In November 1997, the journal Pediatrics published the results of a terrifying experiment. Doctors at several hospitals in Great Britain had decided to covertly videotape 39 parents -- most of them mothers -- whom medical personnel had begun to suspect were deliberately bringing their young children to the brink of death. What they saw astounded them. In 30 of the 39 cases, the parents were observed intentionally suffocating their children; in two they were seen attempting to poison a child; in a third, the mother under surveillance deliberately broke her 3-month-old daughter's arm. Many of the parents seemed as methodical and as brazen, as scoured of fear or conscience, as any serial killer. "Abuse was inflicted without provocation and with premeditation, and in some instances, involved elaborate and plausible lies to explain consequences," the study's authors wrote. "For example, one mother claimed that she had suffocated her son because of stress related to his crying and continually waking her from sleep. However, under surveillance, the mother was seen, with premeditated planning, to suffocate her infant when he was deeply asleep. The majority of other cases showed attempted suffocation when the child was asleep or lying passively on the bed. Children did not appear to provoke their parents into abusing them."
The odd thing -- the really chilling thing -- was that these were women (and a few men) who masqueraded as good parents, the sort who rushed their children to the emergency room when they had trouble breathing, and stood by them with fortitude and devotion while the doctors puzzled out what was wrong. They were slick, many of them; they could morph from demonic menace to concerned mum the minute a doctor or nurse walked in the room. They liked the social prestige of a mysterious disease; they liked the proximity to powerful medical professionals; they liked the attention and the drama -- the wail of the sirens, the adrenalin rush of the ER. And more than that, they seemed to get some acidy trickle of satisfaction out of terrorizing their children.
"2:02 p.m.," reads the transcript of the case in which the mother snapped her daughter's arm before nurses, alerted to what was happening on videotape, could stop her. "Mother slaps the infant's head. 2:03 p.m.: repeated. 2:09 p.m.: repeated. 2:53 p.m.: The mother tears up the nursing record and throws it out the window. 2:58 p.m.: The mother swears at the infant, accusing her of being responsible for them having to remain in the hospital. There is growing anger with the mother repeatedly ordering the infant to kiss her. 'Give me a kiss, you little sod, give me a kiss. Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!'" And so on and on.
With further investigation, it turned out that the 39 patients under surveillance, ages 1 month to nearly 3 years old, had 41 siblings, and that 12 of those siblings had died suddenly and unexpectedly.
How could these parents have gone on so long unrecognized for what they were? How for that matter did others like them get away with it? Waneta Hoyt, whose five babies were thought to have died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome -- indeed whose experience was virtually the entire basis for the influential theory that SIDS runs in families -- and who, in 1995, finally confessed to having suffocated them herself. Marybeth Tinning, the Schenectady, N.Y., housewife who, over the course of 14 years, just kept ferrying her kids to the hospital, and collecting flowers at their funerals, until she was eventually found to have killed nine of them.
"She was a predator," journalist Patricia Pearson writes of Tinning. "Had she been a man, she might have been a particularly ruthless entrepreneur, an organized criminal, a serial rapist. But she was a woman, and she located her well-spring of power in maternity."
For Pearson, the author of a provocative new book called "When She was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence," the mystery of how these women eluded suspicion is really no mystery at all. It helped that they were accomplished liars. It helped that medical science had settled on the SIDS-in-families explanation. It helped that the kind of crimes they committed were rare (though perhaps less rare than we think; some researchers now say that
5 to 10 percent of the 3,200 SIDS cases reported each year in the U.S. should be considered suspicious). But above all, argues Pearson, these women got away with their crimes for years because so few of us are willing to acknowledge that women are as capable of cool and calculating brutality as men are.
"Violence," Pearson writes, "is still universally considered to be the province of the male. Violence is masculine. Men are the cause of it, and women and children are the ones who suffer." The conventional wisdom, born of old-fashioned paternalism and new-fashioned feminist essentialism, holds that when women maim or kill, they do so only from the cringing posture of a battered wife or on orders from an unhinged boyfriend. Or, like Jean Harris, who murdered her diet-doctor boyfriend, or Susan Smith, who murdered her two little boys, they were really intending to commit suicide and somehow "found themselves" killing others instead. Either way, they manage to keep some saving drapery of innocence and haplessness, even of victimhood.
Pearson's is in many ways an original book, but it did not emerge in a vacuum. Over the last few years, criminologists have been locked in an escalating debate about women's capacity for violence. And that debate has in turn been shaped by the longer-standing confrontation between equality feminists (who argue, in this context, that a woman can be as power-hungry, as greedy or as vicious as a man and that female criminals ought to take responsibility for their crimes) and difference feminists (who believe that women are gentler, more nurturant, more virtuous -- and as criminals, more easily bullied).
In fact, that's just the trouble. So infused with ideology has this debate become that the numbers trotted out by the increasingly hostile camps have begun to seem muddled at best and suspect at worst. Are women treated more leniently in sentencing? The studies are all over the map. Are they just as likely as men to beat on their spouses? Those who think they are -- and that men are getting a bad rap as the sole perpetrators of domestic violence -- cite the 1980 survey conducted by family violence scholars Murray Straus, Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz. In a random survey of 3,218 American homes, they found that 12 percent of men -- and 11.6 percent of women -- reported hitting, slapping or kicking their partners. It's also true that many counties and municipalities have reported increases in the number of women arrested for domestic violence over the last few years. But then again, these may be due to mandatory arrest laws, which oblige police officers to collar the wife who hurls a plastic jar of Jiffy in the general direction of her husband just as surely as they do the man who smashes his wife's nose. Battered women's advocates seem blind to the idea that some couples taunt and torment each other with equal gusto and that some men may actually be the brunt of domestic abuse; adherents of the women-are-as-thuggish-as-men school seem blind to the fact that even if a woman slaps first, men are physically able to inflict more damage. As for the observation that, yes, some women clearly are capable of mayhem but for whatever reason, women resort to it far less often than men -- suffice it to say that you'll wade pretty deep into this debate before you're likely to encounter such common sense.
"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.
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