Lizzie Borden and the Feminist Frogwash
In researching “Denise Noe’s Lizzie Whittlings,†my regular column in “The Hatchet: The Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies,†I recently purchased a book about the case called “The Girl in the House of Hate†by Charles and Louise Samuels. It was originally published in 1953, something that shows in the title. Like those writing about the case when it broke in 1892, the Samuels call a 32-year-old woman a “girl.â€
And like too many writing on the case during any time period, the authors see implications in it that aren’t there. They write that, “when Lizzie murdered her parents – and that she did kill them there now seems no longer much doubt — she was unconsciously doing her bit to free her sex from its traditionally inferior position.â€
This statement is wildly wrong on several counts. First, it is by no means a certainty that Lizzie Borden killed her stepmother and father. The reason that the case haunts the world is that there are good reasons to believe she did and equally good reasons to believe that she did not.
The Samuels also accept the general perception of women as having occupied a “traditionally inferior position†when the more complicated truth is that each sex had areas in which it was favored and areas in which it was discriminated against.
Furthermore, even if one assumes Lizzie Borden’s guilt of this brutal double slaying, to see her as, even unconsciously, motivated by a desire to uplift women is grotesque. Her first victim would have been a woman and coming up to another woman from behind and brutally hacking her to death is hardly an act of “sisterhood.†Nor could the slaying of Andrew Borden have done anything to “free her sex from its traditionally inferior position†since he was not a man dedicated to oppressing or restricting women but one who worked hard so that the women in his life could enjoy the freedom of leisure. He was a private individual, not politically active, and not working to oppose suffrage or the expansion of educational or employment opportunities for females.
Charles and Louise Samuels postulate that the situation of women began to slowly change in the years after the Borden slayings. However, the truth is that the first wave of the feminism, known then as the suffrage movement, had been active for many years prior to them. But the Samuelses believe “that when Lizzie swung her ax, she stunned the whole male sex out of its condescension toward women. Lizzie had shown that she could kill better and more cruelly than any man – and get away with it.â€
Even if guilty, Lizzie had shown no such thing. Women were known to commit murder long before 1892 and to perpetrate some very nasty killings.
Many people have suggested that her “getting away with it†was partly due to sexist prejudice working in her favor as America during the period may have been less disposed to believe the worst of women but such prejudice shows that the female sex was not in a “traditionally inferior position†in all respects but in a traditionally superior position in some important ways.
The authors assert that “the old double standard started to disappear just about†the time after the slayings. I think it may be the case that the particular double standard to which they are probably referring, that which held women to a stricter standard in heterosexual relationships than men, might have begun to lighten in the 1920s but that was quite awhile after the Borden murders and there is no reason to believe there was the slightest connection.
Finally, Charles and Louise Samuels proclaim, “If today woman has come out of the kitchen, she is only following Lizzie, who came out of it with a bloody ax and helped start the rights-for-women bandwagon rolling.â€
Lizzie could not “start the rights-for-women bandwagon rolling†as Mary Wollstonecroft, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and several others had already done that. Lizzie was not a leader in any political or social area.
Women as a sex could not follow Lizzie out of the kitchen because Lizzie was never in it. That was thanks to her father, Andrew Borden. Despite his reputation for penny-pinching, this man who supported three women was willing to employ domestic help. Kitchen duties in the Borden household were divided between maid Bridget Sullivan and stepmother Abby Borden.
In the 1970s, the second wave of the feminist movement popularized the saying, “The personal is political.†Although the Samuelses wrote before that saying became commonplace, they seem to have shared its vision. However, the truth is that there are times when the personal is simply personal. IF Lizzie Borden did indeed slaughter her stepmother and father, her reasons were private animus or a greed that led her to brutally speed up her inheritance. The killings of Abby and Andrew Borden had neither a political agenda nor political effects.
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May 9th, 2007 at 6:19 am
Good refutations there, Denise. What the Samuels’ quotes show is that it is just so easy to spin mendacities; just so easy to have people see women as always the victim, fighting for rights denied them, even when it is a patently ridiculous assertion. Nice analysis.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Sounds to me like Charles and Louise Samuels were ahead of the pack in modern feminist theory, i.e. if a man kills a woman it’s because he is a patriarchal oppressor, whether he did it or not, and if a woman kills a man it’s because he is a patriarchal oppressor, whether she did it or not, and no facts or evidence can prove otherwise.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Denise,
Great work. In a paragraph or two you make the obvious points that should be made for clarity and the truth, and you implicate femnist in their “conspiracy” theories where women are always seen as being slaves of men.
