‘Thrilling and devastating reading - thrilling because of the explosion

CREATED WHEN TRUTH IS SPOKEN, AND DEVASTATING BECAUSE OF THE HARSHNESS

OF THAT TRUTH. ...VIGOROUS, COURAGEOUS, AND RADICAL.” _MS Magazine

Notes

of an

Expert

Witness
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2016

https://archive.org/details/patriarchynotesoOOches
 Patriarchy
Notes of
an Expert Witness

Phyllis Chesler

Common Courage Press Monroe Maine

Copyright © Phyllis Chester 1994
All Rights Reserved
Cover design by Matt Wuerker
Manufactured in the United States

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Chesler, Phyllis.

Patriarchy : notes of an expert witness / Phyllis Chesler.

p. cm.
Includes Index.

ISBN 1-56751-039-6 (cloth). - ISBN 1-56751-038-8 (paper)

1. Women’s rights-United States— Case studies. 2. Women-

United States— Social conditions-Case studies. 3. Power (Social

sciences)— United States— Case studies. 4. Feminism-United States.

I. Title. HQ1421.C49 1994 94-21995

305.42’0973-dc20 CIP

Common Courage Press

P.O. Box 702
Monroe, ME 04951
207-525-0900
fax: 207-525-3068

Second Printing
 Contents

Introduction:
Heroism Is Our Only Alternative 5

Women of the Asylum:

First-Person Accounts of Women Hospitalized in
American Psychiatric Institutions, 1840-1945 15

Mothers on Trial:
Custody and the Baby M Case 35

The Men’s Auxiliary:

Protecting the Rule of the Fathers 47

A Wolf in Feminist Clothing 55

Feminism and Illness 67

Marcia Rimland’s Deadly Dilemma 73

A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense:

The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos 85

Sister, Fear Has No Place Here 161

Index 172
 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Flic Shooter and Greg Bates of

Common Courage Press, and to the following people for
their loving support: my exceedingly resourceful mother,
Lillian; my dear friend and publisher Merle Hoffman; my
ever-efficient assistant, Melissa Slaybaugh; my former
housekeeper, Sharon Smalls-Bey; my dedicated and skillful
acupuncturist, Helene Kostre; my inspired nutritionist,
Nicole Janssen, my ever-reliable chiropractor, Harvey
Rossell; my sympathetic internist, Susan Levine; and my edi-
tor Ronni Sandroff. And to liana Rubenfeld and Susan
—
Bender for everything.
I dedicate this book to all those who will continue the
work of feminist revolution, and to the coming generations.
 Introduction
Heroism Is Our Only Alternative

an honor and a joy to have these articles issued in

It is

book form by Common Courage Press. The articles span an

eight-year period, from 1986 to 1994.
In onty 25 years, a visionary feminism has managed to
seriously challenge, if not transform, world consciousness.
Nevertheless, I am
saddened and sobered by the realization
that no more than a handful of feminists have been liberated
from the lives of grinding poverty, illness, overwork, and end-
less worry that continue to afflict most women and men in
America.
Before I introduce the articles, let me introduce myself. I

am the woman who, 1970, nearly a quarter of a century

in
ago, demanded one million dollars in reparations a token —
—
sum from the assembled members of the American
Psychological Association on behalf of all those women who
had never been helped by the mental health professions but
who had, in fact, been further abused: punitively labeled,
ordered to “adjust” to their lives as second and third class cit-
izens and blamed when they failed to do so, overly tranquil-
ized, sexually seduced while in treatment, hospitalized, often
against their will, given shock and insulin coma therapy or
lobotomies, strait-jacketed both physically and chemically,
and used as slave labor in state mental asylums. “Maybe the
newly formed Association for Women in Psychology could
set up an alternative to a mental hospital with the money,” I

5
 —
PATRIARCHY

runaway wives.”
suggested, “or a shelter for
Two thousand of my colleagues were in the audience;
they seemed shocked. Many laughed. Loudly. Nervously.
Some looked embarrassed, others relieved. Quite obviously, I
was “crazy.” Afterwards, someone told me that jokes had
been made about my “penis envy.” Friends: this was 1970
not 1870. And I was a colleague, on the platform and at the
podium.
I went home and wrote Women and Madness ,
which I

published in 1972. The book, and were embraced, instant-

I,

ly, by other feminists, both male and female, and by many

women in general. However, my analysis of how diagnostic

labels were used to stigmatize women and of why more
women than men were involved in “careers” as psychiatric
patients, was either ignored or treated as a passing sensation
by those in positions of power within the psychiatric and psy-
chological professions.
Women and Madness has remained in print ever since,
and has been cited often in the professional journals.
Although feminist views have influenced the theory and prac-
tice of mental health in vital ways, feminist views within the
mental health establishment have mainly been marginalized,
ignored, sometimes debated, and essentially “disappeared.”
Despite some noteworthy exceptions, radical feminists and
radical feminist views have not shaped what most graduate,
nursing, medical, counseling, social work, and pastoral stu-
dents learn.
My generation of feminists hit the ground running. We
had a sense of collective destiny and invulnerability that now
—
seems naive and extraordinarily privileged. For the first time
in our lives, we— and our analysis of reality, became the cen-
ter of our universe. Feminists had (psychologically) declared
that Man as woman’s God on earth was dead easily the —
equivalent of men’s earlier political, scientific, and philo-

6
 —
Introduction

sophical declarations that God and King were dead.

Despite our considerable training as “Daddy’s girls,” we
married History and each other. We wanted revolutionary
transcendence, and justice, more than we wanted romantic
(incestuous) love, individual solutions, or careers. Actually,
we were Americans, and we wanted it all, but we’d been hun-
gry for sisterhood in the service of heroism all our lives. Some
of us found more —and some found less —sisterhood and
brotherhood than we’d dreamed possible; but, for a while, we
lived extraordinary lives. We did not transform the world
although it is a different world today than when we first start-
ed out. Every inch of consciousness, dignity, and institutional
control had to be fought for; that fight continues. Despite our
willingness to make sacrifices, many of us were still silenced,
our work “disappeared” or stolen and watered down, our
collective resistance rendered invisible, our ability to teach the
next generations savagely curtailed.
I became — —
and have remained a liberation psycholo-
gist, a radical political and spiritual activist, an academic
researcher who loves myths and and who refuses to
tales,
teach or write in an obfuscated, Mandarin language. In
Women and Madness and in all my subsequent books and
,

articles, I was charting the psychology of human beings in

captivity, who, as a caste, did not control the means of pro-
duction or reproduction. I was trying to understand what a
struggle for freedom might entail, psychologically and politi-
cally, when the colonized group was female. Better orgasms
or token positions of privilege, racism, homophobia, and
woman-hating in female, or feminist, voices wasn’t good
enough. Early on, I began talking about a feminist govern-
ment in exile. How else, I asked, could we airlift women and
children out of Bangladesh or Bosnia, i.e., out of patriarchy?
For a long time now, like many others, I’ve been a min-
ister without portfolio, representing that nonexistent govern-

7
 PATRIARCHY

ment.
From 1971 to 1991, I routinely received —and dealt
with —50 to 75 and letters a week from women in cri-
calls
sis, and at least 75 to 100 requests per week to sign petitions,
form organizations, attend meetings, demonstrations, press
conferences, read and comment on manuscripts, appear on
television, talk to newspapers, meet with visiting feminist dig-
nitaries, lobby legislatures, coordinate fundraisers, etc. — all

unpaid activities. My office away from the university was

busy, and costly. Subsidizing my intellectual and feminist
activism became more difficult as paid lectures dried up for
all but a few radical feminists during the “backlash” 1980s.
Although I received tenure in the mid-1970s, and, cour-
tesy of a class action lawsuit on behalf of women, was in
1990, finally promoted to the rank of (Full) Professor, I have
never been granted the opportunity to teach graduate stu-
dents or supervise doctoral dissertations. I have been unable to
train the next generations personally , to take pleasure in their
company and in their triumphs, to support them in battle, to
make common cause. However, perspective is everything:
Most radical feminists of my generation were never hired in
the first place.

Now, onward — at least to the pieces you’re about to

read.
Three of these pieces were first published in On The
Issues magazine: “Feminism and Illness” in 1992; “Marcia
Rimland’s Deadly Embrace” in 1993; and “A Wolf in
Feminist Clothing” in 1994. The long piece on the Aileen
Wuornos case appeared in On The Issues, too, in two
first

installments, in 1992 and 1993, although for political reasons

I decided to expand and transform the material into a series of

academic legal articles. The first two such articles appeared

in The St. John's Law Review and in The Criminal Practice
Law Report, both in 1993.

8
 Introduction

The remaining articles in this collection have appeared

in a variety of places: wrote “Women of the Asylum” as an
I

Introduction to an anthology of women’s first-person

accounts of their psychiatric hospitalizations in America from
1840 to 1945, edited by Jeffrey Geller and Maxine Harris; it
was originally to be published by the American Psychiatric
Association Publication Society, but was, instead, published
by Doubleday-Anchor in 1994.
“Mothers on Trial: Custody and the Baby M
Case” was
originally a speech I delivered at a conference at the NYU
Law School in 1987 and later published in 1990, as part of
the conference proceedings in a volume edited by Dorchen
Leithold and Janice Raymond, titled The Sexual Liberals and
the Attack on Feminism , and published by The Athene Series,
Pergamon Press.
“The Men’s Auxiliary: Protecting the Rule of the
Fathers” first appeared in Women Respond to the Men’s
Movement the anthology edited by Kay Leigh Hagan, and
,

published by Harper Collins in 1992.

Three years ago, when I became ill with Chronic Fatigue
Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, I realized that, absent a seri-
ous commitment from a major university or foundation, I
might have to stop my work in the world. I haven’t, of course.
I’ve simply become a citizen of a “Third World” country: I’m
slower, deeper, less impatient, less high-speed, more philo-
sophical, and more appreciative of the so-called “small”
things: good weather, good friends, good literature, sex, the
ocean, solitude; I am more not less, committed to radical
,

visions of reality.
Being and temporarily disabled made me more out-
ill

raged by the contempt and indifference with which most sick

and disabled/differently-abled people are treated in our coun-
try. “Feminism and Illness”, the fifth piece here, has occa-
sioned the most extraordinary response; women, and some

9
 PATRIARCHY

men, have called, written, wept, and thanked me for speak-

ing for them, for “telling it like it is.”

The themes of Women and Madness are, unfortunately,

not out of date. Psychiatric labels and diagnoses —the institu-
tion of psychiatry, is still used to stigmatize traumatized pop-
ulations of second-class citizens, and to punitively diagnose
all those who dare to rebel. When women allege they’ve been
sexually harassed and/or discriminated against on the job in
other vital ways, incredibly, they are still forced into psychi-
atric exams, and treated as if they, the victims, are “crazy.”
Hard to believe? What about the women in the military
who “complained” about being sexually harassed, post
Tailhook, and who’d been punished for doing so? In 1994,
the women testified before the House Armed Services
Committee that once they’d filed grievances, they were ostra-
cized, brutally questioned about their private sex lives,
transferred to dead-end jobs, and forced out of the armed ser-
vices. 1 In addition, Lieutenant Darlene Simmons, a Navy
lawyer, had been ordered to take a psychiatric exam after she
accused her commander of harassment in 1991 and 1992. A
psychiatric exam? How absurd, how chilling, how familiar.
And what about Dr. Margaret Jensvold, winner of a
prestigious fellowship at the National Institutes of Mental
Health (NIH), and a psychiatrist, who was “advised” to see a
psychotherapist by her allegedly sexist supervisor, Dr. David
Rubinow, if she wished to stay at NIH. Dr. Jensvold is now
the second female psychiatrist at NIH in the last five years
who has filed a lawsuit charging sex discrimination; according
to Dr. Jean Hamilton, Jensvold’s immediate predecessor who
settled an EEOCcomplaint against the superviser, women
researchers are routinely called names like “Witch,” “Wicked
Bitch,” “Booby Lady” and, more benignly, “Sugar.”
Double standards of mental illness still prevail. John
Wayne(!) Bobbitt wasn’t diagnosed or convicted as “insane”

10
 Introduction

for raping and beating Lorena Bobbitt wasn’t diag-

his wife;
nosed as “insane” for staying with her tormenter and tortur-
er. She was convicted of “insanity” only for trying to get the

pain to stop and, of course, for taking the weapon away from
the offender.
Richard Mallory, the john who brutally raped Aileen
Wuornos, who had previously been jailed for attempted rape,
was not presented to the jury as an “insane,” woman-hating
criminal. Wuornos was portrayed as “crazy” for having
fought and killed in self-defense; perhaps she was also seen as
“crazy” because she was a prostitute, and a lesbian, and
despite all the violence she’d absorbed, hadn’t had the decen-
cy to kill herself but had, instead, dared to turn the rage out-
ward, against men.
William and Betsy Stern were not seen as “crazy” for
signing a surrogacy contract or for having Baby M’s mother
arrested for running away with that child; only Mary Beth
Whitehead was seen as “crazy,” “borderline,” “narcissistic,”
and as an “unfit” mother(!), for wanting to keep the child
she’d given birth to and had been breast-feeding for four
months.
Marcia Rimland’s ex-husband was not suspected or con-
victed of incestuous insanity when he abused his wife and
(allegedly) sexually abused his four-year-old daughter.
Marcia Rimland was the “crazy” one, because she’d dared to
expose the abuse, tried to get the system to “protect” her and
her daughter and, when it failed to do so, because she took
matters into her own hands and killed herself and her daugh-
—
ter to get the abuse to stop.
Some say that men are getting gentler, more “sensitive,”
—
more in touch with their feelings and with where the dia-
pers are. This is true, for some men. However, are men in the
forefront of the battle against violence against women? Have
men stopped raping and gang-raping and battering and ver-

11
 PATRIARCHY

bally abusingwomen and children? Have a sufficient number

of men stopped sexually enslaving and/or buying women and
children? Do men no longer sexually harass women on the
job-^-or keep them out of the clubhouse altogether? Are
women no longer impoverished, either economically or spiri-
tually, by patriarchy? Have serial killers called it a day?
— —
Women and men are punitively labeled for deserting
their sex-role stereotypical behavior. (Recently, I’ve begun to
document that women are sentenced more harshly for com-
mitting so-called “male” crimes than men are.) This is a hard
lesson to learn: that “bad” things happen to us simply —
because we’re ourselves, or whistle blowers about what hap-
pens to people for being themselves, and/or for failing that
privilege. It’s mind-boggling, enraging. It either turns us into
—
apologists for patriarchy or into feminists: not the “fun”
kind.
Some say that the feminist voice is now widespread, per-
sistent, and difficult to resist. I agree. However, I am also very
aware that patriarchy systematically “disappeared” radical
feminist thought and activism for the last three hundred
years. It’s what’s already happened in my own lifetime to the
work of the major radical feminist thinkers and activists of
my generation.
I ask: What can we do combat the erosion of feminist
to
gains in each and every generation? College-level women’s
studies classes are important, but that’s rather late in the day to
start counteracting what people have already been learning all
their lives. Unfortunately, we have no way of preserving and
continuously transmitting our consciousness to successive gen-
erations. —
Without infrastructure without lasting, structural
vehicles, what we know dies out with us. And future genera-
tions are condemned to reinvent the feminist wheel.
But aren’t feminists quoted all the time in the media
now? Don’t we have countless Women’s Studies programs

12
 Introduction

and courses? Aren’t the “badwhitemen” on the run, defeated

by the proponents of “politically correct,” multicultural
world-views? Ah, not exactly. Most feminist academic pro-
grams, like the most quoted feminists, are not radical; are,
indeed, like high fashion models and prostituted women,
omnipresent, visible, precisely because they do not seriously
threaten the status quo.
Women’s survival (and for that matter, men’s survival
too) and health depend on our doing many things simultane-
ously on a “number of levels.” Freedom and justice do won-
ders for one’s mental health!
So, as Freud once asked: “What do women want?” For
starters, ana no particular order: freedom, food, nature,
in
shelter, leisure, freedom from violence, justice, music, non-
patriarchal family, poetry, community, independence, books,
physical/sexual pleasure, education, solitude, the ability to
defend ourselves, love, ethical friendships, theater and the
arts, health, dignified employment, political comrades, sup-
port during chronic or life-threatening illness. Women and
—
men need all this and more and not just when we’re in
severe psychological or physical pain, but always, as a way of
life, because we’re human beings.
I’ve been envisioning a sovereign feminist government
for a long time and that vision guides me still.

Phyllis Chesler

Brooklyn, New York

March, 1994

NOTES
1. Simmons has since been reinstated.

13
.
 Women of the Asylum
0

First-Person Accounts of Women

Hospitalized in American Psychiatric
Institutions 1840-1945

“Women of the Asylum” is a true companion volume to

my own Women and Madness first published in 1972. These
,

27 first-person accounts are lucid, sometimes brilliant, always

heartbreaking, and utterly principled, even heroic. Incredibly,
these women were not broken or silenced by their lengthy
sojourns in Hell. They bear witness to what was done to
them and to those less fortunate than themselves who did not
survive the brutal beatings, the near-drownings, the force-
feedings, the body-restraints, the long periods in their own
filth and in solitary confinement, the absence of kindness or
reason —which passed for “treatment.” These historical
accounts brought tears to my eyes.
Whether these women of the asylum were entirely sane,
or whether they had experienced post-partum or other
depressions, heard voices, were “hysterically” paralyzed, or
disoriented; whether the women were well-educated and
well-to-do, or members of the working poor; whether they
had led relatively privileged lives or had been beaten, raped,
abandoned, or victimized in other ways; whether the women

15
 —
PATRIARCHY

accepted or could no longer cope with their narrow social

roles;whether they had been idle for too long or had worked
too hard for too long and were fatigued beyond measure
none were treated with any kindness or medical or spiritual
expertise.
Elizabeth T. Stone ( 1 842) of Massachusetts describes the
mental asylum as “a system that is worse than slavery”;
Adriana Brinckle (1857) of Pennsylvania describes the asy-
lum as a “living death,” filled with “shackles,” “darkness,”
“handcuffs, straight-jackets, balls and chains, iron rings
and... other such relics of barbarism”; Tirzah Shedd (1862)
tells us: “This is a wholesale slaughter house... more a place of

punishment than a place of cure”; Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop

(1880) of New York writes: “We could not read the invisible
inscription over the entrance, written in the heart’s blood of
the unfortunate inmates, ‘Who enters here must leave all hope
behind.’” Female patients were routinely beaten, deprived of
sleep, food, exercise, sunlight, ? id all contact with the out-
side world, and were sometimes even murdered. Their resis-
tance to physical (and mental) illness was often shattered.
Sometimes, the women tried to kill themselves as a way of
ending their torture.
I am amazed, and saddened, that I was able to complete

my formal education and write Women and Madness with-

out knowing more than a handful of the stories gathered here.
In 1969, 1 helped found the Association for Women in
Psychology (AWP). I was a brand-new Ph.D., a psychother-
apist-in-training, an Assistant Professor, and a researcher.
Inspired by the existence of a visionary and radical grass-
roots feminist movement, I was conducting a study on wom-
en’s experiences as psychiatric and psychotherapeutic
patients,and on sex-role stereotyping in psychotherapeutic
theory and practice. I planned to present some preliminary
findings at the annual convention of the American

16
 Women of the Asylum

Psychological Association (APA) in 1970, in Miami.

I read psychiatric, psychological, and psychoanalytic
texts, and historical, mythological, and fictional accounts of
women’s lives. I located the stories of European women
who’d been condemned as witches (including Regine
Pernoud’s account of Joan of Arc) and, from the sixteenth
century on, psychiatrically diagnosed and imprisoned. I read
the nineteenth century American heroine, Elizabeth Packard
(whose words are contained here), and about some of Freud’s
patients, most notably: Anna O (who became the feminist
crusader Bertha Pappenheim) and Dora, whose philandering
and syphilitic father, in Freud’s words, “had handed [Dora]
over to [a] strange man in the interests of his own [extra-mar-
ital] love-affair.”
I learned that some well-known and accomplished
women, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Frances Farmer,
Sylvia Plath, and the fictionally named “Ellen West,” had
been psychiatrically labeled and hospitalized. Based on
numerous statistical, academic, and case studies, and on inter-
views with female ex-mental and psychotherapy patients, I
began to document what patriarchal culture and conscious-
ness had been doing to women for thousands of years, includ-
ing psychiatrically and “therapeutically,” in the twentieth
century in the United States. I was also charting the psychol-
ogy of human beings in captivity, who, as a caste, did not
control the means of production or reproduction and who
were routinely abused and shamed sexually, economically,
politically, and socially. I was trying to understand what a
struggle for freedom might entail, both politically and psy-
chologically, when the colonized group was female.
In the midst of this work, I attended the 1970 APA con-
vention. Instead of delivering an academic paper on behalf of
AWP, I asked the assembled APA members for one million
dollars “in reparations” for those women who had never

17
 —
PATRIARCHY

been helped by the mental health professions but who had, in

fact, been further abused: punitively labeled, ordered to
“adjust” to their lives as second and third class citizens and
blamed when they failed to do so, overly tranquilized, sexually
seduced while in treatment, hospitalized, often against their
will, given shock and insulin coma therapy or lobotomies,
strait-jacketed both physically and chemically, and used as
slave labor in state mental asylums. “Maybe AWP could set
up an alternative to a mental hospital with the money,” I sug-
gested, “or a shelter for runaway wives.”
Two thousand of my colleagues were in the audience;
they seemed shocked. Many laughed. Loudly. Nervously.
Some looked embarrassed, others relieved. Quite obviously, I
was “crazy.” Afterwards, someone told me that jokes had
been made about my “penis envy.” Friends: this was 1970
not 1870. And I was a colleague, on the platform and at the
podium.
Women and Madness was first published in 1972. It was
embraced, instantly, by other feminists and by many women
in general. However, my how diagnostic labels
analysis of
were used to stigmatize women and of why more women
than men were involved in “careers” as psychiatric patients,
was either ignored, treated as a sensation, or sharply criticized
by those in positions of power within the professions. My
statistics and theories were “wrong,” I had “overstated” my

case regarding the institutions of marriage and psychiatry, I’d

overly “romanticized” archetypes, especially of the Goddess
and Amazon variety. Moreover, I (or my book) was “stri-
dent,” “hated men,” and was “too angry.” Like so many fem-
inists before me, I became a “dancing dog” on the “one night
stand” feminist academic and professional circuit. Luckily, I
was just about to gain tenure at a university; luckily, no
father, brother, or husband, wanted to psychiatrically
imprison me because my ideas offended them.

18
 Women of the Asylum

It is inconceivable, outrageous, but that is all Elizabeth T.

