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"BAD" MOTHERS: THE POLITICS OF BLAME IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA
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"When She was Bad" has much to recommend it -- clear and vigorous prose, an engagingly urgent tone, plenty of reporting. But it is also, alas, very much an artifact of this rigidly polemical debate. On the one hand, Pearson details the exploits of enough female rogues and ghouls and offers enough startling statistics -- 17 percent of American serial killers are women; the majority of child homicides in the United States are committed by women -- to shake up the most sanctimonious believer in the moral superiority of females. She is excellent on the subject of the battered women's defense, arguing that it has been applied so loosely that it is in danger of becoming an all-purpose excuse for female criminals, a denial of women's free will and moral agency. She has interesting things to tell us about why it is that even women who commit the most "male" of crimes -- serial killing or the killing of strangers -- don't seem to frighten us as much. Aileen Wuornos, the armed robber and sometime hooker who shot seven of her johns and dumped their bodies in the Everglades, was the subject of a sympathetic TV movie that portrayed her as the helpless victim of child abuse. (Imagine, Pearson asks us, if somebody made a movie about Charles Manson or John Wayne Gacy, also victims of child abuse, that depicted them in a mainly pitiable light.) Female killers, as criminologist Eric Hickey points out, attract monikers that either trivialize them -- "Old Shoebox Annie," "Giggling Grandma" -- or sexualize them -- "Black Widow," "Beautiful Blonde." (Compare those to "The Slasher" or "The Night Stalker" or "Jack the Ripper.") "No female serial killer has the mythic force of the classic predator," Pearson observes. "We find it impossible to perceive of them as frightening." One reason for this, she points out, is that women who murder more than once are still "place-specific" killers. They don't tend to prowl. Like Waneta Hoyt or Marybeth Tinning, they're more likely to kill their own children in their own homes; or, like another of Pearson's subjects, the matronly Sacramento landlady who poisoned 11 men and women in her boarding house, to snuff out the elderly or the sick left in their care. Yet all of these level-headed observations don't necessarily add up to a reliable picture. Since Pearson makes no reference to overall crime statistics, for example, it would be easy to come away from this hard-selling book with the impression that women commit as many violent crimes as men do. A glance at the FBI's "Uniform Crime Reports" over the last 10 years shows otherwise. In 1996, for instance, men accounted for 89.7 percent of the arrests for murder. In the aggravated assault category, men accounted for 82.1 percent of all arrests. Indeed, the only offenses for which women's arrests came close to men's were fraud and embezzlement; the only one in which they actually exceeded men's was runawayism. Even in the category of "offenses against family and children" (which includes desertion and non-support as well as abuse), men outstripped women, 77.6 percent to 24.6 percent. Whether you regard these proportions as a good thing or a bad thing, as politically useful or politically inconvenient for your particular brand of feminism, there they are, hulking and unequivocal. At times, "When she Was Bad" sounds like the evil twin of those early feminist tracts celebrating the suppressed accomplishments of history's lost women. We've all heard of Jack the Ripper, but who, Pearson demands, has heard of his female equivalent, the bloodthirsty Jane Toppan? It's not exactly boasting, but it could be mistaken for boasting. (Women can be serial killers, too! And not only that, but they have a proud feminist heritage! You go, Grand Guignol girls!) Surely we don't need to insist on women's equality in every sphere, no matter how tortured the argument or undesirable the sphere, in order to achieve it in most. Go too far down the road with the equality feminists and you part company with reality. Go too far in the other direction, though, and you end up with a book Like "'Bad' Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America." Notice the quotes around bad. Moral judgments -- at least of women -- are few and far between in this collection of essays, whose authors mostly share the conviction that the "bad" mother is a "social construction" or a punitive stereotype. (As one essay puts it, "Bad mothers are the ones who get caught.") To be fair, feminist historians Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky do note in their introduction that "some mothers are not good mothers. No one can deny that. There are women who neglect their children, abuse them, or fail to provide them with proper psychological nurturance." (Yes, and there are women who kill their children, too.) And you can find several essays here that make smart and subtle arguments about the ways in which child-rearing experts and social commentators have pinned the blame on mothers for everything from autism (refrigerator mothers) to homosexuality (overprotective mothers) to juvenile delinquency (working mothers). But this is also a book that shirks distinctions it ought to have the gumption or the decency to make. It's one thing to hold a mother responsible for her child's autism -- a neurological disorder over which she could have had no control; it's quite another to hold her responsible for using heroin when she's pregnant or for failing to protect her child from abuse or incest. Yet for Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, the latter two examples are just as sexist and stereotyping as the first.
The truth is that there are times when the myth of female
innocence and the scapegoating of individual mothers not only co-exist, but work in tandem. Doughy-faced, half-pretty Louise
Woodward, the young English nanny accused of shaking to death 9-month-old Matthew Eappen, won both leniency in sentencing and an
astonishing amount of public sympathy in part, it seems, because
she was a woman. (Chalk one up for Pearson's side.) Meanwhile,
Matthew's mother, Deborah Eappen, an ophthalmologist who had gone
back to work part time, got hate mail from people who blamed her
for leaving her children in anyone else's care. (Chalk one up for
Ladd-Taylor and Umansky.) For some people, it seemed possible to
believe simultaneously that Deborah Eappen was a terrible mother
for leaving Matthew with Woodward, and that Woodward was a good
girl who did Matthew no harm. The Woodward case was too late-breaking a story to make it into either of these books, but I
wonder what they would have done with it. Sadly, it seems to
prove them both right.
Margaret Talbot is a senior editor of the New Republic. Her articles have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications. Join the discussion about women and violence in Table Talk. |
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