What I have noted about female criminals is the tendency for many people to ask “why would a woman do that” (and then to find a man in the background to blame – you know, behind every successful man is a good woman and behind ever bad women is a man successfully abusing her) When men commit crimes no one asks why, it’s just assumed that a certain percentage of men are just bad men, while other men are only a step away from “going off” ….
Even when women are found to be serial murderers you find journalist writing that they are “the first known case” of a female serial killer. Don’t they know how to do research, or is their agenda so fixed that they are incapable of thinking?
Thanks again for trying to help others see that we – men and women – are not that different when it comes to doing what is good or right or when doing what is bad or wrong. Some feminist point out statistically men commit more crimes so blame testosterone and then they melt down when you point out that inner city black women have crime rates similar to white men. They don’t mind being sexist by claiming high crime rates by men are because of the y chromosome … but they would panic about being seen as racist toward a “sister” … For black female crimes they discuss racial issues, gender issues, and poverty, … for “bad men” it’s patriarchy and male values.
May 10th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Here’s example that they can use in “wimmins studies”…
Jane Toppan,
Birth Information:
location: Massachusetts
birth name: Nora Kelly
Active Period: 1880-1901 (ages 26-47)
Victim Information: Confessed to 31 murders. It is believed that she murdered between 70 and 100 individuals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Toppan
May 10th, 2007 at 7:19 am
Feminism has become the polar opposite of Al Qaeda. The only differences between the two:
1. What you hate,
2. The sex you desire to dominate by hook or crook
3. Who you kill
4. One is politically correct here, the other politically correct there.
I do not believe it is unreasonable to call feminism a terrorist enterprise (not that we need to inflate that word more than it already has been). Certainly, you don’t see feminists waving machine guns and IEDs. But feminists use other tools that are equally powerful at achieving their goals. We do have blood in our streets (school shootings, etc). Like the war on terrorism, its a distributed war — difficult to see the aggressor until its too late, and nothing you can do once you have been nailed. This is the longest-running war in American history — a civil war supported by federal government. This must be stopped. The American experiment will be in grave danger if we fail to point this out and bring about a healing.
“Frogwash” is a hilarious descriptor.
May 10th, 2007 at 10:32 am
To David,
I also dont find it unreasonable to call them a terrorist enterprise, nor would i also find it difficult to call them a cult as well (and both those monikers they held in the past). one only needs to look at the works of Rote Zora and the bombs they planted in the name of feminism, as well as other groups to know its early terrorist start. after all, terrorism has a long and distinguished history of putting people on the political palette that would be ignored. Sein Fein has what position today? but they used bombs in the past…. Feminism has what position today, but they too used bombs in the past (and moved to psych warfare weakening the US on behalf of future communist masters who promised them lots of things – though historically have yet to deliver on all of them). and the PLO… they used bombs, and now they can come to the table, without bombs. the list goes on and on and on…
feminism is just one part of the STATED plan of the old commitern… the fact that we are entereing a bad economic area, with open boarders, reduced population steeped in nihilism and self defeat, and more and more, means what on the compettitive world front? just because we called peace doesnt mean that they called peace at all, and with recent works like “unrestricted warfare”, they are doing what these groups have always done… bragged as to what they will do, and then do it… hitler with mein kampf, gramscies nine books and its slow walk through the culture… even the feminists said it.
“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.” – Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p.10
“A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised.” – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, Random House, 1952), p.806
we didnt believe hitler, and his backers… and what happened?
we didnt believe golitsyn and sejna and others and what is happening?
we didnt take gramsci and his state side followers, and what is happening?
we didnt take the roots of feminism in the communist state, and what have we created (a large socialist state akin to the one that caused the soviet union to CONTRACT – not fall)
“Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole… patriarchy.†— Gloria Steinem
“Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers.” — Eleanor Marx, The Woman Question
“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism.” — Karl Marx
“The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.” — Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York, International Publishers, 1942), p.58
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/133814.html
Her code name was Lea, and in her 30s she abandoned the safety of her teaching job to take up the fight of oppressed women of the world through a systematic bombing campaign focused on an array of patriarchal targets from sex shops to sweat shops.
But after almost 20 years on the run, Adrienne Gershäuser admitted in court yesterday to her involvement in a 10-year assault by the militant feminist group Rote Zora.
One of the last remaining members of the leftwing group, Gershäuser yesterday told the Berlin court in a statement read by her lawyer that she had “wittingly and willingly” taken part in the bombing of a bio-technology institute and a clothing factory. An offshoot of the Revolutionary Cells, which formed in Frankfurt am Main in the early 70s, Rote Zora unleashed a wave of bomb attacks across Germany, focusing on sex shops, embassies and clothing factories which the group considered responsible for female oppression.