Stone (1842) of Massachusetts and Elizabeth Packard (1860)
of Illinois did: express views that angered their brothers or
husbands. Phebe B. Davis’s (1865) crime was daring to think
for herself in the state of New York. Davis writes: “It is now
21 years since people found out that I was crazy, and all
because I could not fall in with every vulgar t ef that was
:

fashionable. I could never be led by everything and every-

body.” Adeline T.P. Lunt (1871) of Massachusetts notes that
within the asylum, “the female patient must cease thinking or
uttering any ‘original expression’.” She must “study the art
of doffing [her] true character... until you cut yourself to
[institutional] pattern, abandon hope.” Spirited protest, or
disobedience of any kind, would only result in more grievous
punishment.
In her work on behalf of both mental patients and mar-
ried women, Elizabeth Packard proposes, as her first reform,
that “No person shall be regarded or treated as an Insane
person, or a Monomaniac, simply for the expression of
opinions, no matter how absurd these opinions may appear
to others.” Packard was actually trying to enforce the First
Amendment on behalf ofwomen! Packard also notes that
“It is a crime against human progress to allow Reformers to
be treated as Monomaniacs... if the Pioneers of truth are
thus liable to lose their personal liberty... who will dare to be
true to the inspirations of the divinity within them.” Phebe
B. Davis (1865) is more realistic. She writes that “real high
souled people are but little appreciated in this world they —
are never respected until they have been dead two or three
hundred years.”
The and well-connected Catharine Beecher
talented
(1855) and the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1886) wanted “help” for their overwhelming fatigue and
depression. Beecher, after years of domestic drudgery, and

19
 PATRIARCHY

Gilman, found themselves domestically dis-

after giving birth,
abled. Gilman couldn’t care for her infant daughter; Beecher
could no longer sew, mend, fold, cook, clean, serve, or enter-
tain. Beecher writes: “What [my sex] had been trained to
imagine the highest earthly felicity, [domestic life], was but
the beginning of care [heartaches], disappointment, and sor-
row, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical
suffering... there was a terrible decay of female health all over
the land.” Nevertheless, both women blamed themselves; nei-
ther viewed their symptoms as possibly the only way they
could (unconsciously) resist or protest their traditional “fem-
inine” work —
or overwork.
Beecher and Gilman described how they weren't
helped —or how their various psychiatric cures damaged them
even further. In Gilman’s words, Dr. S. Mitchell Weir ordered
her to

live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with

you all remarked that if I did but dress
the time. (Be it

the baby it left me shaking and crying certainly far —

from a healthy companionship for her, to say nothing of
the effect on me.) Lie down an hour after each meal.
Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never
touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.

This regime only made things worse. A desperate

Gilman decided husband and infant to spend the
to leave her
winter with friends. Ironically, she writes, “from the moment
the wheels began to turn, the train move, I felt better.”
Adjustment to the “feminine” role was the measure of
female morality, mental health, and psychiatric progress.
Adeline T.P. Lunt (1871) writes that the patient must “sup-
press a natural characteristic flow of spirits or talk... [she
must] sit in lady-like attire, pretty straight in a chair, with a
book or work before [her], ‘inveterate in virtue’, and that this

20
 Women of the Asylum

will result in being patted panegyrically on the head, and pro-

nounced ‘better’.” According to Phebe B. Davis (1865),

Most of the doctors employed in lunatic asylums do

much more to aggravate the disease than they do to cure
it.... It is a pity that great men [the asylum doctors]

should be susceptible of flattery; for... when there is a

real mind, that will flatter no one, then you will see the
Doctor’s revengeful feelings all out... [any] patient who
will not minister to the self-love of the physicians, must
expect to be treated with great severity.... Doctors have
been flattered so much they are fond of admiration.

Margaret Starr (1904) of Maryland writes: “I am making

an effort to win my dismissal. I am docile; I make efforts to be
industrious.”
How did these women of the asylum get into the asy-
lum? The answer is: most often, against their will and without
prior notice. Here is what happened. Suddenly, unexpectedly,
a perfectly sane (or a troubled) woman would find herself
being arrested by a sheriff, removed from her bed at dawn, or
“legally kidnapped” on the streets, in broad daylight. Or: her
father, brother, or husband might ask her to accompany him
to see a friend to help him with a legal matter. Unsuspecting,
the woman would find herself before a judge and/or a physi-
cian, who certified her “insane” on her husband’s say-so.
Often, the woman was not told she was being psychiatrically
diagnosed or removed to a mental asylum. Why did this hap-
pen?
Battering, drunken husbands had their wives psychiatri-
cally imprisoned as a way of continuing to batter them; hus-
bands also had their wives imprisoned in order to live with
or marry other women. Tirzah Shedd (1862) of Illinois writes
that

There is one married woman [here] who has been

21
 PATRIARCHY

imprisoned seven times by her husband, and yet she is

intelligent and entirely sane.... When will married

women be safe from her husband’s power?

Ada Metcalf (1876) of Illinois writes:

It is and easy thing now to make a

a very fashionable
person out to be insane. If a man tires of his wife, and
if befooled after some other woman, it is not a very dif-

ficult matter to get her in an institution of this kind.

Belladonna and chloroform will give her the appearance
of being crazy enough, and after the asylum doors have
closed upon her, adieu to the beautiful world and all

home associations.

In 1861, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

wrote:

Could the dark secrets of those insane asylums be

brought to light... we would be shocked to know the
countless number of rebellious wives, sisters and daugh-
ters that are thus annually sacrificed to false customs
and conventionalisms, and barbarous laws made by
men for women.

Alice Bingham Russell (1898) of Minnesota was legally

kidnapped by a sheriff on her husband’s orders. After obtain-
ing her own release, Russell spent twelve years trying to
document and “improve the conditions of the insane.”
Russell describes many women whose husbands psychiatri-
cally imprisoned them in order to gain control of their wives’
property. Russell describes a woman who refused to

sell her property to suit the caprice of her husband... this

young and capable woman who has been doing, up to
the very hour before [she was legally kidnapped], all her
housework, including the care of two children, leaves a
good home and property worth $20,000.00, to become

22
 Women of the Asylum

a public charity and mingle and associate continuously

with maniacs.

At 32, the unmarried Adriana Brinkle (1857) of

Pennsylvania conducted an economic transaction on her own:
she sold some furniture she no longer needed. Charges were
brought against her for selling furniture for which she had not
fully paid. For the crime of embarrassing her father’s view of
“family honor,” Brinckle’s physician-father, and his judge
friend, sentenced Brinckle to 28 years in a psychiatric hospital.
Russell (1898) also tells us of a woman “who had been
wronged out of some property [and who was] about to take
steps to recover it when she [was] falsely accused and sent to
the asylum by fraud.”
Any sign of economic independence or simple human
pride in a woman could be used against her, both legally and
psychiatrically. Russell describes the following:

A woman and her husband quarrel; the wife with inde-

pendence accepts a position as janitress, hoping her
absence will prove her worth at home. She returns to
secure some clothing, and learning from a neighbor that
a housekeeper is in possession, and being refused admit-
tance, she, in her haste to get justice, takes some of the
washing from the clothes line, including some of
the
husband’s and the housekeeper’s to give evidence of
their living together. That evening she is arrested, but
has not the least fear but that she can vindicate herself.
To her surprise she is without friends or counsel com-
mitted to the St. Peter asylum.

Some women of the asylum evolve rather clear-minded

views on the subject of marriage and husbands. Like
Catharine Beecher, Mrs. L.C. Pennell (1883) of Indiana
believed something was truly “wrong” with her (“nervous
prostration”), when she could no longer perform her domes-

23
 PATRIARCHY

tic duties. Mrs. Pennell suffered doubly when her family

“charged [her] with... feigning insanity to evade the responsi-
bilities of [her] home duties.” Mrs. Pennell’s husband finally
had her institutionalized; but he did not visit her for nine
months. Of that first visit, Mrs. Pennell writes:

Only a moment ago I was feeling so utterly wretched

and alone. But my husband had come, and he did care
something for me after all. After I had entered the room,
and closed the door, he stood looking at me, but not
speaking a word until I said, “For heaven’s sake, don’t
stand there staring at me in such a manner as that; sit

down and say something to me... “Were you insane

when you were married?” Not one single, little word of
kindness or gesture of tenderness, not the shadow of a
greeting, simply this cruel, calculating question.
Evidently, he had even then formed the determination
that should never leave that asylum alive.... I
I

answered “I was not insane when we were married.” I

have changed my opinion since then, materially, and
willingly admit I was insane, and my most pronounced
symptom was that I married him.

Some asylum women did not speak; some spoke and

made no sense. Some wept incessantly; some were violent.
However, most women in asylums did not start out or even —
—
become insane. According to Adeline T.P. Lunt (1871),

A close, careful study and intimacy with these patients

(finds no) irregularity, eccentricity, or idiosyncracy,
either in language, deportment, ormanner, than might
be met with in any society of women thrown together,
endeavoring to make the most of life under the most
adverse and opposing circumstances.

The women of the asylum feared, correctly, that they

might be driven mad by the brutality of the asylum itself, and

24
 Women of the Asylum

by their lack of legal rights as women and as prisoners. As

Adriana Brinckle (1857-1885) writes: “An insane asylum. A
place where insanity is made.” Sophie Olsen (1862) writes:
“O, I was so weary, weary; I longed for some Asylum from
‘Lunatic Asylums’!” According to Mrs. L.C. Pennell (1883),

The enforcement of the rules of the institution is the

surest way in the world to prevent recovery. And the
brutalmethods of enforcing such rules call loudly for a
law which will secure to insane people the right to a
chance for mental preservation.

Jane Hillyer (1919-1923) of notes that:

#
(Asylum) conditions were so far removed from normal
living that they actually aided my sense of cleavage,
rather than cleared it up, as they are supposed to do.
The few habits of ordinary living that remained with me
were broken down by a new and rigidly enforced rou-
tine.... My last moorings were cut.

Margaret Isabel Wilson ( 1 93 1 ) of says:

We had no wholesome activities, no work and no

play.... I was afraid of incarceration; I had seen too
much of the deadly effects of institutionalization; and I
knew that any neurotic subject might break down utter-,
ly under the strain...

To sum up the effects of my asylum experiences:

when I had sufficient money in the bank, some
entered I

real estate, chattels and personal belongings; a position,

a fine constitution, and a fair chance to go on with my
teaching. My money was wasted, possessions lost, and
friends disappeared; I was left with bad nerves, an
impaired constitution, and a weakened heart. Courage
remained...! am only one of the many in Blackmoor.

25
 PATRIARCHY

Are these women of the asylum exaggerating or lying?

Are they deluded? Obviously not. Each account confirms
every other account. Each woman says, quite simply, that she
and every other woman she ever met in the asylum were psy-
chologically degraded, indentured as servants, and physically
tortured by male doctors and especially by female attendants.
At times, these accounts of the asylum are unbearable to read,
but if the victims have documented the atrocities for us, I feel
obliged to quote them at length.
[1862] Sophie Olsen:

The faces of many [women] were frightfully blackened

by blows received, partly from each other... but mostly
from their [female] attendants.... I have seen the atten-
dant strike and unmercifully beat [women] on the head,
with a bunch of heavy keys, which she carried fastened
by a cord around her waist: leaving their faces black-
ened and scarred for weeks. I have seen her twist their
arms and cross them behind the back, tie them in that
position, and then beat the victim till the other patients
would cry out, begging her to desist... I have seen her
strike them prostrate to the floor, with great violence,
then beat and kick them.

[1865] Phebe B. Davis:

There was one very interesting lady who died in one of

the water closets... this closet is one of the most loath-
some places imaginable; the stench was terrible... [she

was] rather tall and thin, and very delicate.... She was
rather a troublesome patient, and suicidal, they said.
The fact is, that woman had been frightened out of her
wits, and then she was literally murdered in that house,
for she was worn out by brute-like treatment that I was
witness to; I never saw an old canal-horse that was han-
dled more roughly than that lady was when being har-
nessed down to the bedstead; the girls [attendants] did

26
 Women of the Asylum

not know that I saw that.... I thought that she could not
live long, and she did not; she was a lady of very deli-
cate sensibilities, and of course her powers of endurance
were feeble.... I would advise all who take their friends
to the Asylum, to cut their hair very short indeed; it is
much better for the patients to have their hair cut off
short than to have it pulled out by the roots... there is no
prevention against the attendants making halters of the
hair of patients.

[1880] Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop:

On the floor, on straw mattresses, lay poor, sick, or

insane women, chained or strapped by the wrists to the
floor, huddled together like sheep... the utter heartless-

ness of this treatment filled me with indignation and

sympathy.

[1898] Alice Bingham Russell:

People are sometimes driven insane by treatment and

despair in the hospital.... One woman, a Mrs. Murray,
was brought to the asylum almost dying of paralysis.
They made her walk the floor and beat her to make her
dress herself, saying she was stubborn. I protested
against such treatmentand dressed the woman myself.
In the morning she was dead and the doctors called it
by some long name.

[1902] Margaret Starr:

I found myself and in the room adjoin-

[strait-jacketed]
ing that of a blind girl.... She announced that she had
been in the one room for four years; was not allowed to
enter church, nor to take outdoor exercise. She was try-
ing, she said, to save her soul and be reconciled to her
imprisonment. That Madam Pike [the female attendant]
kept her well dressed but doomed her to live alone....

27
 —

PATRIARCHY

[1919-1921] Sally Willard:

Dr. Reginald Bolls [greeted me] with an airy gesture

the sweeping salute of a hand that touched his forehead,
curved outward in a wide arc, and dropped smartly to
his side. “Physically you’re as sound as a bell... all we
have to do is turn our attention to those foolish little
foibles and fancies of yours, straighten them out, and
send you back home to your good husband again...
Dr. Cozzens is a young man with beetling eye-
brows and fierce black eyes and a Method. A “person-
al and individual method of treatment” [sic] based on a

“personal and individual theory of human nature”

[sic] “Everyone’s been too confounded good to you
—
around here that’s what’s wrong with you now, and
it’s all that’s wrong, too. Everybody’s given in to you,

and been s-s-so sorry for you, and wept great hot salt
tears over you. How about giving a thought now and
then to your husband for instance? Or your father? It
wouldn’t hurt you any to wake up to the fact that
—
you’re doing them harm with your ‘troubles.’ You’ve
managed to make them both half sick.”

[1931] Margaret Isabel Wilson:

I was —
famous elastic cat [who] was frozen,
like the
burnt, boiled, and poured out of a bung-hole and then —
the cat came back!... There was no liberty at all for us.
We learned to jump up briskly at the sound of the ris-
ing bell, to dress speedily without answering back. I

tried to dress as quickly as I could, for I did not wish to

be called “fresh”.... We could not get a bit of privacy....
Conversation during meals was taboo...

[1943-1950] Frances Farmer:

During those [eight] years, I deteriorated into a wild,

frightened creature, intent only on survival.... I was
raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats, and poisoned by

28
 Women of the Asylum

tainted food.... was chained in padded cells, strapped

I

into straight jackets, and half drowned in ice baths.... I

crawled out mutilated, whimpering, and terribly alone.
But I did survive.
The three thousand and forty days I spent as an
inmate inflicted wounds to my spirit that could never
heal.... I learned there is no victory in survival —only
grief.... Where I was, wild-eyed patients were made
trustees.... Sadists ruled wards. Orderlies raped at will.

So did doctors. Many women were given medical care

only when abortions were performed. Some of the
orderlies pimped and set up prostitution rings within
the institution, smugglingmen into the outbuildings
and supplying them with women. There must be a
twisted perversion in having an insane woman, and
anything was permitted against them, for com- it is a
mon belief that “crazy people” do not know what is
happening to them.

Some women of the asylum believe that their inability to

function deserved a psychiatric label and a hospital stay. Two
of these 27 women feel they were helped in the asylum and
afterwards by a private physician. Lenore McCall
(1937-1942) of writes that she recovered because of
the insulin coma therapy. She also attributes her recovery to
the presence of a nurse, who had “tremendous understand-
ing, unflinching patience [and whose] sole concern was the
good of her patient.” After Jane Hillyer (1919-1923) was
released from the asylum, she consulted a private doctor who
she feels rescued her from ever having to return. Hillyer
writes:

I knew from the had made harbor. I

first second that I

dropped all responsibility at his feet.... I need not go

another step alone. I perceived at once the penetrating
quality of his understanding.... He said afterwards he felt
as if he were the Woodsman in the fairy tale who finds

29
 PATRIARCHY

the lost Tinker’s daughter in a darkly enchanted forest....

I am sure the necessity of intelligent after-care cannot be
sufficiently stressed.... My relief was indescribable. If

ever one human being went down into the farthest places
of desolation and brought back another soul, lost and
struggling, that human being was the Woodsman.

McCall and Hillyer are decidedly in the minority.

Twenty-five women of the asylum document that power is
invariably abused: that fathers, brothers, husbands, judges,
asylum doctors, and asylum attendants will do anything that
We, the People, allow them to get away with; and that wom-
en’s oppression, both within the family and within state insti-
tutions, remained constant for more than a century in the
United States. (It exists today still, and in private offices as
well as in private and state institutions.)
Do these accounts of institutional brutality and torture
mean that mental illness does not exist, that women (or men)
in distress don't need “help,” or that recent advances in psy-
cho-pharmacology, or insights gained fron the psycho-ana-
lytic process, or from our treatment of sexual and domestic
violence victims, are invalid or useless? Not at all. What these
accounts document is that most women
asylums were not in
insane; that “help” was not to be found in doctor-headed,
attendant-staffed, and state-run patriarchal institutions, either
in the nineteenth or in the twentieth centuries; that what we
call “madness” can also be caused or exacerbated by injus-
tice and cruelty, within the family, within society, and in asy-
lums; and that personal freedom, radical legal reform, and
political struggle are enduringly crucial to individual mental
and moral health.
societal
These 27 accounts are documents of courage and
integrity. The nineteenth-century women of the asylum are
morally purposeful, philosophical, often religious. Their
frame of reference, and their use of language, is romantic-

30
 Women of the Asylum

Christian and Victorian. They write like abolitionists, tran-

scendentalists, suffragists. The twentieth-century women are
keen observers of human nature and asylum abuse but they —
have no universal frame of reference. They face “madness”
and institutional abuse alone, without God, ideology, or each
other.
What do these women of the asylum think helped them
or would help others in their position? Friends, neighbors,
and sons sometimes rescued the women; however, many of
the nineteenth-century women obtained their freedom only
because laws existed or had recently been passed that empow-
ered men who were not their relatives to judge their cases fair-
ly. Therefore, for them, obtaining and enforcing their legal

rights was a priority. Elizabeth Packard (1860) became a

well-known and effective crusader for the rights of married
women and mental patients; Mrs. L.C. Pennell (1883) also
suggested reforms, as did Mrs. H.C. McMullen (1894-1897)
of Minnesota who, while imprisoned, wrote some model
Laws for the Protection of the Insane. As noted, Alice
Bingham Russell (1898) documented the stories of still-
imprisoned women and helped them obtain their freedom.
Mrs. Pennell (1883) for example, proposed that:

Every doctor, after being called to examine a person for

insanity shall immediately notify the proper authorities;
that all persons confined in any asylum... be allowed to
opium, tobacco,
sleep; that the excessive habit of using
or intoxicating liquors, shall disqualify any man for
Superintendent, or a subordinate position in any hospi-
tal.

Mrs. McMullen proposed that

All rules and laws for the protection of the hospital

inmates should be posted up and enforced. It would be
a relief of mind to know what rights they can

31
 PATRIARCHY

demand.... Those who work should be allowed com-

pensation for it.... Patients shall have the right to cor-
respond with whom they please.... Letters written by
patients shall be by them dropped into a letter box....
Friends shall be allowed to see patients.... All new
attendants should be over thirty years of age.... It is

unjust to compel elderly people to submit to the judg-

ment of the young and giddy.

In addition to legal reform, and the liberty to leave an

abusive husband or an abusive asylum, what else proved
helpful, or invaluable, to the women of the asylum? Phebe B.
Davis (1865) writes that “Kindness has been my only medi-
cine”; Kate Lee (1902) of Illinois proposes that “Houses of
Peace” be created, where women could learn a trade and save
their money, which they could “both be allowed and
after
required to leave.” Lee suggests that such “Houses of Peace”
“operate as a home-finder and employment bureau... thus
giving each inmate a new start in life [which] in many cases
[will] entirely remove the symptoms of insanity.” Margaret
Isabel Wilson (1931) of says that “Nature was her doc-
tor.” Leaving the asylum helped Wilson. She writes:

“It took me months to get over the effects of my incar-

ceration....Through companionship, my appetite came
back; I could sleep in peace, and there was nobody to
annoy me. There were no maniacal shrieks to make me
shudder; no attendants to yell out orders; no nurses to
give me arsenic and physics; no doctors to terrify
me... the things [I] sorely missed while institutionalized:
(1) liberty; (2) my vote; (3) privacy; (4) normal com-
panionship; (5) personal letters and uncensored
answers; occupation; (7) play; (8) contacts
(6) useful
with intelligent minds; (9) pictures, scenery, books,
good conversation; (10) appetizing food.

I’d like Phebe B. Davis (1865) to have the last word

32
 Women of the Asylum

about why women become “excitable” and aboutpsy why

chiatric hospitalization is an especially painful and outra
geous form of punishment. Davis writes:

I find that active nervous temperaments that are full of

thought and intellect want full scope to dispose of their
energy, for if not they will become extremely excitable.
Such a mind cannot bear a and that is one
tight place,
great reason why women are much more excitable than
men, for their minds are more active; but they must be
kept in a nut-shell because they are women.

