains that the Lone Juror, as he has become known, “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children”. Well… yes. That was kind of the point.
Another whined that the prosecution “had no character witnesses in regards to Lindsay being a bad mother”. Because, apparently, calmly planning and executing the brutal serial murders of her children is something a good mother does.
But Good Oil readers who find themselves discombobulated by the outpouring of support from feminists for a callous murderess may or may not be surprised that such behaviour is hardly new. In fact, it has a long history, inseparably tangled with feminism, especially the suffragist movement.
From the late 18th to early 20th centuries, over 200 times more men as women were sent to the gallows in the US city of Philadelphia. Yet, despite a steady stream of infanticides, the few times women who murdered their children were tried, the suffragists went ballistic. No equivalent army of campaigners ever assembled for the men. They swung. The women got papers written, societies lobbied and governors pestered.
Sarah Jane Whiteling is exhibit A. In 1888 she bought a box of Rough on Rats and fed arsenic to her husband and two children over months for the insurance money. She first blamed contaminated water. When the bodies were exhumed, she confessed, adding that she had meant to follow them but lost her nerve. The jury rejected insanity after three days and sentenced her to hang. She was one of only seven women executed in the whole of Pennsylvania across the entire 19th century.
And that was still too many, apparently, for the nascent feminist movement.
Dr Alice Bennett, first female physician in charge of an asylum and now solemnly valorised by academics as “a pioneer in applying medical expert testimony to effect individualized mitigation”, rode to the rescue. She told the court Whiteling had “low mental organization” and was “undoubtedly insane”. ‘Periodically’ insane in fact: and when she said ‘period’, she meant it literally.
In a paper for the Medico-Legal Society she diagnosed “periodic insanity” induced by menstruation and menopause. The more unnatural and cruel the deed, she insisted, the more it proved the woman could not be morally responsible: because a real mother simply does not watch her children die in agony for a few hundred dollars.
“I have come here tonight to appeal to you, and through you, on behalf of woman as a criminal: woman, upon whom nature has laid peculiar burdens,” Bennett pontificated.
Strip away the Victorian diction and it is the same claim modern feminists would call sexist if a man uttered it: women are too hormonally unstable for ordinary adult accountability. Schrödinger’s feminist, as the joke goes: simultaneously every bit as capable as a man, and as mentally helpless as a child the moment the bodies of her children hit the floor.
Whiteling hanged anyway. The Inquirer recorded she was “callous-hearted to the last”.
Two decades earlier, the same script played out with Hester Vaughn. She beat her illegitimate baby to death. Suffragists including Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, operating through the Working Women’s Association, mobilised immediately. They constructed a story of workplace seduction and invented rape that Vaughn herself never substantiated in court, painted her as a “desperate waif” preyed upon by men and won a gubernatorial pardon.
Then they left her to metaphorically hang. The suffragists’ campaigning for a murderess attracted so much negative publicity that they quietly paid to ship her off to England, where her former champions left her to die in poverty a short time afterward. Vaughn is never mentioned in Stanton’s and Anthony’s History of Woman Suffrage. According to historian Sarah Barringer Gordon, their work on Vaughn’s behalf “proved detrimental to their credibility”. Again… yes.
And so it goes: Feminists remain chronically unable to accept that women are responsible for their own behaviour, except when it suits them. Demand the vote, a judgeship, or equal pay and they are fully moral agents. Kill the baby and they become victims of biology, patriarchy or an unnamed employer. The exemption is never extended in the other direction.
Lindsay Clancy’s female jurors are simply the latest chorus. The children are dead. The acts are admitted. The planning is not in serious dispute. Yet the real villain, in their telling, is the one man who could not stop noticing those facts. Some traditions, it seems, are too useful to abandon.