33
 Mothers on Trial
Custody and the Baby M Case

When Mothers on The Battle for Children and

Trial:
Custody was published, the truth was out: I was not a nice,
male-identified, gender-neutral liberal feminist. I was a nice
woman-identified radical. I did not believe that men and
women had to be the same in order to be treated equally. I
mistrusted gender-neutral legislation especially in those areas
where women are most obviously different from men: in the
areas of reproductive biology, heterosexual and homosexual
relations, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, mother-infant
bonding and the bottom-line responsibility for primary child
care. After all, freedom of choice involves the right to have an
abortion and the right to have and keep a baby if women so
choose.
For saying all this, some feminists accused me of roman-
ticizing the biological chains that bind us; and of biological
determinism. I presumably wanted all women to be married,
pregnant, and poor. I was against gender-neutral feminism
and against women’s right to buy or kidnap another wom-
an’s child or to rent another woman as a “surrogate
uterus” — in the name of feminism.
In Mothers on Trial and elsewhere I note that mothers
are women and therefore have few maternal rights and
many maternal obligations; and that feminists fighting for
fathers’ rights or for the primacy of sperm are, to me, a pret-
ty shabby spectacle. Were feminists in favor of joint custody

35
 PATRIARCHY

because it would empower mothers (who are women) or

because it would empower fathers and men, many of whom
have no intention of assuming any primary child care
responsibility after they win joint custody? Unfortunately,
relatively few men are trying to assume serious child care
responsibility. Even such men do not do as many things, or
the same things that women do in terms of housework or
children. Nor are -such men perceived in the same way as
women when they perform a “female” task. However, both
patriarchs and liberal feminists did not want to sacrifice
joint custody as an ideal; many were more willing to sacri-
fice real mothers on the altar of abstract notions —
real
mothers who were suffering under the weight of child care
responsibilities, poverty, custodial siege, and the threatened
or actual loss of their children.
Once I started organizing around the Baby M
case, I
called many feminist leaders. For example, Betty Friedan said
she was “up in arms” about what the media and the courts
were doing to Mary Beth Whitehead. She said: “I am out-
raged by this case! Where are the feminists? Where are the
feminists?”
I replied, “Well, we’re a small, raggedy-assed band out
there every week outside the courthouse in Hackensack.
Please come and join us. But you’re quite right: National
NOW, New Jersey NOW, the NOW Legal Defense and
Education Fund have, as yet, not gotten involved.” I had this
conversation with at least 30 other feminist leaders. Many
were sympathetic; some became involved, but most stayed
away. After a while, it became clear that the “issues” (of sur-
rogacy, adoption, custody) were “complicated” for femi-
nists. And why? Well, there were infertile feminists and sin-

gle adoptive mother feminists and feminists who had hus-

bands whose ex-wives really didn’t deserve custody or child
support. There were lesbian feminists who were suffering

36
 Mothers on Trial

custodially and decent middle class feminist couples (two

career families!) who couldn’t adopt a child without first

being humiliated. And anyway, abortion under siege was the

priority.
All true. But does mean that women should have the
this
right to exploit other women just like men do? Or the right
to call such an arrangement “feminist”?
The refusal of many feminists to get involvedBaby in the
M case or to agree with my view of custody did not stop them
from asking me for help when one of our “own” a custodi- —
ally challenged career woman or lesbian —needed a strategy or
an expert witness. But feminists still didn’t see the connection
between supporting Mary Beth Whitehead as a way of orga-
nizing for the reproductive and custodial rights of all women.
Custody is not a new issue for feminists. In the nine-
teenth century, suffragists fought in the abolitionist move-
ment against slavery; some fought for custody for mothers.
For example, there’s the case of Mrs. Phelps, the wife and the
sister of United States and Massachusetts state senators.
When Mrs. Phelps’ husband was flagrantly unfaithful, beat
her, threw her down the stairs, and when she dared to com-
plain about this —
he locked her up in a mental asylum.
Eventually, with her brother’s help, Mrs. Phelps (whose first
name I do not have) was released from this imprisonment.
She ran away that very day with one of her children. Why did
she have to flee with her child to retain custody? Because in
the nineteenth century, and for all the previous centuries of
patriarchal history, men have always owned wives and chil-

dren, as legal chattel property. All during the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, if a man divorced his wife, she was not
legally entitled to ever again see her children. Like surrogate-
contract mother Mary Beth Whitehead, legal wives had no
legal rights.
Susan B. Anthony came to the aid of Mrs. Phelps, took

37
 PATRIARCHY

her in, helped find her sanctuary. Some of Anthony’s aboli-

tionist friends chastised her for doing They told her she
so.
was endangering the women’s rights movement and the anti-
slavery cause. Anthony disagreed. She said:

Don’t you break the law every time you help a slave to
Canada? Well, the law that gives the father the sole
ownership of the children is just as wicked, and I’ll
break it just as quickly. You would die before you
would deliver a slave to his master, and I will die before
I will give up the child to its father.

How many liberal, gender-neutral feminists are there

today who would utter these words, who would take this
risk, who would act on such a belief?
By the end of the nineteenth century, nine states and the
District of Columbia finally permitted a judge a white, mid- —
dle- or upper-class male judge —
to decide if a mother was
wealthy enough or morally fit enough to be allowed to con-
tinue her obligation to her child. With no child support. And
this was progress!
A lot has been said about how much the maternal pre-
sumption, a legal doctrine, favors mothers. Let me tell you:
the maternal presumption never meant anything in a court of
law when the father said, “Well, your honor, this mother has
no money. She’s been a go-go dancer. I think she’s mentally
unstable. She’s narcissistic. She dyes her hair.” For reasons
like these, mothers have been denied not just custody but even
visitation. These were some of the “deep” psychological
problems that William Stern and the court used to deny Mary
Beth Whitehead her parental rights (parental usually means
paternal, not maternal).
Contrary to myth, when custody is contested fathers ,

win easily and routinely. It is a very different situation when

the issue is child support. When a father walks out, there is

38
 Mothers on Trial

very little a wife can do to make him stay, make him pay
decently (above the level of state welfare), or to make him see
his own children. This is the common plight of most custodi-
al mothers. Most fathers don’t fight for custody. Most moth-
ers are stuck with it, whether they want it or not. Most
mothers rise to this occasion heroically, with no help from
anyone. But when fathers fight for custody, fathers win cus-
tody anywhere from 60% to 82% of the time, even when
they’re grossly unfit, as fathers or as husbands, and even
when they’ve never been their child’s primary caretaker.
In my study, in the United States, between 1961 and
1981, 82 %
of those fathers who contested custody won cus-
tody within two years. Eighty-seven percent had done no pri-
mary child care. One-third were wife batterers. More than
one-third kidnapped their children and took them on
“sprees.” Nearly two-thirds of these fathers tried to seriously
brainwash children against their mothers. Two-thirds refused
to pay child support for the very children they claimed to
love. It is not always the good guys who fight for and get cus-
—
tody. It is at least two-thirds of the time the bad guys who—
fight for custody.
Just when feminists began to organize for the right to
abortion, and for equal pay for equal work, at that precise
moment in history, men in every state legislature and in the
men running Hollywood studios and TV stations
judiciary,
and newspapers, men who were economic losers and/or
whose patriarchal kingdoms had begun to tremble as wives
moved for divorce, men everywhere started to say, “Oh, you
want equality? You want men’s jobs? You want to leave us?
Okay, bitch! We’ll take your children. They were only on
loan to you. It’s our sperm and our dollars that matter. They
were only on loan to you.”
In the landmark case of Dr. Lee Salk against his wife,
—
Kersten, Dr. Salk was granted custody not because Kersten

39
 PATRIARCHY

was and not because he was an involved father, but

unfit
because the judge found him to be more intellectually stimu-
lating and richer than his legal wife who was, after all, only his
womb-man or “surrogate uterus.” Many people applauded
this decision as a progressive and liberal decision —which
indeed it was.
Then there’s Mary Beth Whitehead’s case. Mary Beth
was a New Jersey housewife and mother who, for reasons
unknown to me and, indeed, no real business of mine, signed
a contract to be a surrogate mother. She was psychiatrically
interviewed and, once a month for nine months, inseminated
by Noel Keane’s Infertility Center of New York.
Mary Beth was impregnated with the semen of William
Stern. Dr. Stern forced her to undergo, against her will, but
by contract, an amniocentesis test. Not only did he want a
baby to whom he was genetically related; he wanted one who
was genetically perfect.
Whitehead was contractually on notice that, if the baby
was genetically defective, she must have an abortion. If she
didn’t have an abortion, then Dr. Stern would no longer be
responsible for the child, legally or economically.
Mary Beth had the amniocentesis test. It made her so
angry that she didn’t tell the Sterns the sex of her child. And
when it was time to deliver, she chose to have her legal hus-
band, Richard, in the delivery room with her.
A woman faces all kinds of medical consequences and
physical risks, including death, during pregnancy. Although
the initial nonmedically facilitated contributions of the future
—
mother and father are comparable she contributes the egg,
—
he contributes the sperm the similarities stop there. She is
pregnant for nine months. She carries the baby, feels it moving
inside her. She goes through labor. She delivers. She begins to
lactate. She breastfeeds the baby. Mary Beth did all these
things. Additionally, throughout her life she was being social-

40
 Mothers on Trial

ized into motherhood. Motherhood is not what men are

socialized into. William Stern’s position was in no way iden-
tical to or even comparable with Mary Beth Whitehead’s. 1
On March 27, 1986, when she gave birth, Mary Beth
saw that her new daughter looked like herself and like her
other daughter, Tuesday. At that point, Mary Beth felt that
she had made a terrible mistake. She could not honor the sur-
rogacy contract. It was too inhumane. It was beyond her
capacity to do so.
She called Noel Keane, the lawyer who in many ways
functions like pimps and profiteers do in terms of women’s
sexual and reproductive capacities, and said, “I can’t go
through with this.” And he allegedly replied, “Well, Mary
Beth, okay. Take your baby home. We will find another sur-
rogate mother for the Sterns. The worst that could happen is
that they might want some visitation.” And she allegedly said,
“I’ll give them all the visitation they want. I feel so bad. I feel

so guilty.”
Mary Beth went home and continued to breastfeed her
daughter. On March 30, 1986, three days later, she let the
anguished and arrogant Sterns have the baby. Within 24
hours, Mary Beth arrived at their door, distraught, weeping,
having had no sleep. She pleaded, “I need to have the baby
back. It’s my baby. I The Sterns gave the
can’t give her up.”
baby back. (If they really thought she was crazy or an unfit
mother, why would they have done so?) By April 12, 1986,
Mary Beth allegedly informed the Sterns that she could not
surrender her daughter. Mary Beth Whitehead continued to
breastfeed and care for her for four and a half months.
The Sterns went to a lawyer, Gary Skoloff. And he, in
turn, went to his colleague, Judge Harvey Sorkow. Now at
this point in time, there had been no paternity test. The
existing birth certificate said “Sara Elizabeth Whitehead.”
The baptismal certificate said “Sara Elizabeth Whitehead.”

41
 PATRIARCHY

But Judge Sorkow ignored these facts. All that William Stern
had to say to the judge was that he was the genetic father of
the child (that it was his sperm) and that he was ready to
economically support the consequences of his sperm and —
yes, that the “surrogate” mother was mentally unstable.
The judge didn’t say, “Well, let me interview this
woman.” He didn’t say, “Let me interview this woman’s
lawyer.” He didn’t even say, “Well, let’s at least have a psy-
chiatric kangaroo court chambers.” On the basis of
in my
hearsay alone, he issued a custody order, and then he ordered
it enforced. So one day, five policemen, with guns drawn,

came to Mary Beth Whitehead’s home, handcuffed her, and

threw her into the back seat of a police car. Only then did
they actually read the birth certificate in her possession. The
child’s name was Sara Elizabeth Whitehead. But their order
was for a “Melissa Stern.” Scratching their heads, the police
returned to the courthouse. And Mary Beth fled, with her
baby daughter in her arms, to Florida.
William Stern responded by putting a lien on the
Whitehead house. He effectively halted all the Whiteheads’
cash flow. Remember, the Whiteheads were a struggling,
working-class family while the Sterns were comfortably upper
middle class.
Hiding in Florida, without any financial resources, Mary
Beth had that famous conversation with Dr. Stern, a conver-
sation he taped secretly, the one in which she threatened to
kill herself and her child.
She said, why have you done this to me and my
“Bill,
family? Please take the lien off.” And he replied, “It’s my
baby.” She said, “It’s our baby.” And then she said, “Okay.
What do you want me to do, kill myself? Is that what you
want? Do you want me to kill the baby? Is that what you’re
asking for?” Frankly, if I had been in Mary Beth’s place, I
might have sounded crazier than she did. Any normal mother

42
 —

Mothers on Trial

under those conditions would.

Detectives hunted Mary Beth down. The police and pri-
vate detectives hired by the Sterns came time and again, and
they finally took “Baby M” away. They did this after Mary
Beth had been breastfeeding the child for four and a half
months.
After that, Mary Beth was allowed to see her baby only
two hours at a time, twice a week, in an orphanage with an
armed sheriff standing guard over her. She had to travel four
to six hours roundtrip for each of those two-hour visits.
Mary Beth Whitehead was put on trial by the legal sys-
tem. But she was also put on trial by the media and by society.
Watching coverage of her ordeal was, to me, like watching a
version of the New Bedford, Massachusetts gang rape on the
pool table, over and over again, day after day, where the men
in the bar cheered the rapists on. You do something like that
to a woman and you kill her. The victim of the New Bedford
rape was driven out of town. She allegedly began to drink and
—
take drugs. (I would too wouldn’t you?) And died in a car
accident in Florida. They said it was an accident. It was the
inevitable consequence of what the rapists and our woman-
hating society did to her.
In Mary was not just a few bad
Beth Whitehead’s case, it

guys who cheered her rapists on. It was the entire country.
Some patriarchs and feminists said, “We must have a
right to make contracts. If a woman can change her mind
about this contract — if it isn’t enforced — we’ll lose that right!
And we’ll lose the Equal Rights Amendment.” They didn’t
consider that a contract that is both immoral and illegal isn’t

and shouldn’t be enforceable. They didn’t consider that busi-

nessmen make and break contracts every second, renegotiate
—
them, buy themselves out with only money at stake. Only a
woman who, like all women, is seen as nothing but a surro-
—
gate uterus, is supposed to live up to or be held down for

43
 PATRIARCHY

the most most dehumanizing of contracts. No one

punitive,
else. Certainly no man.

Judge Sorkow ruled that the contract was enforceable

and awarded the Sterns custody “in the best interests of the
child.” Indeed, this was just one of many contemporary cus-
tody battles between a legally married man and woman or
between an adoptive couple and an impoverished birth moth-
er. The child is usually awarded to the highest bidder.

Whoever earns more money is seen as “better” for the child.

How can a stay-at-home mother, like Mary Beth Whitehead,
who earns no money, ever be seen as the better parent? Even
when the mother has a comparatively lucrative career she is
often seen as a selfish career-monster and therefore bad for
the child.
Judge Sorkow ruled that the contract was not baby sell-
ing. However, if the baby were stillborn, or the mother mis-
carried, contractually the mother only gets $1,000. But if she
delivers a perfect, whole, living baby, which she surrenders
for adoption, then — —
and only then is she entitled to the
$10,000. Is this baby selling or not?
Judge Sorkow also rejected the idea that surrogacy con-
tracts exploit women and create an underclass of breeders.
He reached this conclusion even though, under the contract,
the surrogate mother gets approximately 50 cents an hour.
(Mary Beth refused the $10,000. It was put in escrow and the
interest that accrued contractually went to William Stern.)
Now think: who is going to be so economically desperate that
she will be happy and grateful to get 50 cents per hour? It will
probably be working-class women, impoverished women,
—
and/or Third World women whose fertility is seen as a
resource to be plundered by men who want genetically per-
fect babies in their own spermatic image. This kind of genet-
ic narcissism means that already living children who
need to
be adopted — poor, black, minority, disabled, abused, aban-

44
 Mothers on Trial

—
doned, neglected children are not being adopted. As a soci-
ety, none of us is adopting such children before we sign sur-
rogacy contracts, and before we decide to reproduce ourselves
biologically.
As a we planned a feminist press conference at the
start,
courthouse. And we kept going back. We demonstrated with
whoever came to the courthouse to join us, with whoever
called to offer their support. Local mothers of young children.
Outraged mothers and fathers of grown children. I called on
200 feminists to join us. One liberal feminist expert in repro-
ductive rights and motherhood said that she couldn’t jeopar-
dize hernew-found celebrity as a neutral expert on network
talk shows* by joining us and appearing to “take sides.”
Another liberal feminist said that Mary Beth was too tarred
and feathered and would only destroy what little “main-
stream respectability” we had. A third liberal feminist said
that Mary Beth was causing a lot of “anxiety” among lesbian
co-mothers and infertile women who might themselves want
the option of hiring someone just like her.
Eventually, the case was appealed to the New Jersey
Supreme Court. The Court overturned Judge Sorkow’s deci-
sion upholding the contract. It ruled that the contract was
against public policy (in terms of baby selling and baby buy-
ing and in terms of the birth mother’s right to change her
mind) and could therefore not be enforced. And although it
affirmed the lower court decision granting custody to the
Sterns, the court nevertheless acknowledged Mary Beth
Whitehead’s status as the mother and awarded her visitation
rights.
A partial victory at last. But New Jersey is just one state.
Many courts in other states are hearing cases just like Mary
Beth Whitehead’s. They could rule in other ways.
Mary Beth Whitehead —the woman is brave. She went
after what belongs to all of us. And we must not let her and

45
 PATRIARCHY

others like her fight by themselves for our collective rights.

I call on everyone to join us at a rally tomorrow outside
of Noel Keane’s Infertility Center in NYC.

NOTES
1. Had Mary Beth wanted to donate the eggs and had their
“harvesting” been painful, dangerous, or expensive, then in
that case egg donation would not have been the same as
sperm donation.

46
 The Men’s Auxiliary
Protecting the Rule of the Fathers

The male legal ownership of children is essential to

patriarchy. Women are supposed to breed, bear, and/or
socialize father-owned “legitimate” children within a father-
absent and mother-blaming family. The fact that fathers are
often absent, or abusive when present (incestuous, infanticidal,
infantile), —
doesn’t change what patriarchy is about literally,
“the rule of the fathers.”
I have explored this paradox in each of my books: in
Women and Madness in 1972 and in Women, Money and
Power in 1976. In 1978, 1 did so more mythopoetically, in
About Men. Long before Robert Bly, I saw men as father-
wounded sons who therefore grow up to scapegoat women
for their fathers’ many failings. In About Men I said:

How sad that men would base an entire civilization on

the principle of paternity, upon male
ownership of
legal
and presumed responsibility for children, and then
never really get to know their sons or their daughters
very well; never really participate, for whatever reason,
in parenting, in daily, intimate fathering.

True rebellion against a father frightens sons terribly.

Sons have just barely begun to overthrow their original par-
ents, their mothers. So I was concerned with displacements of
male-male rage and grief onto safe targets, onto weaker men,
onto children, onto women.

47
 PATRIARCHY

viewed male uterus envy as probably the major psy-

I

chological force behind the patriarchal creation myths (God as

a father-creator of humanity) and behind the consequent sec-
ular myths that held man as medical expert to be superior to
woman as mother. (My Rx for men was not male separatist
drum-beating sessions but feminist consciousness and
activism.)
So I was not surprised when encountered fathers’
I first

rights activists in the late 1 970s, claiming male maternal supe-

riorityand blaming women for fathers’ failures. Eventually, I

wrote about them in “Mothers on Trial The Battle for :

Children and Custody ” in 1986. The collective message pre-

sented by “fathers’ rights” groups is a chilling one: that chil-
dren belong to men (sperm donors, surrogate contract
fathers, live-in boyfriends, legal husbands) when men want
them, but not when men don’t. Exactly who and what is the
organized men’s rights/fathers’ rights movement?
It is patriarchy itself: the church, the state, and private
enterprise, as it herds women into sex-typed, lesser lives; it is

our own families, sacrificing our female members and defend-

ing our male members, even when they’re known to have seri-
ously wronged women and children. It is the profound and
unending hostility women encounter —on street corners, on
dates, at work; it is the exclusion of women from paid or
well-paid jobs. The movement is the men’s aux-
fathers’ rights
iliary to this larger men’s movement.

The fathers’ rights movement in America grew out of the

male feminist movement and the antifeminist new Right.
What the men’s rights movement has done during the past 20
years is to repackage long-standing ideas about father-rights,
sometimes in a progressive voice, other times in a reactionary
one.
“Left-wing” (or feminist) fathers’ rights activists claim
that fathers have an equal right to children because men can

48
 —

The Men’s Auxiliary

mother also. They say that “Mother is a verb, not a noun”

and “A man can be a better mother than a woman can.”
“Right-wing” (or patriarchal) fathers’ rights activists
claim that children need a father-dominated family. They also
claim that God is the “father” of all children and that He
appointed earthly fathers as His children’s custodians.
Both kinds of fathers’ rights activists share certain per-
spectives and strategies. They claim that as men they are sav-
agely “discriminated” against by lawyers, judges, and
ex-wives in custody matters; that as men they are economi-
cally enslavedand controlled by greedy and parasitic ex-wives
who prevent them from seeing their children. And they argue
—
that men’s parenting whether on a “mothering” or a patri-
archal fathering model —
is sufficient and often superior to

women’s parenting.
There is no comparable movement for mothers’ rights
that is, for custody, child support, alimony, marital proper-
ty, increased levels of welfare, “free” legal counsel upon
divorce, and so forth. But there should be because, despite
men’s movement cries of “unfair,” it is in fact mothers’ and
children’s interests that are routinely sacrificed on men’s
behalf.
The organized fathers’ rights movement
1) campaigns against abortion rights, and sometimes
against female birth control;

2) counsels men to kidnap children, either legally or

illegally, and to default on alimony, health, and
child-support payments;

3) lobbies against state-initiated actions against

“deadbeat dads” and for programs that replace
women’s rights to a lawyer and a court hearing
with mandatory mediation favoring joint legal cus-
tody;

49
 —
PATRIARCHY

4) lobbies the media and state legislatures to dismiss

commit incest (as lies fabri-
allegations that fathers
cated by vindictive wives and manipulated chil-
dren), manipulates anecdotes and social science
data (e.g., about “battered husbands”), and
— —
demands and commands “equal time” in public
and media discussions;

5) fails to lobby for health, education, and welfare

a family allowance appropriate to human needs
and dignity.

As began to work actively on behalf of women who

I

were targets of this growing movement, I was surprised when

liberal middle class feminists began to support fathers’
rights —in the mistaken hope that if we allowed men even
more rights than they already had they’d become more
responsible and nurturant, at least to their own children; or if
we counseled women to give up custody of children that they
(and other women) would choose to devote themselves to
feminist pursuits instead. In 1979, in With Child: A Diary of
Motherhood I wrote about chosen motherhood as a feminist
,

and spiritual pursuit; however, many feminists were not inter-

ested in motherhood as an unmarried heterosexual impover-
ished woman’s right.
Feminists have no difficulty uniting around the issue of
women’s reproductive rights and health. We all understand
that the opposition to women’s right to control our own bod-
iesmaintains men’s power. But the issues of “fatherhood”
and male parenting have proved to be far more complex and
divisive. have found that my pro-woman position embar-
I

rasses and threatens the kind of perfectly good liberal femi-

nist who is not as concerned with a woman’s right to choose
motherhood when our right to abortion is in such jeopardy;

50
 The Men’s Auxiliary

who ardently believes in the ideal of male (heterosexual) par-

enting and joint custody and in the reality of lesbian adop-
tion, and the rights of the lesbian co-mother and adoptive
couple over and against the rights of the lesbian biological
mother or the nonlesbian, impoverished birth mother; the
kind of feminist who views the right to have an abortion or to
“choose” noncustodial motherhood as somehow morally and
politically superior choices than the right to retain custody of
the child you chose to have.
I grant that the issue is exceedingly complex and does

not lend itself to simplistic solutions. Yet, as I see it, once fem-
inists began fighting for equal pay and for the right to abor-

tion, the backlash was on. If women wanted the right to leave
men or take men’s jobs away from them, then men, and the
women who support them, would simply repossess women’s
children as well as women’s bodies. While feminists, to our
credit, may want to be “fair” to men, patriarchs are anything
but “fair” to women.
Since I examined this new auxiliary backlash in Mothers
on Trial first published in 1986, more than 5,000 mothers
,

have called or written. “I’m in your book,” they say. “It’s as if

you know my story personally.” Fathers’ rights activists, both
men and women, do not call or write. Instead, they picket my
lectures and threaten lawsuits. In media debates, they literal-
ly shout at me, trying to drown out what I have to say. “Why

don’t you admit it?” they demand. “Ex-wives destroy men

economically. They deprive fathers of visitation and brain-
wash the children against them. Fathers should have rights to
alimony and child support. Joint custody should be manda-
tory. Why do you refuse to see it our way? We’ve already
convinced legislators and lawyers, judges and social workers,
psychiatrists and journalists — —
and many feminists that what
we’re saying is true.”
Indeed they have. I know about their convictions from

51
 PATRIARCHY

firsthand experience. I’ve been sued by fathers’ rights activists

and threatened with imprisonment; I’ve received my feminist
share of obscene phone calls and death threats. After one par-
ticularly harrowing encounter with fathers rights activists in
Canada, I found a dead animal at my door. Early in 1986, for
the first time in U.S. history, the FBI convened a grand jury
on an ostensibly domestic matter: to question me about the
whereabouts of a -runaway mother and her two “allegedly”
sexually abused children. They had reason to believe I’d
helped her. Friends: 1986 was not my favorite year. But in
part because of the intense reaction to my work, I’ve come to
think of myself as an abolitionist opposed to female slavery.
I’ve learned to take myself seriously —not only because oth-
ers support my views, but because they oppose them.
What is about the face of this backlash is that
different
some feminists support it. They argue that the best way to
achieve women’s liberation is through a “gender-neutral”
—
approach by treating women and men, mothers and fathers,
as if they were the same; i.e., all white men and as such,
deserving of equality. But men and women, mothers and
fathers, are not equal under patriarchy. And the “gender-neu-
tral” approach often backfires.
In Mothers on Trial, I challenged the myth that fit moth-
ers always win custody —
indeed, I found that when fathers
fight they win custody 70 %
of the time, even when they have
been absentee or violent fathers. Since then, other studies
have demonstrated that when men fight they win custody
anywhere from 50% to 80% percent of the time whether —
or not they have been involved in child care or the economic
support of the family.
Although 80% to 85% of custodial parents are moth-
ers, fathers who fight win custody not because mothers are
unfit or because fathers have performed any housework or
child care, but because mothers are held to a much higher

52
 The Men’s Auxiliary

standard of parenting.
In custody battles, mothers are routinely punished for
having a career or job (she’s a “selfish absentee mother”) or
for staying home on welfare (she’s a “lazy parasite”); for com-
mitting heterosexual adultery or for living with a man out of
wedlock (she’s “setting an immoral example”) or for remar-
rying (she’s trying to “erase the real dad”) or for failing to pro-
vide a male role model (she’s a “bitter, man-hating lesbian”).
Divorcing fathers increasingly use the threat of a custody
battle asan economic bargaining chip. And it works. He gets
the house, the car, and the boat; she gets the kids and, if she’s
lucky, minimal child support. When fathers persist, a high
percentage win custody because judges tend to view the high-
er male income and the father-dominated family as in the
“best interests of the child.” Many judges also assume that
the father who fights for custody is rare and should therefore
be rewarded for loving his children, or that something is
wrong with the mother.
What may be “wrong” with the mother is that she and
her children are being systematically impoverished, psycho-
logically and and physically battered by the
legally harassed,
very father who is fighting for custody. However, mothers are
often custodially punished for leaving a violent husband
(she’s “economically depriving her kids and violating her
marriage vows”) or for staying (she “married him so I hold
her responsible for what he did”). Some people, including
psychiatrists, lawyers, and judges, deal with male domestic
violence by concluding that women have either provoked or
exaggerated it.

Co-parenting or “male mothering” is an ideal of some

feminist theorists, who therefore support joint custody of chil-
dren as the preferred arrangement after divorce. However,
this is liberal theoretics, not scientific fact —and leaders of the
joint custody movement such as Dr. Judith Wallerstein are

53
 PATRIARCHY

now saying just this. Inviting men to have more involvement

in childcare, through a joint custody arrangement, will not
necessarily produce more “mothering,” but perhaps more
patriarchal “fathering.” The “disconnected” men who have
been socialized to reproduce sexism are the very men whom
feminists have been calling upon to participate “equally” in
child care. Dr. Miriam Johnson, in Strong Mothers, Weak
—
Wives concludes that fathers not mothers control and
, —
dominate gender stereotyping. She asks: Would not such men
“carry their dominating tendencies” into the nursery? Do we
really want such men involved in mothering?
I am absolutely in favor of getting men off the battle-
fieldsand into the kitchen; and absolutely in favor of male
tenderness, intimacy, accountability. However, I am arguing
that the call for “gender neutrality” in custodial determina-
tion is a mistake. A deeper and closer look at the way “gender
neutrality” works in actual custody cases shows that, rather
than achieving equality, it may enhance male, patriarchal
power and the primacy of sperm.
The patriarchal ideal of fatherhood is sacred. As such, it
usually protects each father from the consequences of his
actions. The ideal of motherhood is sacred, too, but no
human mother can live up to it, so it serves to expose all
mothers as imperfect. Therefore, all mothers are custodially
vulnerable because they are women; all fathers, including
incestuous, violent, absent, passive, or “helper” fathers, can
win custody, not because mothers are “unfit” or because
fathers are truly equal partners, but because fathers are men.
The equal treatment of “unequals” is unjust. In real
patriarchy, the paternal demand for “equal” custodial rights,
and the law that values legal paternity or male economic
superiority over biological motherhood and/or over women’s
primary care of children, degrades and violates both mothers
and children.

54
 A Wolf in
Feminist Clothing

These are the times that try feminist souls.

“Femininity’s” back —even among feminists—and for years,
I’d thought it was a fugue state, not a secret political weapon.
It’s 1994 and we’re surrounded by ancien regime images
still

of glamorous, mainly white, young, thin, lucky-in-love, rich

women, who by media sleight-of-hand, have become our rad-
ical feminist “leaders.” I despair when mediocrity triumphs

— when people confuse what sells with what’s important or

true.
I find the current crop of books for women disturbingly
and deeply reactionary. Yes, Camille Paglia, Katie
slick,
Roiphe (The Morning After), Marianne Williamson (A
Womans Worth) and Naomi Wolf (Fire With Fire), are fre-
quently quoted, not because they’re original or revolutionary
thinkers, but because what they say threatens no one at —
least, no one in power and no wannabes. The rpedia-anointed
“leaders” insist that:
• Anita Hill prevailed (even though Clarence
Thomas is a sitting Supreme Court Justice).

• There is no epidemic of rape and incest (only

an epidemic of malicious, feminist-induced
hysteria, false memory syndrome, and fake
statistics about rape, gang-rape, and date-
rape).

55
 —

PATRIARCHY

• Women have won the gender war —even as

women from Paris to Peoria are overworked,
unpaid, underpaid, devalued, undervalued
and yes, “glass-ceilinged”; even as women are
being gang-raped in Bosnia and Boston, geni-
tally mutilated in Mogadishu and Nairobi,
killed at birth in Beijingand Calcutta, sold
into sexual slavery as children in Bangkok
and Manila, and veiled, beheaded, and stoned
to death for “adultery” in Saudi Arabia and
in the Iranian provinces.

Women have not won the war against women; we have

only begun to fight. The heat of battle is intense. Many
women are running scared, smiling as fast as they can.
Clearly, it's too hot in the kitchen for Naomi Wolf and she’s
made on describing her departure as
her exit; that she insists
“ radical feminism” is sheer Newspeak. While Wolf’s first
book, The Beauty Myth exposed how media images of “per-
,

fection” were harmful to women, Fire With Fire seems to be

—
written for the media as if Wolf’s applying for a job as a
news anchor or syndicated columnist. No crime, by the way,
but no book either.
Vital feminist ideas are rarely, not frequently, touted in
the mainstream media; it’s important to understand what’s
being shown as the latest in radical feminist “fashion,” as
worn by a well-spoken, exceedingly earnest, and personable
young woman.
—
Wolf proclaims a “genderquake” then, paradoxically,
backtracks, as she tries to explain why, in h^r view, so many
women have resisted the feminist label. She describes some of
the feminist sisterhood accurately, but constantly cuts her
own insights down to size in a voice that is shockingly similar
to women’s magazine advice.

56
 A Wolf in Feminist Clothing

Wolf’s message, to women only, is: Improve yourself,

your self-esteem, your appearance, your attitude and pay no —
attention to the high female body count. Don’t analyze it or
draw political conclusions. All is sunny, couldn’t be better.
No pain, all gain.
Wolf describes the feminist sisterhood at its worst —and
she’s accurate about the collective authoritarianism, the “hor-
izontal hostility,” the downward mobility, the worm’s eye
view of realpolitik. But you can find precisely such self- and
woman-hating behavior among women everywhere: in
church groups, sororities, and families. Proclaiming oneself a
“feminist” doesn’t, unfortunately, inoculate one from sexist
behaviors.
However, Wolf is wrong about some important things.
For example, the pioneering shelter workers didn’t refuse
money for their volunteer labor; no one offered any. Taking
token sums of govermnent money meant the files were open to
Reagan-Bush government surveillance and that the female
victims of violence would be forced into therapy, not into
political activism. If a battered mother was running away
with her sexually abused children the therapist would be
forced to “tell” on her. Shelter workers were, understandably,
ambivalent about accepting token sums of money under such
conditions.
Wolf’s experience in a rape crisis center was with her
third-wave peers, not with their pioneering mothers. Their
style may partly have been an imitation of second-wave fem-
inist culture —and partly more of the same non-feminist
female behavior that Wolf abhors (“backstabbing,” denying
one’s own “dark” side, rewarding the weakest, punishing the
strongest, ruling by excluding, taking no prisoners). Join any
ladies’ auxiliary and you’ll experience these same dynamics.
Wolf’s redefinition of radical feminism includes: 1 )
a “go
along, get along” approach to power; 2) the idea that femi-

57
 PATRIARCHY

—
nism doesn’t need principles sound-bites, such as “I feel
your pain, I see your point” will do; and 3) the recommenda-
tion that women should stop concentrating on “victimiza-
tion” and seize the “power” that is ours.
According to Wolf, one reason that some women shy
away from calling themselves feminists is that others might
suspect them of being lesbians. “Not all women can econom-
ically afford to be seen as gay —
and if they are not gay, the
misidentification is a financial, emotional, and physical risk
few are willing to run,” writes Wolf. Ah, risk. What if the
Danes had chosen not to wear Yellow Stars because it was
too dangerous, and because they weren’t Jews anyway? The
Jews of Denmark might all have died in Auschwitz.
Wolf describes herself as a practitioner of “radical het-
erosexual feminism.” She writes: “Male sexual attention is

the sun in which I bloom. The male body is ground and shel-
ter to me, my lifelong destination. When it is maligned cate-

gorically, I feel as if my homeland is maligned.” Is she not “of

woman born”? I thought that “our bodies, ourselves,” our
own female bodies were the sovereign territory feminists
wanted. She also contradicts herself: one page later, she writes
that “there is a primal place that leads plumb down to infan-
cy... she [the infant] wants to possess the breast... she wants
to merge, be cared for, taken over.” Is the female breast not
“homeland” to women as well as men? Even that Victorian
gentleman, Dr. Freud, conceded we were probably all “bi-

sexual.”
Radical heterosexuality? Okay, I’m open. Persuade me
that who I sleep with, or my declaration that I can’t do with-
out sexual pleasure, is somehow equivalent to a political
analysis, or to a program that will abolish rape or establish
economic equality for women and for all races and classes.
I didn’t think Gennifer Flowers mattered; was more I

interested in Bill Clinton’s voting record on women. I am

58
 —

A Wolf in Feminist Clothing

more concerned with our leaders* out-of-bed than their

in-bed positions. Given how overexposed and overly con-
women are as physical/sexual
trolled beings, I don’t want to
know too much about the personal or sexual life of Janet
Reno, Barbara Mikulski, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Donna
Shalala, or Hillary Clinton (though I agree with Wolf: I
would be concerned if they, or any public official or employ-
er, sexually harassed their employees).
I don’t mind heterosexual Femme glitter. Sher Hite,
Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Joan Nestle, and many oth-
ers were always very good at it, still are. It’s okay, as long as
you also have politics and a real sense of humor about sur-
face appearances. (Steinem has said she’s “not really that
pretty, the media just thinks [she’s] pretty for a feminist.”)
I’ve always preferred Maria Callas to Jackie Onassis
nothing personal, I just don’t like the less-is-more school of
female appeal. I prefer the fleshy to the anorexic, the greatly
to the minimally talented. worry when men (and women)
I

reward women merely for being younger, for knowing less,

and for saying things that are less rather than more threatening.
I have no problem with a woman of ideas declaring that

she is a sexual being. It’s important for a thinking, feminist

woman to tell her straight, lesbian, bisexual, and celibate sis-

ters that her body is her own (see my

above point about our
bodies, ourselves), and that she won’t lie with her body to toe
—
a party line. But it’s as important no, it’s more important
to deliver the same message to powerful anti-lesbian and anti-
homosexual groups. It’s called “talking truth to power” and
the young are often gifted at this. Not Wolf, not Roiphe, not
Williamson, who are telling men just what they want to hear:
that modern women, even those with feminist longings, still

burn for male sexual attention, approval, and protection,

exclusively. So young, and such canny gate-keepers already.
Wolf ends her book with a series of Psychological

59
 PATRIARCHY

Strategies. Her first five admonish us to

1) avoid generalizations about men that imply that their

maleness is the unchangeable source of the problem;
2) avoid generalizations about men that are totalizing:
that is, that do not admit to exceptions; 3) never choose
to widen the between the sexes when the option
rift

exists to narrow it, without censoring the truth;

4) never unreflectingly judge men in a way that we
would consider men applied it to women...;
sexist if

5) distinguish between the men we love, who are on our

side, and the male system of power, which we must
resist. It is not “hating men” to fight sexism. But the

fight against sexism must not lead to hating men...

Contrast this tone with her otherwise matter-of-fact

(and quite useful) description of the difficult “impasse” often
faced by African-American and white women trying to work
together. Wolf demands more of women than she does of
men.

To antiracist white women, the impasse is a devastating

rejection, like a lover’s. “Aren’t we listening?” they ask.
“Aren’twe trying to address the issues?” To African-
American women, that very articulation of the problem
is often annoying, for it sounds as if white women
good intentions will make racism dis-
believe that their
appear overnight, at which point everything will be fine.
White women’s wish for intimacy and love from
African-American women often carries the implicit
hope of being magically absolved of racism... If we
learned to substitute respect for intimacy and teamwork
for sisterhood, these tensions would not paralyze wom-
en’s organizational efforts...

Wolf shows us African-American and white women

working on racism together; she does not show us women
and men working on sexism together. We don’t read: “It

60
 —
A Wolf in Feminist Clothing

sounds as if men believe that their good intentions will make

sexism disappear overnight. ” Instead, Wolf shows us men
and women “loving” each other and having “sex” together.
I’m all in favor of alliances with pro-woman or feminist
men in the boardroom, bedroom, and on the barri-
in the
cades. But I think it’s cowardly, and insulting, to appeal to
men by saying that feminists personally love and adore men
all men, any men —
and/or that feminism doesn’t really threat-
en the status quo because feminist leaders love/adore their
sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, or boyfriends.
Wolf exaggerates the extent to which feminists have
offended or destroyed “good men.” (Fire With Fire might
well be called Women Who Don't Love Good Men Enough
and What's Wrong with Them.) In her book, pro-feminist
men are “nearly dismembered” when they attend radical fem-
inist speeches. But where are the bloody body parts? Real
body parts litter the landscape but they’re mainly female body
parts. Men have killed and dismembered them. Wolf wants
to “heal this sexual divide” and to “ease rage between the
sexes.” That’s nice, but how? As Churchill knew, appease-
ment doesn’t work. And that’s all most women have tried
that, and looking away, blaming the victim, and denying that
things are “that bad.”
It’s disheartening to see a media-obsessed generation of
young women who are more conservative than their mothers
and grandmothers. Perhaps to them, the (male) power struc-
ture background; in the foreground is the tyranny of their
is

mothers’ (or of older women’s) radical feminism. Perhaps

Roiphe and Wolf are engaged in a daughters’ rebellion.
Wolf is consistently ambivalent about both radical and liber-
al second-wave feminists, especially those who have paid a

high price for their political beliefs; I believe Wolf and others
of her generation fear this deeply.
According to Wolf, some women have remained alien-

61
 —
PATRIARCHY

ated from feminism either because the media has distorted the
essentially happy-go-lucky nature of revolutionaries or
because those same revolutionaries have, wrongfully, insist-

ed on certain principles or “dogmas.” Abortion rights, for

example. Or so-called generalizations about male aggression.
Wolf writes: “I am calling on us to look clearly at the
epidemic of crimes against women without building a too-
schematic world view upon it.” But just mopping up after the
violence that has been done to woman after woman after
woman is not as effective as “schematically” confronting that
same violence. Physicians used to treat brown lung disease in
miner after miner; unionists eventually went out on strike to
close mines down and to improve working conditions.
How, exactly, shall women (and men of good will) go
out on strike to end rape? Wolf, Roiphe, Paglia, and
Williamson do not join Andrea Dworkin in calling for even
a “24-hour truce” —
no rape for 24 hours. Instead, Roiphe
insists that reports of date rape are greatly exaggerated. Wolf
suggests that we decorate rape crisis shelters in a more cheer-
ful fashion. She may have a point, but it’s beside the point.
Rape centers aren’t starving “for lack of fun,” but for lack of
available funds, lack of political action. Or is rape something
Wolf, as a radical feminist, is willing to live with?
What’s Wolf’s program? She has one. She demands that
we not discriminate against anyone on the basis of gender;
she insists, correctly, that this is a radical goal. I agree with
her. But this is a hard goal to reach, especially if we don’t note
our starting point. Currently, both women and men discrim-
—
inate against men positively we adore, trust, fear, and forgive
men; we despise, mistrust, fear, and punish women we dis- —
criminate against women negatively. Reaching some middle
ground is a laudable aim. Wolf doesn’t take us there. What
she does, instead, is to passionately defend the “good” men
whom she perceives as under massive and unfair feminist

62
 A Wolf in Feminist Clothing

attack —and attack the “bad” women, mainly second-wave

feminists, now 50s and 60s (I’m one) whom she
in their
blames/jettisons first for not having attracted a mass following
and/or for having poor image control: as if popularity and
“image” are all that count, as if her so-called “genderquake”
wasn’t brought about by 28 years of hard, second- wave fem-
inist labor.

Wolf takes a cheap shot when she opposes “victim” to

“power” feminism. By all means, let’s not be victims, let’s
have power feminism. But Wolf fakes power like some
women fake orgasm.
She criticizes the so-called “victim feminists” for
attempting to deal with violence against women in a political
way. From about 1967 on, in addition to fighting for women’s
right to abortion and to equal pay for equal work, grass-roots
feminists focused on the sexual objectification of women and
on issues of sexual violencetoward women, such as stranger-
rape and sexual harassment on the job and on the street. They
pioneered and maintained the rape crisis centers and the shel-
ters for battered women, conducted Speakouts, testified at
hearings, and drafted legislation. Only after a decade were
feminist activists able to expand their focus to include marital
rape, date rape, domestic battery, and incest.
During the 1980s, it became clear to feminists working in
the area that most prostituted women were also incest vic-
tims, that many battered wives were treated as if they were
their husband’s or boyfriend’s prostitutes, that wife-batterers,
pedophiles, and serial killers of women often admit they’re
addicted to pornography, and that all women, whether they
were prostitutes (the so-called “bad girls”) or non-prostitutes
(the so-called “good girls”), who dared to kill in self-defense
were treated as if they were prostitutes, i.e. demon terrorists
from hell who deserved no mercy.
I understand Wolf’s desire to “look away”; most have.

63
 PATRIARCHY

But as the poet Judy Grahn wrote:

Have you committed any indecent acts with

ever
women? Yes, many. I am guilty of allowing suicidal
women to die before my eyes or under my hands
because I thought I could do nothing.

A radical feminist vision has to be radical. If you’re a

radical, the things you say and do are bound to threaten those
in power, as well as those who are at their mercy. They
burned the nineteenth- and twentieth-century meeting houses
down to intimidate abolitionists and suffragists into silence,
and they jailed and force-fed them too.
Fighting with fire is brutal, bloody, deadly, dull, ter-
fire

rifying, unsafe, and unglamorous. Like birth. And revolution.

And creation. Wolf refers briefly, very briefly, to Harriet
Tubman’s nineteenth-century Underground Railway: “she
[Tubman] took the liberation of African-American slaves into
her own hands.” However, breaking the law or creating an
underground is not on Wolf’s menu of options when she tells
her readers to exercise their right to vote, run for office, amass
capital, tithe themselves, network, etc.

Recently in Brooklyn, where I live, a 20-year-old Black

street-prostituted woman was
gang-raped by seven Black
teenage boys who, afterwards, laughing, doused her genitals
and buttocks with gasoline and set her afire. She bolted the
hospital when personnel demeaned her as a “whore.” Her
mother threw her out of their project apartment for “sham-
ing” her. Now, she walks the streets, still selling (she has a
pimp/manager), getting crazier and crazier, suffering horri-
bly. Where is “North” for this poor wretch? It doesn’t exist
yet. Real power feminism will be needed to create it.
Does Wolf really believe that her within-the-system
recipe, “Add women and stir,” amounts to that real power? I

agree, by all means, let’s get women or feminists , both women

64
 —
A Wolf in Feminist Clothing

and men, elected to government. But whom will we elect

and to do what, and at whose expense? Will our electioneer-
ing mainly benefit the wives, daughters, mistresses, and
homosexual lovers of (white) men of wealth -or will it alle-
viate the suffering of the most vulnerable and endangered
—
amongst us now, not a century from now?
Radical thinkers pay a high price. They learn to take
themselves seriously, not only because others support their
views, but because others oppose them. One
one learns that
has power not from one’s admirers or supporters, but from
one’s opposition. If there is no opposition, something’s
wrong.
I agree with Wolf: “It is not dissent that is harmful to
feminism but consensus.” Feminists must be able to disagree
in public, take nothing personally, and keep on working
together. I think Wolf has given us an opportunity to discuss
—
what feminism is and what it might be.
I challenge Wolf and others of her generation, and of my

own, to use their moment in history to provide sanctuary in

their lifetime to the victims of patriarchal violence, and to cre-
ate a powerful feminist government by all the means at their
disposal.
The question Wolf asks herself is: Will she choose to be
a “warrior for justice” or succumb to her need to “connect
and be loved”? She experiences the tension between these two
desires as a “coat of fire.” But women
group are pun-
as a
ished whether, as individuals, we acquiesce or resist. Thus,
— —
heroism not martyrdom is our only feminist alternative.

65
 Feminism and Illness

In only 25 years, a visionary feminism has managed to

seriously challenge, if not transform, world consciousness.
Nevertheless, I am
saddened and sobered by the realization
that no more than a handful of feminists have been liberated
from the lives of grinding poverty, illness, overwork, and end-
less worry that continue to afflict most women and men in
America.
I have seen the best minds of my feminist generation go
“mad” with battle fatigue, get sick, give up, disappear, kill
themselves, die, often alone, and in terrible isolation, as if we
were already invisible: to each other, and to ourselves, our
role as pioneers and immigrants diminished, forgotten.
Immigrants always form infrastructure or self-help
groups and tithe themselves accordingly. We are the immi-
grants who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, left the Old
Patriarchal Country to clear a path in History for the genera-
tions to come. It’s too late for us to turn back, and we’ve still
got “miles to go before we sleep” in our own feminist country.
There are few feminist networks in place whose mandate
it is to assist feminists (or female adults) when they lose their

jobs, fall ill, stay ill, face death, and are without patriarchal
family resources, supportive mates, or other safety nets.
Surrounded by epidemics, I ask: Where are our feminist
credit unions and emergency funds (remember those failed
attempts in the mid-70s?)? Our feminist soup kitchens, Meals
on Wheels, land trusts, and old age homes (remember those
fiascos?)? Our breast cancer fundraising campaigns, our hos-

67
 PATRIARCHY

pices, our burial societies? (Feminists are just starting to get

serious about breast cancer, and about women with AIDS.)
They do not yet exist. Instead, feminists say: “I didn’t
tell anyone I was sick because I didn’t want my employers or

my enemies to know.” Or: “I didn’t ask anyone for help.

Pride maybe, but also fear. People tend to avoid you when
you’re in trouble.” One survivor of breast cancer told me that
in the mid-80s, her newly formed cancer support group dis-
banded(!) when its firstmember died. A formerly disabled les-
bian feminist said: “Sick men know how to get others to take
care of them. Sick women know how to ask for help
don’t
and can’t get it when they do. Maybe gay men are also learn-
ing how to take care of others. Gay men took care of me
when I was sick, not other lesbian feminists.” A chronically
disabled woman said: “Only a few friends visited me more
than once. Most had a hard time with the fact that a strong
woman could become so sick, and an even harder time fitting
me into schedules already overcrowded with other care-taking
1
responsibilities.”
Some blame those whose immune systems can-
feminists
not absorb any more environmental toxins or toxic —
amounts of hostility. Some of us still say: “It’s her own fault
she has no health insurance, 2 no nursing care, no job, no
mate. She should have planned better or compromised hard-
er.” Or we say: “But isn’t she really a little (or a lot) crazy?”
Aphra magazine
In 1982, Elizabeth Fisher, founder of
and author of Women’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the
Shaping of Society and in 1987, my dear friend Ellen
,

Franfurt, author of Vaginal Politics , killed themselves. Not

just because they were depressed, on drugs, discarded at mid-
life, or without hope that things would get better (although
some of this was so), but also because they were tired of fight-
ing so hard for so long for a place in the sun (a community, a
decent-enough book contract), tired of being hated so much

68
 Feminism and Illness

and of never having enough money. They despaired of both

man’s and woman’s inhumanity to woman.
So many of us have died, mainly of breast cancer and
metastasized breast cancer. To name only a few: June Arnold,
Park Bowman, Phyllis Birkby, Jane Chambers, Barbara
Deming, Audre Lourde, Mary-Helen Mautner, Barbara
Myerhoff, Lil Moed, Pat Parker, Barbara Rosenblum, Isacca
Siegel, Sunny Wainwright.
We have no quilt, and no memorial.
So many of us have wrestled with and survived breast
cancer. So many of us are struggling with long-time disabili-
ties, reeling from Lyme Disease, and from Chronic Fatigue

Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), myself included 3 .

Some of us have been blessed by feminist care-taking. I

think of how magnificently Sandra Butler cared for and —
—
orchestrated community support for her cancer-stricken
lover/partner Barbara Rosenblum (an account is contained in
their book Cancer in Two Voices ); I think of how tenderly,
how enduringly, Jesse Lemisch has cared for his CFIDS-
racked wife, my beloved comrade Naomi Weisstein; I think
of how many lesbian-feminists cared for and sent “white
light” to Barbara Deming and Jane Chambers, and who con-
tinue to do so for Audre Lorde 4 .

But these are splendid exceptions, lucky, individual solu-

tions, even trends, not yet sturdy, immigrant infrastructure.
I recently attended a rent party for Ti-Grace Atkinson,

author of Amazon Odyssey. Ti-Grace’s health was seriously

impaired by exposure to low dose radiation. (Her father was
the head of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Plutonium By-
Products Division at Washington State’s Hanford
Reservation.) She says: “First, I had a hysterectomy. Now, I
have no thyroid left. I take tons of thyroid medication, some
of which has made me sick and unable to work.”
The rent party was a determined, even inspired, grass-

69
 PATRIARCHY

roots effort that yielded more goodthan cash; however,

will
such events are too labor-intensive, too hard to repeat on a
monthly basis for every pioneer feminist, whether or not she’s
written a book, who’s in an illness-related economic crisis.

Ti-Grace at least has an apartment. Other feminist pio-

neers are —or are about to become—homeless.
For example, a legendary anti-pornography activist has
been forced to warehouse her files and move in with a friend.
The co-author of a lesbian-feminist classic, a well-known
—
feminist comedienne, an abortion rights activist and count-
less other pioneers sway unsteadily on the brink of job-
all

lessness and homelessness. The co-author of a much-loved

book on feminist spirituality became homeless last year; she
left New York for a warmer climate to be homeless in.

Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectics of Sex and a

welfare recipient, had to battle, hard, to hang onto her rent-
controlled apartment in between “visits” to Belleview in the
late 1980s.
The fact that none of these women have written second
books impoverishes us all.
Two of my dear friends, both major feminist leaders,
have kept writing, despite a variety of health problems, but
like so many great writers, both dead and alive, simply cannot
earn a living by the pen. (A writer’s annual income is about
$5,000.00.) Neither are independently wealthy, have tenured
positions or pensions; they remain dreadfully, bravely poor,
unable to act on their own grand visions without unimagin-
able personal sacrifice and constant worry.
I am not blaming any of us for not having done more;

we did the best we could, and we did alot. But in all our imag-
inings, we failed to imagine that we ourselves would grow
weary or fall ill and have no real, specific “family” to take us
in and tide us over until we could get back on our feet.
Some of us acted as if we didn’t think we’d need fami-

70
 Feminism and Illness

lies again. Perhaps our collective experience of transcendence

blinded us to our ordinary needs. But most of us were longing
for “communitas.” We talked about sisterhood and commu-
nity, tribes and alternate families —
but only in the abstract,
as we rushed from one dazzling spectacle to another.
I know: the republic ought to provide employment,

health insurance, and medical care for all its citizens, but it
doesn’t; and we have fallen on hard times, along with every-
one else. All we have is each other: our sisters, ourselves.

NOTES ,

1. Some women either opposed or were so uncomfortable

with my identifying them by name that I chose not to do so.

2. In May of 1992, the Older Women’s League released a

report thatshowed that due to low-paying and part-time
work, American women between the ages of 40 and 60 are
far more likely than their male contemporaries to lack
health insurance.

3. Some survivors of breast cancer and other serious diseases

are: Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jan Crawford, Edith Konecky,
Phyllis Kriegel, Eleanor Pam, Alma Rautsong (Isabel
Miller), Gloria Steinem —these names come immediately to
mind. Some survivors of long-time disabilities are: Flo
Kennedy, Bea Kreloff, Bettye Lane, Judy O’Neil, Betty
Powell; of Lyme disease: Beverly Lowy, Max Dashu; of
CFIDS: myself, Susan Griffen, Joan Nestle, Aviva Rahmani,
Arlene Raven, Naomi Weisstein —to name only those I

know personally.

4. Since this article first appeared, more feminists have devel-

oped breast cancer and some have died from it. I have
added/changed some names accordingly.

71
 Marcia Rimland’s 0

Deadly Dilemma

For more than 5,000 years, no mother anywhere has

ever been legally and automatically entitled to custody of her
own child. Only men have been entitled to sole custody of
children. Women have been obliged to bear and rear chil-
—
dren who carry their father’s last name, without which they
are considered illegitimate.
Although most custodial parents in North America and
everywhere else are mothers, this does not mean that women
always “win” custody; rather, mothers retain custody only
when fathers choose not to fight for it. In 62 countries sur-
veyed world-wide, fathers were legally and automatically
entitled to custody if they wanted custody —
whether or not
they fulfilled their paternal obligations.
Mothers were obligated and support their
to care for
children without any reciprocal rights; most rose to the occa-
sion heroically. Nevertheless, women had few rights as indi-
viduals and no rights as mothers over and against the rights
that men have over women, that husbands have over wives,
that fathers have over mothers, and that states have over cit-
izens. In general, mothers everywhere are vulnerable to legal-
ized father right— whether that right is embodied by a legal
or genetic father, paternal family or tribe, or by the state, act-
ing as a surrogate father.
In the last 15 to 20 years, when American fathers fought
for custody they increasingly won custody, from 63% to 70%

73
 — —
PATRIARCHY

of the time, whether or not they were previously absent, dis-

tant, parentally non-involved, or violent (Chesler, 1986;
Pascowicz, 1982; 1982, 1983; Takas, 1987;
Polikiff,
Weitzman, 1985). Similar trends have been documented in
Canada (Lahey, 1989) and in Australia, France, Holland,
Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden (Chesler, 1991;
Smart and Sevenhuijsen, 1989). Fathers do not win because
mothers are unfit, or because fathers have been participatory
parents, but because mothers are expected to meet more strin-
gent standards of parenting. This double standard has also
been documented by ten 1989-90 U.S. State Supreme Court
reports on “Gender Bias in the Courts” which confirm that
there is one set of expectations for mothers and another less
demanding set for fathers.
Today more and more mothers, as well as the leadership
of the shelter movement for battered women, are realizing
that women risk losing custody if they seek more (or some-
times any) child support or stability from fathers in terms of
mothers also risk losing custody if they
visitation. Incredibly,
accuse fathers of beating or sexually abusing them or their
children even or especially if these allegations are detailed
and supported by experts.
Many judges still believe that “just because a man beats
his wife doesn’t mean he’s an unfit father.” While it is true
that many children of violent fathers reject violence when
they grow up, many do not. Both studies and common sense
suggest that a violent, woman-hating father teaches his son
to —
become and his daughter to marry a man like himself. —
Which, despite what some judges say, is not in the best inter-
est of women, children, or society. 1
What about a father who sexually molests his own
child? Surely all of us, judges included, take that seriously
don’t we? Not necessarily. On the one hand, we vaguely
know that 16% of all young American girls (an epidemic

74
 Marcia Rimland’s Deadly Dilemma

number), and a much lower percentage of young American

boys, have been sexually molested within the heterosexual
family by fathers, grandfathers, uncles, stepfathers, and
brothers. Yet when mothers accuse men of sexually abusing
children in their families, we don’t believe that they’re telling
the truth.
We don’t, of course, want to believe it, but studies doc-
ument that at least two-thirds of the recent maternal allega-
tions about incest are true, not false, and that neither mothers
nor child advocates allege paternal incest more often during a
custody battle than at other times. Some fathers’ rights
activists, including lawyers and mental health experts, keep
insisting that the mothers or children are lying or misguided.
And the media continue to cite an increase in “false” maternal
allegations.
A Washington, D.C. physician, Dr. Elizabeth Morgan,
was more than two years for hiding her daughter,
jailed for
Hilary, from what she and many experts believed was an
incestuous relationship with Hilary’s father. The father has
consistently denied any wrongdoing and was never found by
any court to have sexually abused his daughter Hilary.
Hilarys’ theraspists were convinced that she had been sexu-
ally abused and was becoming actively suicidal. However, a
Virginia judge did prevent him from seeing Hilary’s half-sister
Heather, from a previous marriage, who had also accused
him of sexually molesting her. Judge Dixon refused to con-
sider this as relevant to the Morgan case.
Dr. Morgan’s lengthy imprisonment haunted me. Judge
Herbert Dixon had made Dr. Morgan an example of what
can happen to any mother who defies the law even to save —
her own child.
Here’s what I have to say about the Morgan case: Look
what can happen to a white. God-fearing, Christian, hetero-
sexual mother who is a physician, whose brother is a Justice

75
 PATRIARCHY

Department lawyer, whose fiance (now husband) is a judge,

and whose lawyer is an ex-State Attorney General; look what
can happen to an extremely privileged “insider” who decides
to make a court case of it. Morgan is an insider in terms of
class, color, sexual preference, etc. As a woman, she’s still an
outsider. Would a male physician be allowed to sit in jail so
long without the old boy network springing into action? Dr.
Morgan was freed only by the passage of a special bill
approved by Congress and the Senate and signed into law by
the President. It states that in the future no judge can imprison
a resident of Washington, D.C. for more than 12 months
without a trial by jury for specific, stated crimes.
What if Dr. Morgan were a Black, Asian or native-
Indian woman with only a high school education? A lesbian
and an atheist without a single friend or relative in high
places? What if the media thought the case not worth the cov-
many of the media and psychi-
erage? Interestingly enough,
atric reports on Dr. Elizabeth Morgan bore an uncanny
resemblance to those of another mother-kidnapper: Mary
Beth Whitehead. Both mothers were often described as nar-
cissistic, righteous, stubborn, manipulative, and obsessed
“borderline personalities.” This is not surprising. Despite dif-
ferences in class and education, both were viewed by experts
who share the same biased views of women.
There is a danger in focusing exclusively on the incest-
custody kidnapping battles. If we finally convince judges that
some fathers do sexually abuse their childrenand that it’s a
bad thing to do, then judges might begin to deny custody to
incestuous fathers but they’ll tend to view all non-incestuous
fathers as automatically worthy of custody —
if only by com-

parison. Still, how can we not focus on some blatant miscar-

riages of justice?
Marcia Rimland was a woman driven to the edge —and
over the edge — by a court system bent on thwarting her abil-

76
 Marcia Rimland’s Deadly Dilemma

ity to protect her four-year-old daughter from harm. When I

joined a demonstration called by the Coalition for Family
Justice lastsummer to mourn the deaths of Rimland and her
daughter, I was filled with both grief and rage.
It was a childcare worker and Rimland herself who first

suspected that Rimland’s estranged husband, Ari Adler, was

sexually abusing their daughter, Abigail. Abigail began having
tantrums, weeping uncontrollably, and masturbating exces-
sively after visits to her father. After four play-and-talk ses-
sions with Abigail, a clinical social worker validated the
probable sexual abuse. But in Rockland County, N.Y.
child’s
Family Court, the social worker’s findings were challenged.
Another sex^abuse validator concluded there were problems
with the social worker’s findings, including failure to ade-
quately explore the possibility that the child was coached by
her mother. However, the second validator never evaluated
the child in person.
After this report, Judge William P. Warren decided to
reinstate Adler’s overnight, unsupervised visits with Abigail.
Marcia Rimland made a hasty appeal to the Appellate
Division in Brooklyn, where a stay of Warren’s order was
issued —
one that allowed supervised visitation by the father
in the home of his friends — the very place at which the alleged
sexual abuse had continually taken place. Abigail was sched-
uled to spend three overnight visits and a full weekend with
her father before any court would reconsider the issue.
The night before the first mandated visitation, Rimland
gave Abigail a tranquilizer. She and the child then sat in a red
Toyota with the motor running in an enclosed garage until
they both were dead from carbon monoxide inhalation. “I
have no choice, I hope you understand,” read Rimland’s sui-
cide note.
Many people will say that the murder-suicide proves
that Marcia Rimland was crazy all along. But I believe that

77
 PATRIARCHY

we should also view Rimland as a woman driven crazy — dri-

ven to despair and desperation. Although her action was per-

sonal, not political, we can analyze it politically and try to
understand its meaning.
Most research shows us that when mothers or daycare
workers allege paternal sexual abuse, it is very likely true.
Sometimes, however, one cannot substantiate it fully or clear-
ly enough. This does not mean that the mother has lied or
that she is crazy or malevolent. It means that our techniques of
eliciting information from children are not advanced enough.
Yet, in the course of writing Mothers on Trial: The
Battle for Children and Custody I found that mothers who
,

allege and can document sexual abuse are increasingly pun-

ished by losing custody of the child they are trying to protect.
Many lawyers now advise mothers: “If it’s true, don’t allege it,

or chances are you are going to lose custody.” It’s hard to

convey the extent to which mothers are blamed, disparaged,
feared, hated, belittled, and not believed in the American
court system.
Marcia Rimland was a matrimonial lawyer; she knew
what she was up against. She was distraught beyond measure,
perhaps clinically insane. But she was also, objectively,
trapped.
Let’s consider why Rimland thought she had “no
choice.” Her simplest choice would have been to obey the
court and permit her husband overnight visitation with four-
year-old Abigail— an option she viewed as complying with
and presiding over the slow destruction of her child.
Like many mothers, Rimland could have watched
Abigail slowly come apart. Rimland could have denied what
she believed was happening or denied that it was “that bad.”
Perhaps Abigail would “only” develop a multiple personality
syndrome. Perhaps, like Hillary, Elizabeth Morgan’s child,
she would become actively suicidal. Perhaps, like Sherry

78
 Marcia Rimland’s Deadly Dilemma

Neustein in another well-known case, Abigail would develop

anorexia nervosa and begin to suffer from malnutrition.
Perhaps Abigail would identify with her aggressor, blame her
mother for not saving her, and become utterly lost in the
fugue state we mistakenly call femininity. Perhaps Abigail
would one day become a prostitute. Studies by sociologists
and criminal justice researchers show that 80% to 90% of
prostitutes have been victims of incest and childhood sexual
abuse. not a prostitute, then somebody clearly with a limit-
If

ed capacity to enjoy a quality life, with low self-esteem and

with a good deal of self-hatred.
“The child could have survived it,” some women have
said to me, in macho voices. “We know women who have
been through incest. What was the matter with Marcia
Rimland? Was her kid better than everyone else’s? I got
though it, my neighbor’s daughter got through it, we can all

get through it. Now there’s even treatment for incest.”

Marcia Rimland decided that she would not accept this
deal. She could not live if she turned her back on what so
many of us learn to live with or minimize, namely, the sexual
abuse of children by adult men.
Rimland’s second option was to run away with her
child— to go underground. But unlike Elizabeth Morgan,
Rimland didn’t have a father who was an ex-CIA operative
with the will, know-how, and money to go undercover.
Rimland had no living parents. There was nobody she could
count on to take custody of the child if she got sent to jail.
She had no support. Had she called me, I couldn’t have done
a thing for her. There is no “North” for women and children;
there is no real underground —
no sovereign feminist country
for women (or men) in flight from sexual violence. Runaway
mothers make it onto television documentaries, but they often
lose custody of the kids and go to jail.
A third option: Rimland could have killed the alleged

79
 PATRIARCHY

abuser instead of herself and her child. But again, if Rimland

shot Adler, who would raise her child? Rimland knew she
would probably go to jail for a very long time. This is rou-
tinely what happens when battered women kill violent hus-
—
bands or boyfriends forget about men they’re no longer
living with. There have been some governors granting clemen-
cies in these cases, but it’s very rare.
Anyway, Rimland was probably a “nice” girl, and nice
girls don’t shoot men or cut off their penises. Nice girls usually
turn their rage inward. They leave the place of unbearable
pain by killing themselves, either slowly or suddenly.
from her point of view and mine, Rimland had no
So,
acceptable options. She was desperate. She knew the score.
Like the heroine Sethe in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved ,

Marcia Rimland saw the slave catchers coming. She heard

their breath hard on her heels and she refused to give up her
daughter or herself.
Clearly, we need to provide more options for women
like Rimland caught in the jaws of an unfeeling legal system.
For a start, there should be an independent review of the
Rimland-Adler case by judges, mental health professionals,
and lawyers outside of Rockland County. Some very obvious,
hard questions demand an answer:
Why didn’t Judge Warren listen to the validator’s report
that sexual abuse had occurred? This validator interviewed
both parents and the child. Why did Warren listen to a report
that a second validator issued after not having interviewed
anybody, which merely quibbled with the first validator’s
methodology? Why did the Appeals Court allow any unsu-
pervised visitation between Adler and his daughter? Why did
the D.A. in Rockland County not pursue the first validator’s
report of sexual abuse? What sort of political pressure, if any,
was put on the judges involved in this case?
At the very least, Judge Warren should have erred on the

80
 —
Marcia Rimland’s Deadly Dilemma

side of caution. He should have said, “Something is going on.

I don’t know what it is. Let’s get more evaluations.
Meanwhile, let’s have neutral, trained personnel supervise the
visits.” The judge could have at least done that. The appel-
late level could have done that. I suspect they didn’t because
they never believed the mother or the first validator.
As a society, we are in denial about incest and other
forms of male violence against women and children.
Ironically, even as there are more books, articles, conferences,
and first-hand survivor testimony about incest and molesta-
tion of children, it is more difficult for individual mothers to
get a fair hearing. There seems to be a need to say, “Well
maybe it’s gping on somewhere else out there but not in my —
courtroom, not on this block, not next door to me, not in my
marriage.”
It’s easier for us to blame the victim; to assume the
mother is crazy, or exaggerating, or lying, or just being diffi-
cult. And mother overwhelmed by fear that her child is
a
being abused is not always a model of calm, restrained behav-
ior. She may tremble and stutter in fear and in panic. She may

cry or rage. And the judge may unthinkingly choose to believe

a smooth, calm, rational — but not necessarily innocent
father.
Deep structural changes. are required to combat the
moral insanity that courtrooms and lawyers’ offices.
exists in
Well-intentioned judges and mental health professionals are
utterly unprepared to deal with allegations of child sexual
abuse in any context, no less in the confusion of a custody
battle. At best, they are seriously perplexed. In frustration,
they “blame the victim” and “pass the buck” on to the next
judge.
We must learn to handle child sexual abuse allegations
differently: rapidly, very expertly, and with a cadre of spe-
cially trained professionals, not witch hunters. The trial and

81
 PATRIARCHY

appeal process must be accelerated, and the child —as well as

—
due process protected at all costs. Psychiatry, psychology,
and social work have not acquitted themselves nobly in this
area. Therefore, interdisciplinary guidelines must be devel-
oped by a coalition of feminist grass-roots workers, scholars,
and activists, many of whom are also psychiatrists, psycholo-
gists, and social workers. Such guidelines, or protocols, must

be standardized, applied, and enforced everywhere.

While -such within-the-system measures are being devel-
oped, we must dare to believe and shelter the “protective par-
ent”— most often the mother. Marcia Rimland and her
daughter might be alive today if they had had even a tempo-
rary escape hatch and some reason to hope for justice.
Some years ago, we began to blame mothers for not
leaving men who abuse their children. And mothers began to
blame themselves when they discovered many years later that
their daughters had been sexually abused by husbands and
fathers. Today, traditional women, who are not necessarily
political or feminist, are saying no to sexual violence. They
do not want their children to be sexually violated while they
stand by and do nothing. They are desperate heroines. We
need to make sure they have a way out.

NOTES

1. Two examples among many: Both Marc Lepine, the

Montreal mass murderer of 14 young female engineering stu-
dents, and Colin Thatcher, the wealthy Canadian legislator
who for years battered his wife, Joanne Wilson, and then
bludgeoned her to death (or perhaps hired someone to do it
for him) in the midst of a bitter custody battle, were, as chil-
dren, humiliated and beaten by their fathers. Both Lepine

82
 Marcia Rimland’s Deadly Dilemma

and Thatcher also observed their fathers physically and ver-

bally abuse their mothers. When boys are brutalized by their
fathers, those who become violent often scapegoat women
and children and not other men. Thus Lepine didn’t shoot
—
14 fathers, nor did Thatcher murder or procure the mur-
—
der of another man.

83
 .

.
 A Woman’s Right
to Self-Defense
The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos

For the first time in U.S. history, a woman stands

accused of bemg a serial killer: of having killed six adult male
motorists, one by one, in just over a year, after accompanying
them to wooded areas off Highway 75 in Florida, a state well
known for its sun, surf, and serial killers.
I first heard about Aileen (Lee) Carol Wuornos in

December of 1990, when Florida newspapers and national

media announced:

TWO WOMEN ARE BEING SOUGHT AS POSSIBLE

SUSPECTS IN THE SHOOTING DEATHS OF EIGHT
TO TWELVE MIDDLE AGED MEN WHO WERE
LURED TO THEIR DEATHS ON THE FLORIDA
HIGHWAYS. SUSPECT #1 IS A WHITE FEMALE,
FIVE FEET EIGHT TO FIVE FEET TEN, WITH
BLONDE HAIR, WHO IS TWENTY TO THIRTY
YEARS OLD. SHE MAY HAVE A HEART TATTOO
ON HER UPPER ARM. SUSPECT #2 IS ALSO A
WHITE FEMALE, FIVE FEET FOUR TO FIVE FEET
SIX, WITH A HEAVY BUILD AND SHORT BROWN
HAIR. SHE MAY BE WEARING A BASEBALL CAP.
THESE WOMEN ARE ARMED AND DANGEROUS
AND MAY BE OUR NATION’S FIRST FEMALE SER-
IAL KILLERS. 1

85
 PATRIARCHY

This sounded as diabolically whimsical as Orson

Welles’s 1938 broadcast on the Martian invasion. What was
Everywoman’s most forbidden fantasy and Everyman’s worst
nightmare doing on television? Was this some kind of joke?
Perhaps these women were feminist Martians on a mission to
avenge the Green River killings or the Montreal massacre. If
not, did female serial killers really exist on earth?
Historically, women certainly have been convicted and
executed 2 for killing adult male non-intimates, often with
male accomplices, but sometimes alone, for money, “thrills,”
or revenge, in a drug-induced fit of rage, a battery-induced
fugue state, and/or in death-defying self-defense. 3 Battered
women have also killed male and family intimates, children,
the elderly, and employers. 4 In Europe and elsewhere, war-
rior queens and female soldiers and civilians have killed their
male counterparts in battle and in self-defense. 5 In the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, female slaves and pros-
titutes sometimes injured or pimps, or
killed their masters,
johns, to avoid being beaten, raped, or killed, or because they
had been seduced-and-abandoned, beaten, prostituted, or
raped. 6
However, according contemporary studies 7 and
to
countless true-crime accounts of homicide and femicide, 8
99% of mass, sexual, and serial murder, and about 90% of
all violent crime, is committed by men. Women do not mas-

sacre adult or male strangers, all at once, in large numbers,

nor do they stalk-rape-and-kill male strangers, one by one.
When women who commit 10% of all violent crimes
those
do kill, nearly half kill male intimates who have abused them
or their children, and they do so in self-
invariably
Until recently, such (battered) women were viewed
defense. 9
as more deviant and “crazy” than their male counterparts.
Indeed, for a variety of reasons, female victims who kill male
intimates in self-defense have been viewed more harshly than

86
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

men who, unprovoked, kill their wives and girlfriends, or

who kill female non-intimates, especially prostituted
women. 10
Most North American women prisoners have been con-
victed of pettyeconomic crimes 11 and of primarily “female”
crimes, such as prostitution. 12 Due to increased drug use and
tougher drug penalties, more women are being imprisoned
than ever before; however, women still comprise less than 6%
of the North American prison population. 12 Nevertheless,
this smaller and population of female inmates
less violent
(most of whom are young, uneducated, impoverished,
African-American or Spanish-speaking single mothers) are,
paradoxically, perceived as more violent than their more
numerous and more violent male counterparts. Why?

Psychological Double Standards

Women are held to higher and different standards than
men. People expect men to be violent; they are also carefully
taught to deny or minimize male violence (“I don’t believe
any father would rape his own child”) and to forgive violent
men (“He’s been under a lot of pressure,” “He’s willing to go
into therapy”). On the other hand, people continue to blame
women for male violence (“She must have liked rough sex if
she stayed married to him,” “She provoked him into beating
her”).
Also, people do not expect and will not permit women to
be violent —not even in self-defense. (In fact, most people con-
sistently confuse female self-defense with female aggression.)
In addition, people demand that women, but not men, walk a
very narrow tightrope of acceptable behaviors —perfectly,
and with a smile. 14 And, until very recently, both men and
women experienced woman’s human nature (menstruation,
menopause, pregnancy, aging, illness, odors, etc.) as unnat-
ural, offensive, diseased. People still expect women to keep

87
 PATRIARCHY

—
up an unnatural appearance almost as a specifically female
moral obligation 15 Thus, most people are psychologically
.

primed to distrust/dislike any woman who, in addition to

being naturally imperfect, dares to commit other morally
questionable acts. For women, such acts include having sex
or children, for money, outside of marriage; or refusing to
marry, bear, and rear a man’s children; or abandoning
responsibility for a child in a way that only men are allowed to
do.
For example, while many people, including journalists,
seemed to “hate” battered wife Hedda Nussbaum 16 surro- ,

gate contract mother Mary Beth Whitehead , 17 and teenage

prostitute Amy Fisher , 18 they remained emotionally “flat”
about Joel Steinberg, William Stern, and, at least initially,
about Joey Buttafuoco. Many, both male and female, also
enjoyed “hating” Imelda Marcos 19 and Leona Helmsley 20
with a passion unvisited upon Ferdinand Marcos, Michael
—
Milkin , 21 Ivan Boesky 22 and Neil Bush 25 all of whose white
collar (and other) crimes were far greater than Helmsley’s.
(Parenthetically, most people have felt enormous sympathy
for Chief Justice Sol Wachtler 24 little interest in his female
,

victim, and utter revulsion for Bess Meyerson. 25 )

These psychological double standards of perceived vio-
lence result in a double standard of punishment. In a way,
such double standards already constitute punishment, as they
poisonously permeate and circumscribe a woman’s daily life.
It doesn’t stop here. Studies document that women are often

punished more severely for lesser, primarily “female” crimes,

such as prostitution, than men are for the more violent
“male” crimes of femicide and homicide. When women com-
mit “male” crimes such as spouse murder or stranger mur-
der, in self-defense, or when they protectively kidnap a child,
they are usually punished more harshly than their male so-
called counterparts 26 .

88
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

According to the 1990 Florida State Supreme Court

Gender Bias Report, “despite the perception that the crimi-
nal justice system is lenient to women... women [in Florida]
are treated more harshly than similarly situated male offend-
ers.” 27 Generally, whatever their crime, men in jail and prison
have greater access to libraries, educational and rehabilita-
tion programs, modern gymnasiums, etc. than do women;
men’s jails are also more conveniently located for family vis-
itation than are women’s jails. 28
To avoid jail overcrowding, male criminals are often
plea-bargained into lesser sentences by prosecutors who fear
they might otherwise be set free. Since women commit fewer
crimes, there^are fewer, less overcrowded, women’s prisons,
and less motivation to plea-bargain women out in order to
save jail-space. Thus, women often inadvertently serve longer
sentences for lesser crimes in more ramshackle jails than men
serve for more serious crimes in more modern jails. 29
According to the findings of the 1990 Florida Gender Bias
Report:

1. Women convicted have fewer

of crimes
opportunities for rehabilitation, training, and
treatment throughout Florida.

2. There are currently only two maximum secu-

rity state facilities for women. Minimum
security inmates thus must endure conditions
designed for maximum security inmates.

3. Some women’s facilities fall below the

requirements for exercise facilities and, in any
event, are not comparable to those provided
for men.

4. Women generally are imprisoned for less seri-

ous offenses than their male counterparts

89
 PATRIARCHY

[and] have significantly limited access to

alternative programs or rehabilitative treat-
ment. Men have programs and alternative
treatment centers throughout Florida.

5. In the county jails, overcrowding in the male

population results in men being released.
However, there is less overcrowding among
women inmates. As a result, women serve
longer sentences than men who have commit-
ted more serious crimes.

6. Women have limited access to trusteeships

and work release programs in comparison to
men, thus restricting the availability of early
release for good behavior.
7. Women sentenced to work release by the
courts nevertheless are often incarcerated
because of the lack of work release programs
or the shortage of openings in similar pro-
grams for women.
8.
10.
Women unable to participate in work release
programs lack the opportunity to gain useful
work experience. This results in less success-
ful reentry into society after incarceration and
more time spent incarcerated than similarly
situated male offenders.

9. Men are favored in experimental and alterna-

tive programs around Florida.

The remote location of some jails for women

restricts family visitation, access to counsel,
and information. 30

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 —
A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Another example: as noted, battered women who kill in

self-defense account for about half of all women who kill.
Even here, men and women are not “equal.” (Non-battered)
men kill their female domestic partners three to four times
more often than women kill their domestic part-
(battered)
ners/agressors. Battered women who kill in self-defense rarely
“get off” and, to date, are rarely granted clemency; most are
given long or even life sentences 31.

In comparison, minority/immigrant men are sometimes

freed on the grounds that, in their culture, men are “obligat-
ed” to kill wives who want to desert their whipping-girl posts
to go to work, go to school, or get a divorce. White male
defendants have sometimes successfully claimed that their
wives’ desire to “shop too much” or to leave the marriage
amounted to unbearable sexual humiliation 32 .

In addition, whilemen accused of murder often refuse

to confess, women, who believe that the criminal justice sys-
tem will “care about” the “truth,” are all too eager to “tell

all,” especially if they’ve killed their batterers or kidnapped

their children to protect them from paternal physical and sex-
ual abuse. Women are routinely punished for their naivete
and honesty, and/or for their inability or refusal to play court-
room “war games .” 33
Judges, jurors, Senate Judiciary Committee members,
and We, the People, still value men’s lives more highly than
women’s and feel —
compassion for male but not for female
sinners. When a woman is accused of committing a crime
(and even when the woman is the crime-victim ) , her story is

rarely believed, by men or by other women, and even less so if

she’s accusing a man of being the aggressor. That’s when
she’s Anita Hill or Patricia Bowman; imagine what happens
when she’s a prostituted woman, armed robber, child-beater,
or cold killer. Few are “interested” in hearing her “excuses”:
that she was a battered wife, a serial rape and/or incest vic-

91
 —
PATRIARCHY

tim, or that she killed in self-defense.

What do we really know about women killers —espe-
cially those who kill male non-intimates?

Women Killers In Literature, Film, and

the Social Sciences
Have Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Woolf, Colette,
Wharton, Stein, Barnes, Nin, de Beauvoir, or Lessing ever
given us a portrait of homicidal fury in female form? I don’t
think so, but neither have Dostoevski, Melville, Baudelaire,
Zola, Dickens, Celine, Genet, Camus, Burroughs, Miller,
Wright, Ellison, Mailer, Mishima, or Capote. Few pre-feminist
writers have ever dared to imagine the lives of women killers
and outlaws 54 .

Not one character comes to mind: no female

Raskolnikov, Meursault, or Bigger Thomas. How could so
many great writers have resisted this temptation?
Perhaps it wasn’t challenging enough. Until recently
and I’m not sure much has changed women and men of —
color were already presumed guilty, inferior, even evil, by
virtue of their gender and skin-color, and were supposed to
be humbled and punished. There’s no story here. On the
other hand, white men were presumed innocent, Godlike,
heroic, both by birth and in the courtroom. Their descent into
evil, redemption, or lack of it —now that’s a story!
This may be changing. Something’s up, it’s in the air, it’s

a sea-change, and suddenly, or so it seems, we are being bom-

barded by celluloid images of women killing men: Barbra
Nuts the three women
Streisand’s incest-victim prostitute in ;

who stomp a man to death in the Dutch film A Question of

Silence; and the battered wives and victims of rape in The
Burning Bed Sleeping with the Enemy Mortal Thoughts
, , ,

and Thelma and Louise. Superficially, nontraditional and

career-women who kill men are also beginning to appear in

92
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

films such as Silence of the Lambs ,

Alien One and Two ,

Terminator Two La Femme

, Nikita , Basic Instinct , Patriot
Games Passenger 57,
,
etc.

In actuality, these images have feminist precursors. By

1979-80, the pre-existing grassroots shelter movement for
battered women, and feminist lawyers and social scientists
such as Angela Browne (1987),^ 5 Cynthia Gillesp (1989), 36 :

Ann Jones (1985), 37 Susan Schechter (1982),^ 8 Elizabeth

Schneider (1978), 39 Diana Russell and Nicole Van den Ven
(1976), 40 and Lenore Walker (1979, 1989) 41 began to focus
on battered women who kill. 42
Earlier still, and at a more imaginative level, feminist
writers began to portray heroic, or anti-heroic, women who
kill: Monique Wittig’s fictionalized band of Amazon war-

riors, set in the future, in Les Guerilleres (1969), 4 ^ and

Manastabal, her lesbian feminist Archangel, who guides
Wittig through a surrealistic Purgatory of abused women in
Across the Acheron (1985); 44 Nawal el Sadawi’s Firdaus, a
prostituted woman who kills her pimp in Woman at Point
Zero (1975); 45
Joanna Russ’s Janet Evason, an advanced
extra-terrestrial who kills heroically and in self-defense, in
The Female Man (1976); 46 Marge Piercy’s Connie Ramos, a
time-traveler and ideological warrior, in Woman on the Edge
47
of Time (1976); Suzy McKee Charnes’s warriors in Mother-
Lines (197 48 Sally Gearheart’s lesbian feminist warriors in
);

The Wanderground (1976); 49 Kate Millett’s Gertrude

Baniszewski, who, in real life, led a gang of teenagers in the

torture-killing of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens, in The

Basement— Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979); 50
Margaret Atwood’s Ofglen, an ideological warrior who mer-
cifully kills a male comrade to spare him a slow and agonizing
death in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); 51 Jeanette Winterson’s
Dog Woman, who is given to killing Puritans with an ax dur-
ing the reign of Charles the Second in Sexing the Cherry

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 PATRIARCHY

(1989); 52 Helen Zahavi’s Bella, an ex-prostitute, “no one spe-

cial,”but someone who, once she’d “realized she’d had
enough,” proceeds to kill at least seven sexually and murder-
ously assaultive men, in The Weekend ( 1 991 ); 53 and Diana
Rivers’sband of lesbian feminist psychic-military warriors in
Daughters of the Great Star (1992) 5 *. Andrea Dworkin’s
Mercy 55 first published in England in 1990 and in the United
,

States in 1991, reads like something the visionary Cassandra

might have written — had she escaped her life as
Agamemnon’s and turned military tactician,
slave-prostitute
had she escaped from History and become an “avenging
angel”:

We surge through the sex dungeon where our kind are

kept, the butcher shops where our kind are sold; we
break them loose; Amnesty International will not help
us, the United Nations will not help us; so at night,
ghosts, we convene; to spread justice... I am an appren-
tice: sorcerer or assassin or vandal or vigilante; or
avenger; I am in formation as the new one who will
emerge.

Women, including women writers, have been condi-

tioned to be the social enforcers of the status quo, to challenge
and condemn any woman (or man) who “steps out of line.”
That women have begun to imagine and befriend women
killers — —
and in print is very promising. Writers need to cre-
ate female heroes and anti-heroes, larger than life. Acts of
radical compassion are required, acts that embrace other
women, not just “nice” girls or “perfect” victims, not when
it’s safe, but precisely when it’s risky.
Enter Aileen (Lee) Carol —
Wuornos a prostitute and les-
bian convicted of killing four men and accused of killing at
least two more —a really “bad” girl.

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 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Is Wuornos a Serial Killer?

The media and social scientists have described Wuornos
as the first “female serial killer”; the FBI has classified her as
such. But is this true? Is Wuornos indeed a female “Jack the
Ripper,” “Hillside Strangler,” “Green River Killer,” or
“Night-Stalker”? Eric Hickey, sociologist and criminologist,
estimated that there has been an average of at least five serial
killers each year in the United States since 1970. The vast
majority are men (approximately 170 between 1970 and
1988). Hickey estimated that in the nearly 200 years between
1800 and 1988, a total of 34 female serial killers have exist-
—
ed contrasted with an estimated 30 male serial killers on the
loose as of the late 1980s. A disproportionate number of ser-
ial killing victims are women, a trend which Hickey says may
be increasing. 57
mainly white male drifters, obsessed
Serial killers are
with pornography and woman-hatred, who sexually use their
victims, either before or after killing them, and who were
themselves paternally abused children. As adults, they scape-
goat not fathers but mainly women, sometimes children,
—
sometimes male homosexuals who are seen as “feminine”
or vulnerable. Serial killers may be responsible for the daily,
and permanent, disappearance of thousands of prostituted
and non-prostituted women, each and every year, all across
the United States. 58 In addition, most sex-murderers who
stalk, rape, torture, and kill prostitutes (and non-prostitutes,
whom they view as prostitutes and as therefore worthy of
death), are rarely ever found or convicted. 59
I don’t think Wuornos fits this description. Wuornos
was not a pornography addict, she did not eroticize her
hatred of women (or of men); she did not stalk women, or
male or female prostitutes; in fact, she was a prostituted
woman. The men she killed all fit the profile of johns, those
who frequent prostitutes.

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 PATRIARCHY

In addition, most serial killers don’t insist that they

killed in self-defense —as WuornosShe said so at least 50
has.
times during her three-hour, videotaped, psychologically
manipulated confession on January 16, 1991, in which she
also said that she believed she was going to be beaten or raped
or killed by each of her victims. 60
People say that Wuornos could not have killed six times
in self defense, that —
no one could except of course men, in
times of war. But Wuornos, a seriously abused child and a
serially raped and beaten teenage and adult prostitute, has
been under attack all her life, probably more than any soldier
in any real war.
In my opinion, Wuornos’s testimony in the first trial was
both moving and credible as she described being verbally
threatened, tied up and then brutally raped, both anally and
vaginally, by Richard Mallory. 61 According to Wuornos, this
is what Richard Mallory did to her on the night of November

30th, 1989:

I went to Tampa and made a little money hustling. I was

hitchhikinghome at night. This guy picked me up right
outside of Tampa, underneath the bridge. So he’s
smokin’ pot and we’re goin’ down the road and he says,
‘Do you want a drink?’ So we’re drinkin’ and we’re get-
tin’ pretty drunk. Then, around 5:00 in the morning, he

says: ‘Okay, do you want to make your money now?’

So we go into the woods. He’s huggin’ and kissin’ on
me. He starts pushin’ me down. And I said, ‘Wait a
minute, you know, get cool. You don’t have to get
rough, you know. Let’s have fun.’ 62
I said I would not [have sex with him]. ‘Yes, you

are, bitch. You’re going to do everything I tell you. If

you don’t, I’m going to kill you and [have sex with you]
after you’re dead just like the other sluts. It doesn’t mat-
ter, your body will still be warm.’ He tied my wrists to

the steering wheel, and screwed me in the ass.

96
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Afterwards, he got a Visine bottle filled with rubbing

alchohol out of the trunk. He said the visine bottle was
one of my surprises. He emptied it into my rectum. It

really hurt bad because he tore me up a lot. He got

dressed, got a radio, sat on the hood for what seemed
like an hour. I was really pissed. I was yelling at him,
and struggling to get my hands free. Eventually he
untied me, put a stereo wire around my neck and tried
to rape me again. ^3
Then I thought to myself, well, this dir... this dirty
bastard deserves to die anyway because of what he was
tryin’ to do to me. We struggled. I reached for my gun.
I shot him. I scrambled to cover the shooting because I

didn’t think the police would believe I killed him in self-

defense.^
I have to say it, that I killed ’em all because they got

violent with me and I decided to defend myself. I was-

n’t gonna let ’em beat the shit outta me or kill me,
either. I’m sure if after the fightin’ they found I had a
weapon, they would’ve shot me. So I just shot them. 6 ^

Apart from her own testimony, the jury never got to

hear any evidence about violence toward prostitutes in gen-
eral, or about Mallory’s history of violence toward women in
particular, that might have helped them evaluate Wuornos’s
much-derided claim of self-defense.

Violence Against Prostitutes

There is a suppressed, forgotten, and/or unrecorded his-
tory of violence against prostituted women both world-wide
and in North America. Prostitutes have long been considered
“fair game” for sexual harassment, rape, gang-rape, “kinky”
sex, robbery, and beatings; their homes have been destroyed,
they have been taunted, even killed, for “sport .” 66 According
to historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle,

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 PATRIARCHY

After 1820, physical violence against prostitutes [in

New York City] increased dramatically.
...Drunken, disorderly, and delirious males often
became incensed when a prostitute or madam denied
them their heart’s desire.
...The increasing frequency of these attacks during
the 1830s reflected, in part, the growing perception that
prostitutes were fair game for the aggressions of frus-
trated males. The most threatening form of assault was
“the spree” or “row.” Fueled by male camaraderie and
substantial quantities of liquor, gangs of rampaging
drunks moved from one saloon or brothel to another,
becoming increasingly obnoxious and violent at every
stop.... Many sprees evolved into scenes of sadistic ter-
ror.^8
...Just as some white men terrorized black propri-
etors of small businesses, oyster shops, churches, and
theaters, others found the increased economic and
social power of prostitutes threatening.
...Efforts to limit accessibility, in the mind of the
brothel bully, violated custom and male prerogative.
...In 1836, for example, John Chichester and his

politically connected gang attacked at least three bor-

dellos. Entering Jane Ann Jackson’s Chapel Street
brothel with bats, they destroyed windows and shutters
and threatened to cut Miss Jackson’s throat.
Chichester’s consorts then broke into Eliza Ludlow’s
»

house and forced her to serve brandy; they concluded

their guzzling by tossing the glasses in the fire. Then
they “abused the inmates of the house,” burned a rug,
broke a bench by hurling it at a prostitute, and threat-
ened to toss one woman out the window. 69
...Just as lynchings in the American South later in
the century extended psychological control far beyond
their immediate victims, brothel riots probably imposed
similar behavioral constraints upon prostitutes.

98
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

A 1991 study by the Council for Prostitution

Alternatives, 71 in Portland, Oregon, documented that 78%
of 55 prostituted women reported being raped an average of
16 times annually by their pimps and 33 times a year by
johns. 72 Twelve rape complaints were made in the criminal
justice system and neither pimps nor johns were ever convict-
ed. These prostitutes also reported being “horribly beaten”
by their pimps an average of 58 times a year. 73 The frequen-
cy of beatings by pimps ranged from once to daily, or 365
times per year; the frequency of beatings by johns ranged
from 1 400 times a year. Legal action was pursued in 13
to
cases, resulting in two convictions for “aggravated assault.”
Fifty-three percent were the victims of sexual torture at the
hands of both pimps and johns; nearly a third reported being
mutilated as a result of this torture. 74 Legal action was sought
in eight cases and only once was a pimp convicted.
The 1990 Florida Supreme Court Gender Bias Report
stated that “[prostitution is not a victimless crime....
Prostitute rape is rarely reported, investigated, prosecuted or
taken seriously... [ajlmost all young prostitutes have run away
from sexual and physical abuse in their homes. ..[and]. ..are
most often the victims of coercion.” 75 According to Philippa
Levine, who studied street prostitutes in Florida,

[t]he same dangers attached to prostitution wherever I

looked. In every [Florida] city and town I heard grim

stories of violence and coercion, of rape and murder, of
non-payment and forced sex, of hunger, pain, disease,
and desperation.
...[W]e should not forget the still unsolved murders
of young prostitutes in Pensacola, the crack-addicted
street-walkers of Tallahassee, the heroin-addicted HIV-
infected woman whose prostitution charges made head-
lines in Tampa (in 1988] and whose name was disclosed
by the media with little care for her health or dignity. 7 ^

99
 PATRIARCHY

...[T]he [Florida] police confirmed that they knew

of no [prostitutes] who had not had bad experiences
with customers. Intimate transactions with strangers
constitute danger in themselves, all the more so when
one considers that almost all street prostitution is con-
ducted in parked cars controlled by those customers.
Women spoke of jumping out of moving cars in prefer-
ence to facing weapons, of being driven to lonely areas
against their will, of non-paying clients whose violent
behaviour forced them to comply with unanticipated
desires. One interviewee described one horrific night
when three separate clients threatened her with a
knife. 77

Research has also indicated that street and juvenile pros-

titutes suffer bruises, broken bones, and very poor health as a
result of multiple beatings and rape. 78 According to Eleanor
Miller, “The beatings and sexual assaults female hustlers
received at the hands of their ‘men/ their ‘dates,’ their wives-
in-law, former ‘women’ of their ‘men,’ and other street people
as well as the police, were numerous and often brutal.” 79
Underage girls are often introduced into prostitution by fam-
ily intimates who either rape and then begin selling them, or

“only” rape them, often from the time they are seven or eight
years old; in so doing, they fatally break their spirits, and
drive them out of the house and into the arms of waiting
pimps and johns, often by the time they are twelve or thirteen
years old. 80 According to Susan Kay Hunter, Executive
Director of Council for Prostitution Alternatives,

Suicide common among victim/survivors of prostitu-

is

tion: 75% of women victimized by escort prostitution

have attempted suicide and prostituted women com-
prise 15% of all suicides reported by hospitals. 8 *
78% of 200 street prostitut-
According to a 1981 study,
ed women, the majority of whom were under 21 years of age.

100
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

reported being victimized by forced perversion an average of

16.6 times each woman; 70% were victimized by john rape
(when johns went beyond what was agreed on) an average of
31 times; 74% were victimized by non-payment an average
of five times; 65% were victims of violence an average of nine
times; 41% were victimized in some other way such as being
forced into sex for no pay with police, beaten by police, or
beaten by other prostitutes. 82 Additionally, 65% of these
young streetwalkers were physically abused and beaten by
customers an average of four times — because they “got off on
it, enjoyed it and thought it was part of sex,” or because the
customers hated prostitutes or hated women in general. 8 ^
Prostituted women often make headlines when their
headless and mutilated bodies are discovered. To date,

At least forty-eight women, mainly prostitutes, were

killed by the Green River Killer; up to thirty-one women
[were] murdered in Miami over a three year period,
most of them prostitutes; fourteen in Denver; twenty-
nine in Los Angeles; seven in Oakland. Forty-three in
San Diego; fourteen in Rochester; eight in Arlington,
Virginia; nine in New Bedford, Massachusetts, seven-
teen in Alaska, ten in Tampa. Three girls, ages 3, 4, and
6, [were] sold in Suffolk, New York. Three prostitutes
were reported dead in Spokane, Washington in 1990,
leading some to speculate that the “Green River” mur-
derer of 48 women and girls had once again become
“active.”
...[W]omen in prostitution are dying quickly. One
authority cited in the Canadian Report on Prostitution
and Pornography concluded that women and girls in
prostitution suffer a mortality rate 40 times the nation-
al average. 84

Wuornos’s public defenders, Trish Jenkins and Ed

Bonnett, chose not to use any of the pro bono expert wit-

101
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PATRIARCHY

nesses I’d gathered together who were ready to testify for the
defense in the first trial. In my view, such experts were need-
ed to educate the jury about the routine and horrendous vio-
lence against prostituted women, including Wuornos, the
long-term consequences of extreme trauma, 85 and a woman’s
right to self-defense. 86
If the people on Wuornos’s jury had been allowed to
hear from such experts, perhaps, just perhaps, they’d have
been better able to understand that, as Wuornos has said, she
lived “on dangerous ground at all times,” and that she killed
Richard Mallory in self-defense. 87 For example, in addition
to Mallory’s drunken sadism, Wuornos’s early childhood
and the fact that she was serially raped and abused all her
—
life predisposed her to both deny and to overreact to all sub-
sequent abuse. 88
We know that Wuornos never met her father, Leo
Pitman, a man who was imprisoned for molesting one child
and who possibly murdered another, a man who committed
suicide in prison when Wuornos was Wuornos’s
13; that
teen-age mother, Diane, abandoned her when Wuornos was a
toddler; and that her maternal grandparents took her in.
Wuornos was physically, psychologically, and probably sex-
ually abused, as well as seriously neglected at home. She was
badly scarred in a fire when she was nine; her life-long hearing
impairment was never corrected. We also know that
Wuornos was raped, presumably by a stranger, when she was
12, impregnated, and sent to a home for unwed mothers,
where she gave birth to a son she surrendered for adoption.
We know that Wuomos’s maternal grandmother was an
alcoholic who when Wuornos
died of liver failure in 1971,
was 14; that Wuornos finally ran away from home shortly
thereafter; and that in her first year as a runaway, she was
reportedly beaten and raped at least six times by six different
men.

102
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

We know that Wuornos’s grandfather killed himself in

1976, the year her brother Keith died of cancer, and that
Wuornos tried to commit suicide, at least once seriously, by
shooting herself in the stomach. Like many female victims of
serious childhood abuse, Wuornos became an alcoholic, a
prostitute, and a petty She supported herself as a pros-
thief.

titute as she drifted between Michigan and Florida from 1971

to 1991. Wuornos spent time in reform school in Michigan
and in jail in Florida.
assume that Wuornos’s attorneys decided not to
Let’s
use any pro bono experts. What else might they have done? If
a prostituted woman (or anyone) alleges rape and self-
defense, and there are no eye-witnesses other than the
accused, it is appropriate to review the murdered man’s past
history of violence toward both prostitutes and non-prosti-
tutes. 89
Shortly after the Mallory homicide, and a month before
Wuornos’s arrest Mallory’s former girlfriend, Jackie Davis,
,

gave a grim portrayal of Mallory to investigator Larry

Horzepa. Mallory, Ms. Davis recounted, had served ten years
in prison for burglary, suffered from severe mood swings,
drank too much, was violent to women, enjoyed the strip
bars, was “into” pornography, and had undergone therapy
for some kind of sexual dysfunction. 90 A search of Mallory’s
business revealed that he was erratic in business, heavily in
debt, in trouble with the IRS,and had received many hostile
91 (Ultimately,
letters from angry customers. Judge Uriel
Blount did not allow Jackie Davis to testify about Mallory’s
past violence toward women.)
However, the prosecution did not share Davis’s infor-
mation with the defense for more than a year. The prosecution
revealed this information on January 10th, 1992, three days
before Wuornos was to stand trial for Mallory’s murder. On
January 10th, Judge Blount denied a defense motion for the

103
 PATRIARCHY

admission of this testimony at trial and for a continuance to

allow the defense to find and question Davis anew. 92 In my
view, the absence of such corroborating evidence was
absolutely damaging to Wuornos’ self-defense claim.
Chastity Lee Marcus, a Tampa-based exotic dancer,
prostituted woman, and member of the Sons of Silence
Motorcycle gang, was interviewed by the police as possibly
the last person to have seen Mallory alive. 93 Marcus
described Mallory as a drinking and partying man who
thought nothing of paying $600 (or the equivalent in VCRs)
to have sex with two prostitutes at once: herself and her
friend “Danielle.” 94
Neither the defense nor the prosecution questioned
Marcus, Mallory’s ex-wife, or another ex-girlfriend, Nancy
Peterson, about Mallory’s violence toward them or toward
women. Neither Jackie Davis, Chastity Lee Marcus, nor
other
Nancy Peterson ever testified for the defense. 95
It is Wuornos’s public defender, Trish Jenkins,
true that
asked for a continuance at the last moment, in order to ques-
tion Davis. However, on October 15, 1991 —
two months
—
before the trial started Jenkins herself had deposed Officer
Lawrence Horzepa about Jackie Davis. 96 Perhaps Jenkins for-
got about this deposition. In a series of meetings with Jenkins,
held in April and May of 1991 —nearly seven months before
the first trial —feminists, myself included, had asked Jenkins
and her investigator, Don Sanchez, to look into Mallory’s
past. 97 They never did. A routine computer check would have
revealed that Richard Mallory had done many years in
Patuxent Prison, in Maryland, as a sex offender. In Mallory’s
criminal record he was described as an “impulsive and explo-
sive individual who will get into serious difficulty, most like-
ly of a sexual nature.... Because of his emotional disturbance
and his poor control of his sexual impulses, he could present
a potential danger to his environment in the future.” 98

104
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

I Marion County ex-police officer Brian

eventually hired
Jarvis, who had initially worked on the Wuornos case, to con-
duct a computer search and a series of interviews about
Mallory. NBC private investigator Jack Kassewitz also
learned of Mallory’s criminal record and on November 10,
1992, NBC-Dateline aired the above findings. NBC also
revealed that the defense had failed to call a number of
“friendly” witnesses."
It is not clear whether the prosecution had ever done a
thorough computer check on Mallory, or whether they active-
ly suppressed the results. Prosecutor John Tanner admitted,
on camera, that the prosecution’s preparation had been
“incomplete.” 100 He also admitted that “we may have to try
the case again.” 101

The Psycho-Pathology of Woman-Hatred

Wuornos may have had sex for money with a “guessti-
mated” quarter of a million men. Did the six johns she killed
demand something that so terrorized and outraged her that
she “snapped”? Or was it just the first of the six, Richard
Mallory, john number quarter-million-plus-one, who sent her
over the edge?
Was a quarter-million johns all Wuornos could take
before she cracked, or, dare I say it, experienced a momen-
tary flight into sanity? Was a quarter-million johns all

Wournos could take before she decided that “enough was

enough”?
Was it anything like the Dutch film, A Question of
Silence , 102 in
which five women, strangers to each other, are
shopping in the same store on the very day each woman,
finally, has had enough of being treated like a “woman” by
men? In a rather dreamlike sequence, three of the women
spontaneously stomp to death the 250,001st man who treats
them with contempt; and they do so without exchanging a

105
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PATRIARCHY

word. After the women are arrested, they maintain an uncan-

ny silence.
The prison psychiatrist, a “happily married” woman,
hopes to save them by finding them insane. To her conster-
nation, she can find nothing wrong with them. They are all
ordinary, rather “nice” women who are not insane. With
considerable anguish, the psychiatrist acknowledges that
there is a war going on against women and that during war,
atrocities are —
committed usually by the stronger, occupying
force; more rarely, by the occupied themselves. Perhaps, she
thinks, women are only insane when they put up with the
daily atrocities committed against them, or when they deny
that such atrocities are really happening. Improbably, the psy-
chiatrist joins the silent, imprisoned women and their silent
female supporters —none of whom expect justice or under-
standing.
A Question of Silence is a surrealistic feature film.
—
Wuornos’s story especially since her arrest on January
9, —
1991 is far more surrealistic.
Despite widespread media attention, the state of Florida
treated Wuornos the way it treats all its female prisoners
very badly. As a pre-trial detainee, Wuornos was entitled to
the presumption of innocence. She was, instead, punished
before her first trial. She lostmore than 40 pounds and
appeared to age ten years within ten months. Wuornos was
—
kept in solitary confinement intermittently, and sometimes
without her clothes (presumably as a way of preventing her
suicide). She was also verbally abused and threatened by
prison guards and other inmates, deprived of daylight and
exercise, allowed no safe, monitored medication for with-
drawal from her long-standing alcohol addiction, and denied
all contact Wuornos did place numerous collect phone
visits.

calls to Arlene Pralle, the Born-Again Christian “Good

Samaritan” who first began writing to her in February of

106
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

1991, and who legally adopted her in November of 1991.

Wuornos was kept in jail at an eight-hour-round-trip
distance from her public defender, Trish Jenkins. Therefore,
their visits were not as frequent as Wuornos might have
wished (or needed). 103 In addition, although Wuornos could
not hear or see very well, her frequent requests for a hearing
aid and were denied, as was permission to see a
for glasses
gynecologist for painful, heavy bleeding. Trish Jenkins final-
ly ordered a gynecological consultation in December of 1991,

but only after I called some Florida newspapers about

Wuornos’s (routine) mistreatment in jail. 104 I suggested that
Wuornos’s mistreatment was a sadistic and calculated
attempt to destroy her capacity to participate in her own trial
and, perhaps, to drive her to suicide. I questioned whether
Wuornos could receive a fair trial on these grounds alone. 105
Wuornos decided to confess only after repeated
entreaties by Tyria Moore, her lover, who was, early on, her-
self a suspect in the police investigation. Moore cooperated
with the police by taping a number of phone calls from
Wuornos in jail in which Moore begged Wuornos to protect
her. During her videotaped confession, Wuornos kept
explaining that she was only confessing in order to save
Moore.
In her videotaped confession, Wuornos was visibly dis-
traught, confused, and rambling. Her police interrogators cre-
ated a false sense of camaraderie with her by frequent
inquiries as to her comfort and by cozy small talk. Wuornos
seemed to have no clear understanding of where she was,
whether she was talking to police officers or lawyers, why
exactly she needed a lawyer, or what exactly a lawyer could
do for her. Despite the fact that she was going through alcohol
withdrawal, scared, and pressured by Moore into confessing,
Wuornos continued to insist that the killings were done in
self-defense. 106 The absence of skilled legal counsel —even
107
 PATRIARCHY

after Wuornos said she wanted counsel —was woefully appar-

ent. Late in the session, counsel finally arrived.
Some of the eventsWuornos attempted to describe to
the police in her confession on January 16, 1991 had hap-
pened more than a year before; any clear recollection she
might have been able to conjure up was distorted, manipu-
lated, or not properly “heard” by her interrogators. As a
result, Wournos omitted important details. Her later, more
detailed account at trial, describing the horrific abuse she suf-
fered at Mallory’s hands immediately preceding his homicide,
was viewed as “inconsistent,” “contradictory,” or as a series
of “lies.”

The Media Connection

Even before Wuornos was arrested, local, national, and
international media, including Hollywood and network TV
filmmakers, became part of the drama. The most (routinely)
brazen manipulation of Wuornos (and of her case) com-
menced. For example, right after her arrest, Wuornos’s first
public defender, Ray Cass, helped Wuornos negotiate a deal
—
with Hollywood filmmaker Jacqui Giroux the only person
who visited Wuornos immediately following her arrest. Three
Marion County sheriffs— Major Dan Henry, Sergeant Bruce
Munster, and Captain Steve Binegar together with —
Wuornos’s ex-lover, Tyria Moore, allegedly sold their version
of the story to CBS/Republic Pictures. 107 (Tyria Moore was
granted immunity in exchange for her testimony against
Wuornos.) 108 Arlene Pralle and Wuornos’s third attorney,
Steve Glazer, negotiated with and pocketed the relatively
small amounts of money paid by the media to interview
Wuornos on Death Row. In a phone conversation, Glazer
himself confirmed to me that Montel Williams, BBC, and
Geraldo Rivera each paid between $7,500 and $10,000 to
interview Wuornos on Death Row. 109 Glazer also persuaded

108
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Wuornos to withdraw her lawsuit against Giroux and to

renegotiate (or “upgrade”) the contract instead. 110
Although the media proved as much hero as villain,
Government by Geraldo, if not translated into a series of legal
motions, is at best useless and at worse harmful. For exam-
ple, Wuornos’s original judge, Gayle Graziano, replaced
—
Wuornos’s first public defender, Ray Cass who Wuornos
charged had negotiated with Hollywood producer Jacqui
Giroux for the movie rights to Wuornos’s story. At
Wuornos’s request, her new public defender was a woman:
Trish Jenkins of neighboring Marion County. This replace-
ment (of a man and by a female lawyer in another county)
was ultimately used by the prosecution to force Graziano,
reportedly a feminist, into recusing herself. 111
Another example: According to a number of people I
interviewed, Giroux allegedly began offering contracts for
$5,000 to the people in Wuornos’s childhood if they spoke
—
only to Giroux and presumably not to any other media per-
son. 112 For this and other reasons, some Michigan residents
who knew how badly Wuornos had been abused during
childhood allegedly did not cooperate with Wuornos’s public
defenders at all, or in a timely fashion. When Giroux alleged-
ly tried to intercede, it was too late. In any event, Trish

Jenkins did not call anyone to testify for the defense from
Michigan or elsewhere.

Double Standards for Serial Killers?

Do we have different standards for evil, violence, and
insanity: one for men, another for women? Or is Wuornos
simply too evil, for a woman? As such, is her punishment a
warning to other women that female violence, including self-
defense, will never be glamorized or forgiven, only pun-
ished —swiftly and terribly?
One reporter I spoke to about the Wuornos case kept

109
 PATRIARCHY

needling me “C’mon, Wuornos

for not being cynical enough:
is not entitled to the kind of lawyer that William Kennedy

Smith or Mike Tyson had. Get real!” But what does it mean
that Jeffrey Dahmer, accused of torturing, raping, killing, can-
nibalizing, and dismembering 15 young men, mainly of
— —
color none of whom attacked him was able to command a
private lawyer, some well-known national experts, his father
and stepmother, and continuous live TV in the courtroom?
In addition, skinheads apparently demonstrated on his behalf
in Chicago (“He got rid of the filth” they chanted), and a
growing number of women supporters filled the courtroom,
some of whom reportedly formed a Jeffrey Dahmer Fan
Club. 115
Or, let’s look at another Florida serial killer: Ted Bundy,
who 30 (and possibly 100) women. 114 Several
killed at least
lawyers, including Atlanta lawyer Millard Farmer and North
Florida lawyer Brian T. Hays, offered to defend Bundy pro
bono in Florida; Dr. Emil Spillman advised him on jury selec-
tion pro bono; at one point, no fewer than five public defend-
ers assisted Bundy, who insisted on representing himself. 115
Even more interesting is that the State of Florida offered
Bundy a life sentence without parole, a plea bargain Bundy
refused. Jenkins et al. tried to arrange a similar plea for
Wuornos but James Russell, the Dixie County Prosecutor,
thought Wuornos deserved to die and refused to agree to a
plea bargain.
Considering its complexity, Wuornos’s first trial was
exceptionally brief: took only 13 court days. The State had
it

estimated that the trial would last from three to six weeks.
Judge Blount, who was coaxed out of retirement to replace
Judge Graziano, granted all of the prosecution and denied
most of the defense motions. In deference to the State’s
motion, the jury was allowed to see excerpts from Wuornos’s
—
videotaped confession minus her repeated statements that

110
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

she killed in self-defense. Under Florida’s Williams rule, 116

the jury was also permitted to hear similar fact evidence from
the six other alleged murders. (Under the same Williams rule,
Judge Mary Lupo, presiding in William Kennedy Smith’s
1991 Palm Beach rape trial, did not allow the jury to hear any
of the other allegations of rape against Smith. 1 17 )
Judge Blount did not grant the defense a change of venue
despite the enormous local, pre-trial publicity, which includ-
ed Wuornos’s televised confession. (Ted Bundy did get a
change of venue, from Tallahassee to Miami, for similar rea-
sons). Judge Blount felt that he could seat an “impartial” jury
even if they’d seen or heard about the confession and he did —
so in a day and a half!
Given the gravity and the notoriety of the case, the 68
prospective jurors might have been polled individually; none
were. Further, only jurors who said they believed in the death
penalty were seated. (This is routinely done in Florida. 118 )

During the guilt/innocence phase of this bifurcated cap-

ital trial, Wuornos herself was the only witness for the
defense. As previously noted, early in the trial preparation,
feminists, myself included, contacted more than 50 experts,
approximately ten of whom agreed to testify for the defense,
pro bono or at minimal cost. These included a psychologist, a
psychiatrist, experts in prostitution and violence against pros-
titutes, experts in child abuse, battery, rape trauma syndrome,

lesbianism, lesbian battery, female alcoholism, and the psy-

chology of adoption. None of these experts and no other —
—
experts with similar information were ever called by the
defense. Three weeks before the trial, Trish Jenkins called one
of these experts for the first time, but never called her
back. 119 As previously noted, Wuornos was the only one who
took the stand on her own behalf, a dubious strategy consid-
ering her vulnerability to impeachment.
The prosecution’s legal theory was replete w ith
T
misogy-

111
 PATRIARCHY

John Tanner, a Born-Again

nist stereotypes: lead prosecutor
Christian, had been Ted Bundy’s deathrow “minister” and
had tried to have Bundy’s execution delayed. 120 In his open-
ing and closing arguments, Tanner portrayed Wuornos as a
“predatory prostitute” whose “appetite for lust and control
had taken a lethal turn,” who “had been exercising control
for years over men,” and who “killed for power, for full and
ultimate control.” 121
In the penalty phase of the trial, the jury heard from
defense psychologists Elizabeth McMahon and Harry Krop,
two experts more experienced in testifying for male killers
than for female killers on trial. According to McMahon: “Lee
[Wuornos] is such a classic textbook example of a borderline
personality .... she calls almost everybody a ‘fucker.’ I don’t
know that Wuornos canget a sentence out without that . . .

she is a child, developmental^ and emotionally.” 122 Krop

also diagnosed Wuornos as a “borderline personality” suf-
fering from “organic dysfunction in the brain cortex.” 12 ^
The defense presented no family members or friends in
mitigation. Many of Wuornos’s childhood relatives and
friends either were never asked to testify for the defense; were
asked but never called; or allegedly were, in their view, paid to
keep by Hollywood producer Jacqui Giroux.
silent
When men are accused of crimes, even terrible crimes,
their families invariably back them. The wives of the “Big
Dan” gang-rapists in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the
Kennedy women, Mike Tyson’s adoptive mother, the fami-
lies of the young men accused and exonerated in the gang-

rape of a John’s University student, and those of the

St.

gang-rapists of a young woman with an IQ of 64 in Glen

Ridge, New Jersey, all stood by their men.
Even Ted Bundy had enormous emotional and secretar-
ial/public-relations support from his mother, Louise, and
from his 32-year-old “fiancee” Carol Ann Boone, whom he

112
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

would marry and Both Louise and Carol

later impregnate.
Ann testified for Bundy. Scores of young women attended the
trial and openly flirted with Bundy in court. 124

Impoverished (and non-impoverished) women do not

usually have anyone willing to speak for them, nor do they
routinely have “supportive” families. They’re lucky if they
don’t die at the hands of a family intimate. Often, the families
of female outlaws are the ones who turn them in and testify
against them. Wuornos’s lesbian ex-lover, Tyria Moore, was
the star prosecution witness against her. Wuornos’s uncle, 12
years her senior, with whom she’d been raised as a sibling,
and whom she hadn’t seen for at least 20 years, testified for
the prosecution He claimed that Wuornos had never been
.

abused at home and therefore had no “reason” to kill any-

one. 125
Wuornos did have the support of Arlene Pralle, the
woman who contacted Wuornos after her arrest and who is
now her legal mother. Pralle accepted countless collect calls
from Wuornos in jail, and facilitated countless telephone
interviews between Wuornos and the media by inviting the
journalists most attentive to Pralle to her home, and then
,

putting them on the phone with Wuornos.

Although Pralle “meant well,” her own need to talk,
mainly about herself, and about her love for both Jesus and
Wuornos, posed grave dangers to the defense. For example,
the telephone calls could be taped or the prosecution could
read “all about newspapers and magazines. At first,
it” in

Pralle insisted that Wuornos was a “good” person and that

she couldn’t have killed in cold blood; Pralle also said she
expected Jesus to perform a miracle. Once Wuornos was sen-
tenced to death, Pralle publicly supported Wuornos’s desire
to die and to “go home to Jesus.”
Pralle and Wuornos engaged in a folie a deux a “you
,

and me, babe, against the world,” which both women must

113
 PATRIARCHY

have experienced as supportive, even thrilling, given the

intense media attention being focused on them. (Like
Wuornos, Pralle was also abandoned by her biological moth-
er and had seriously attempted suicide.) However, the fact
that a “traditional” woman stood up for Wuornos is as mov-
ing as it is bizarre.
Wuornos also had the (questionable) support of Steven
Glazer, Pralle’s own lawyer, who helped Wuornos achieve
four more death sentences, and who, as previously noted,
charged the media for Death Row interviews with his client,
disbursing the money to Wuornos, and
Pralle, to himself. 126
Jury deliberation in the Wuornos case was surprisingly
brief: on January 30, 1992, her jury of five men and seven
women needed only one hour and 31 minutes to find her
guilty, and only one hour and 48 minutes to recommend the
death penalty. (In Ted Bundy’s case, the jury took seven hours
to find him guilty and seven and a half hours to sentence him
to death.) On January 31, 1992, Judge Blount, who could
have overridden the jury’s recommendation, ordered that
Wuornos die in the electric chair for the murder of 51 -year-old
ex-convict Richard Mallory. She was immediately taken to
Death Row at the Broward County Correctional Facility for
Women.
If the state of Florida could, it would electrocute
Wuornos once for each man she’s accused of killing. (She has
so far been sentenced to death five times.) But what are
Wuornos’s true crimes?
Wuornos stands accused of being a man-hating lesbian,
a description that could not endear her to the sheriffs, war-
dens, lawyers, judges, or jurors in an area of Florida where
the local abortion clinic was burned right down to the ground
not once, but twice in the years between 1989 and 1991;
where crosses have been burned with alarming regularity on
the lawns of African-American families; and where residents

114
 —
A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

were responsible for the third largest individual, out-of-state

contribution to David Dukes’s most recent gubernatorial
campaign. Someone like Wuornos has little support in the
state known as the “Buckle of the Death Sentence Belt.”
Is Wuornos guilty of being a prostitute? Or is she guilty
of not having killed herself —the way
“good” sexual abuse
all

victims and prostituted women are supposed to do? Or

shades of “Thelma and Louise” and the backlash against
clemency for battered women who kill in self-defense is —
Wuornos guilty of daring to defend herself in a violent strug-
gle with a man and, by example, encouraging other prosti-
tutes (and non-prostitutes) to do likewise?

A Woman’s Right To Self-Defense

As previously noted, in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, both prostituted and non-prostituted women, and
slaves, sometimes injured and killed violent male non-inti-
mates in self-defense. 127 From 1970 to 1992, both prostitut-
ed and non-prostituted women have charged rape and battery
or attempted rape and battery and claimed they killed in self-
defense. 128 Only a handful have been believed.
In the early 1970s, grass-roots feminists, civil rights
activists, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the
Southern Poverty Law Center focused on three cases in which
women of color had killed violent male non-intimates in self-
defense. I am referring to the cases of Yvonne Wanrow, 129
Joan Little, 130
and Inez Garcia. 131
Joan Little was a black woman who killed a white jail
guard who attempted to rape her in the jail cell in which she
was incarcerated for a burglary conviction. She was repre-
sented by Morris Dees and acquitted in 1975. Inez Garcia
was raped, and she shot the man who held her down later
that same day. She was convicted, but her conviction was
overturned on appeal.

115
 PATRIARCHY

At this time, I will discuss only the decision of State v.

Wanrow,^! n which j Supreme Court of Washington
the
affirmed the reversal of the conviction of Yvonne Wanrow
for second-degree murder and first-degree assault with a
deadly weapon. 133
W
The facts of anrow were as follows: On the afternoon
of August 11, 1972, Yvonne Wanrow, a Colville Indian
woman who was a single mother and an artist, left her two
children at the home of her friend, Ms. Hooper. After play-
ing in the neighborhood, Ms. Wanrow’s son returned to Ms.
Hooper’s home and told her that a man had tried to pull him
off his bicycle and drag him into a house. A few months prior
to this incident, Ms. Hooper’s seven-year-old daughter had
suffered from a venereal disease, contracted after being
molested by a man whose identity she would not reveal to her
mother. A few minutes after Ms. Wanrow’s son told his story
to Ms. Hooper, the decedent, William Wesler, appeared at
Ms. Hooper’s house and stated through the door, “I didn’t
touch the kid, I didn’t touch the kid.” 134 At that moment,
Ms. Hooper’s daughter, seeing Wesler at the door, identified
Wesler as the man who had molested her. Ms. Hooper’s land-
lord then informed her that Wesler, a six-foot-two-inch white
man who had been committed to an institution for the men-
tally ill, had molested another child who had previously lived
in the same house. 135 Ms. Hooper immediately summoned
the police, who arrived shortly thereafter and advised Ms.
Hooper to wait until Monday to get a warrant for Wesler’s
arrest.
That evening, Ms. Hooper called Ms. Wanrow, related
the incident, and asked her to spend the night. Ms. Wanrow
arrived sometime after 6 p.m. with a pistol in her handbag.
Still afraid to stay alone, Ms. Hooper and Ms. Wanrow called

Ms. Wanrow’s sister and brother-in-law, Angie and Chuck

Mitchell, who agreed to spend the night. At approximately 5

116
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

a.m., Chuck Mitchell, without informing the women, went to

Wesler’s home with a baseball bat and accused Wesler of
molesting children. Wesler then suggested they all discuss the
incident,and together with a third man, Wesler and Mitchell
returned to Ms. Hooper’s home to straighten out the prob-
lem. Wesler, however, was the only man to enter the house.
Wesler, then visibly intoxicated, entered Ms. Hooper’s
home and refused to leave when asked to do so. Confusion
—
and shouting followed, and a young child one of eight then
staying at the house —awoke crying. Testimony indicated that
Wesler approached the child, stating, “My what a cute little

boy,” and Ms. Hooper began screaming for Wesler to get

out 136
. Wanrow, five-foot-four-inch with a broken leg and
using a crutch, went to the door to ask Mitchell for help.
When Ms. Wanrow turned around, Wesler was standing
directly behind her. Startled by her situation, Ms. Wanrow
testified as to having shot Wesler in what amounted to a
reflex action.
At Ms. Wanrow argued that she had acted in self-
trial,

defense. The jury was instructed that in evaluating the gravi-

ty of the danger to Ms. Wanrow, the jury was to consider
only those acts and circumstances occurring “at or immedi-
ately before the killing ....” 137 Ms. Wanrow was convicted of
second-degree murder and first-degree assault with a deadly
weapon .
138

Ms. Wanrow’s conviction,

In affirming the reversal of
the Supreme Court of Washington held that the trial court
had erred in limiting the jury instruction on self-defense 139 .

Instead, the jury should have been instructed to evaluate the

justification of self-defense “in light of all the facts and cir-

cumstances known to [Ms. Wanrow], including those known

substantially before the killing .” 140 The court stated that the
jury should have been instructed to consider Ms. Wanrow’s
knowledge of Wesler’s reputation for aggressive behavior,

117
 PATRIARCHY

despite the fact that Wesler’s reputation was based on events

which had occurred over a period of years and that Ms.
Wanrow had received this information several hours before
the incident. This information would aid in the “critical deter-
mination of the ‘degree of force which... a reasonable person
in the same situation... seeing what (s)he sees and knowing
what (s)he knows, then would believe to be necessary ’.” 141
In addition, the court held that Ms. Wanrow’s actions
were to be judged against her own “subjective impressions [of
danger] and not those which a detached jury might determine
to be objectively reasonable .” 142 In recognizing the special
circumstances which often accompany a woman’s assertion
of self-defense, the court acknowledged that “women suffer
from a conspicuous lack of access to training in and the
means of developing those skills necessary to effectively repel
a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly
weapons .” 142 With respect to the delivery of jury instruc-
tions, the court cautioned that the persistent use of the mas-
culine gender leaves the jury with the impression the objective
standard to be applied is that applicable to an altercation
—
between two men. The impression created that a five-foot
four-inch woman with a cast on her leg and using a crutch
must, under the law, somehow repel an assault by a six-foot
two-inch intoxicated man without employing weapons in her
defense, unless the jury finds her determination of the degree
of danger to be objectively reasonable — constitutes a separate
and distinct misstatement of the law and, in the context of
this case, violates the respondent’s right to equal protection
of the law. [Ms. Wanrow] was entitled to have the jury con-
sider her actions in the light of her own perceptions of the sit-
uation, including those perceptions which were the product
of our nation’s ‘long and unfortunate history of sex discrimi-
nation.’ Until such time as the effects of that history are erad-
icated, care must be taken to assure that our self-defense

118
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

instructions afford women the right to have their conduct

judged in light of the individual physical handicaps which are
the product of sex discrimination. To fail to do so is todeny
the right of the individual woman involved to trial by the
same rules which are applicable male defendants. 144
to
Since the Wanrow decision, a number of articles on fem-
inist jurisprudence have appeared, attempting to further clar-
ify the circumstances under which a reasonable woman
can
argue self-defense, especially after she has been sexually and
physically assaulted, or has killed to avoid being assaulted or
killed. 145 In
1978, Elizabeth Schneider, who was Wanrow’s
lawyer in the successful appeal to the Washington Supreme
Court, and^co-author Susan Jordan, commented on the
Wanrow case, noting that the [circumstances under which
women are forced to defend themselves [are] entirely different

from those which cause men to commit homicides, [and] the

woman’s state of mind is different as well. Presenting the indi-
vidual woman’s perspective in the trial means educating the
judge and jury about the incidence and severity of the prob-
lems of rape, wife-assault, and child abuse and molestation....
It also means educating them about the lack of judicial and

social alternatives available to women in these situations and

combating specific myths, for example, that a woman who
kills a man is insane or that women enjoy rape.
State v. Wanrow is an example of successful implemen-
tation of this strategy.
In a landmark decision, [the Wanrow court]... acknowl-
edged the threat to equal protection inherent in the failure to
include a woman’s perspective in the law of self-defense.... 146
According to Schneider and Jordan, despite the fact that
women are targets for male violence, and tend to be shorter
and to weigh less than men, women are not socialized to
defend themselves, generally have no experience of combat,
tackle sports, or street fighting, and are actually dissuaded

119
 PATRIARCHY

from using violence against men as a cultural imperative. 147

Thus, at this point in history, when women perceive them-
selves to be in mortal danger, perhaps they should be/are enti-
tled to useweapons as the only way to exert comparable force
against a male assailant.
In 1982, Catharine Mackinnon also commented on
Wanrow. She wrote:
Wanrow is an exceptional woman because she fought
back. She, therefore, receives the benefit of the history
of all women who have not, presumably because they
were disabled from doing so. It seems that you have to
behave more like a man to get the berefi of being con-
sidered as a woman.... Wanrow , in this light, is not
about fighting back, although that is what its result sup-
ports, It is more as if the state will help keep women
from being walked on so long as we struggle while
down, but it may not support us if we stand up. 14 **

Mackinnon does not think the Washington State

Supreme Court went far enough in establishing a “subjective”
standard for a reasonable woman’s right to self-defense.
Mackinnon concludes that
The reasonable woman’s subjectivity is equivalent to
women’s point of view under conditions of sex discrimi-
nation. The Wanrow court thus uses a subjective test to
place the jury in the defendant’s immediate surroundings
but goes well beyond traditional notions of subjectivity
(without becoming objective) in attributing to her a con-
sciousness for acting that first sets her in the concrete his-
torical context of gender and then attributes the meaning
of that context to her mentality and physicality 149 .

Since the Wanrow decision, many women have alleged

rape self-defense; few have been believed (e.g., Shirley Mae
Thomas v. State , 578 South Western Reporter, 2nd Series

120
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

1975 (Texas); Commonwealth v. Lamrini 467 N.E. 2nd 95

1984 Mass 1984; Commonwealth v Carbone 574 Atlantic
.
,

Reporter, 2nd Series Pa. 1990). An increasing number of arti-

cles on feminist jurisprudence have also tried to clarify, fur-
ther, the circumstances under which a reasonable woman can
argue rape/battery self-defense. 150
Burning questions remain. They include: Does a woman
have the right to kill to prevent herself from being raped? In
the past, courts have refused to impose the death penalty on
rape 151 or to hold that forced sex constitutes “great bodily
injury” to trigger penalty enhancement 152 —despite the fact
that the consequences of rape are often life-long and extreme-
ly debilitating. If a woman only has the right to use whatever

force, short of homicide necessary to prevent rape, how can

,

she know exactly how much or how little force to employ to

make her escape? How does a woman know that a rapist will
stop at rape ? Does a womanhave the same right to “heat-of-
passion” and rage to protect her bodily integrity and “honor”
that men do? Does a man’s Fourteenth Amendment right to
use deadly force to prevent burglary or other invasions of his
home and castle cover a woman’s right to prevent any
unwanted invasion of her body? Is a woman’s “right to equal-
ity” a right to have inequality taken into account?
From about 1967 on, in addition to fighting for wom-
en’s right to abortion and to equal pay for equal work, grass-
roots feminists focused on the sexual objectification of
women, and on issues of sexual violence toward women, such
as stranger-rape and sexual harassment on the job and on the
street. Only after a decade were feminist activists able to
expand their focus to include marital rape, date rape, domes-
tic battery, and incest. During the 1980s, it became clear (to

feminists working in the area) that most prostituted women

were also incest victims, that many battered wives were treat-
ed as if they were their husbands’ or boyfriends’ prostitutes,

121
 PATRIARCHY

that both wife-batterers and serial killers of women were

addicted to pornography, and that all women, whether they
were prostitutes (the so-called “bad girls”) or non-prostitutes
(the so-called “good girls”), who dared to kill in self-defense
were treated as if they were prostitutes, i.e., demon terrorists
from hell who deserved no mercy.
As yet, no radical feminist equivalent to the Center fo*
Constitutional Rights or the Southern Poverty Law Center
exists, nor does even one overarching graduate/medical/law
school program committed to centralizing, summarizing, and
updating the relevant research and training of expert wit-
nesses in this area. The media often decides which cases the
nation will follow, not feminists, who are increasingly without
resources, exhausted, and under seige.
The Battered Woman’s Syndrome Defense was devel-
oped by feminists to help explain to juries how, for example,
a woman could stay with a batterer, refuse to report him, and
then one day kill —
him when he is sleeping and claim “self-
defense.” However, this approach is highly controversial
among feminists 153 Critics say:
. If a woman defends herself
in order to save her life, why view (or explain) female self-
defense as a form of “diminished capacity,” as “temporary
insanity,” or as “post-traumatic stress syndrome”? Either the
woman’s life was being threatened —or not; either, as a rea-
sonable women, she believed her life to be in danger and she
acted in self-defense —or she didn’t. Why view a woman’s
exercise of a legal right as a psychiatric disability ? 154 Perhaps
the (battered) woman who finally kills to escape being tor-
tured has experienced a sudden “flight into mental health,”
and should not be viewed as psychologically “disabled” for
having stood up for herself.
Although I will not go into this here, it is my under-
standing that the Battered Woman’s Syndrome Defense does
not necessarily suggest a psychiatric disability —although the
122
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Defense is often perceived as such. Theorists, such as

Schneider, Jordan, Walker, and others, have suggested that
this defense meant to educate the jury about how wide-
is

spread anti-woman domestic and sexual violence is and about

what the normal human (female) response to prolonged vio-
lence is.
155

Given what we now know about how often prostituted

women are raped, gang-raped, beaten, robbed, tortured, and
killed,Wuornos’s claim that she killed six out of hundreds or
thousands of violent johns, in self-defense, is plausible.
Wuornos’s claim certainly merited far more thought and con-
sideration than the deliberate neglect it received from those
who heard and tried her case.

Latest Developments
As disappointed as I was in Jenkins’s defense of
Wuornos, Jenkins and co-counsel Billy Nolas and William
Miller look radiantly efficient compared to her next and cur-
rent lawyer, Steven Glazer of Gainesville. Glazer, a civil
lawyer, was recommended by Trish Jenkins not as
originally
a defense attorney, but to handle Wuornos’s adoption by
Pralle. 156
phoned Glazer for the first time on March 1, 1992. He
I

told me he was not interested in having me or any other pro

bono expert testify for the defense in upcoming trials two
through six, nor was he interested in handling Wuornos’s
appeal of the Mallory conviction or in a future campaign for
clemency. Glazer said he was only interested in how much
money I was willing to pay for the right to interview Wuornos
on Death Row, that his client had empowered him to do this
and no more. Glazer told me that Dolores Kennedy, together
with Robert Nolin, who have since published On A Killing
Day (and who ultimately never got to interview Wuornos),
had offered $10,000 cash up front with an additional per-

123
 PATRIARCHY

centage of the paperback monies. 157

Glazer further told me that because he saw a “career”
for himself in attracting criminals with stories to sell, his asso-
ciation with Wuornos would “good advertise-
definitely be a
ment.” He added that he needed the money the media was
willing to pay to interview Wuornos in order to fund his fight
against the state of Florida if and when, despite the recent
Supreme Court ruling overturning New York’s Son-of-Sam
law, 158 Florida officials tried to interfere with Wuornos’s
ability to profit from her crimes and to assist her in her crim-
inal cases as best he could. Also, Glazer pointed out, money
was needed to pay for Arlene Pralle’s visits to Death Row and
to save Pralle’s heavily mortgaged horse-farm. 159
When I “pimp,” he hung up on me and
called Glazer a
instructed Wuornos to cease communicating with me which —
she did from mid-March to mid-June, 1992 and again from
mid-August to October, 1992. 160
In March of 1992, shortly after our conversation, Glazer
had Wuornos plead “no contest” in Marion County in three
additional trials. In open court, Glazer likened himself to the
“Dr. Jack Kevorkian of the legal world,” and asked Judge
Thomas Sawaya to “assist him in helping his client to com-
mit suicide.” 161 (What next? A lawyer who offers to pull the
switch? A lawyer who scalps tickets for front-row seats in the
execution chamber?) Wuornos was sentenced to death three
more times.
Wuornos is confined to a cage on Death Row
by a legal
order; I’m confined at home, often in bed, by Chronic Fatigue
Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. I have imaginary conversa-
tions with her almost every day.
Lee: you hit the ground running before either Thelma or
Louise came to town. You're the real star of that movie; it's
about you , about what you've done, about what to do, when
men , truckers for example , or police officers in unmarked

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 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

cars:you know ordinary married men the mainstay of your

, ,

profession, start making those sounds and faces at women,

any women, it’s nothing personal, some women even take it as
a compliment, and with one hand on the wheel, the other
somewhere out of sight, say: “ Wanna sit on my face, suck my
cock, let me fuck you in the ass, ” as they follow the teen-age
hitchhiker, or the mother of teen-agers, it makes no differ-
ence: whether the hitch-hiker's own car has broken down, or
whether she’s just been dumped on the highway by her
boyfriend for refusing to put out, or whether she’s just been
raped by the previous man-in-a-moving-vehicle, or whether
she’s just out riding to clear her mind. There’s no law against
trying, is there?
You probably don’t know what I’m talking about; you
were behind bars when Thelma and Louise were on the lam.
Talk about women who run with the wolves! You’ve
navigated North America’s vast, frozen tundra, with a crafti-
ness, a cunning, a scavenging genius, without which neither
wild life nor prostitutes could survive: not for a day, not for an
hour.
Often, you’ve been shown “grinning like a damn foo 1 ” as

if you’re at the Mad Hatter’s tea party with a lampshade on

your head. You’re the Queen, yelling “off with his head.’'
And you’re smiling, as they say, “ inappropriately .” You
know: that smile women smile when we’re embarrassed by
insults, and scared: as if our compliance, our willingness to
act as if we’re not in danger, will keep us safe. You’ve had lots
of practice in this area.
I Wuornos in July of 1992.
visited
“Far out, man” she said. “You’re from the Women’s Lib
aren’t you? Tell the women out there that I’m innocent. Tell
them that men hate our guts. I was raped and I defended
myself. was self-defense. I could not stop hustling just
It

because some asshole was going around Florida raping and

125
 PATRIARCHY

killingwomen. I still had to hustle.”

Her voice was Joplin-husky and surprisingly sweet, even
girlish. (Did I expect her to sound like a man?) Well, honey,
that’s a real heftyswagger she wore on TV, and the way she
tossed her hair around: most women do it out of nervousness;
she seemed to do it out of defiance, to intimidate: the way
male lions toss their manes.
She said that jail didn’t “bother” her, that she could
“take it,” that the daily verbal abuse was nothing: “Hey,
whore, show us some tits ’n’ puss”; “Here’s a little present
just from us guys: our come, all nice and wet in this envelope,
with your name on it”; “We’ll put you in solitary forever if
you do any weird lesbian shit in here: bark at the moon, bitch,
if you don’t like it”; “I’m going to enjoy watching you fry,

real nice and slowly, once for each guy you killed.”
The heartlessness of these words would kill me. My life
has rendered me unfit to survive her jail cell; her life has
groomed her do so.
to
“I need you guys real bad,” she answered. “The public
defender has 47 other capital cases and no time for me. I’ll
pay you back if you get me a lawyer who has time for me. I’ll
sell my life story for 30 million dollars and I’ll set up a foun-

dation for abused women. Hey, man: I’m going through living
hell for defending myself.”
And then, with wonderment, she said: “I can’t believe
there are women out there rooting for me!”
Well, not so fast. Yes, many women, actually a surprising
number, have said: “It’s about time women started shooting
back,” and “Good for her. Those men must have done some-
thing to provoke her: they’re johns, they deserved it.” Some
feminists (and anti-death penalty advocates) have urged me
to do everything I can for her. But most women, including
feminists and lesbians, see her as too unsympathetic a victim
to bother with: unstable, uncooperative, a loser, a real pain-in-

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 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

the-ass, and just plain nuts.

Know: that I don’t romanticize her. How could I? She’s
as conventional as most (abused) women are. For example:
she’s quite the “Golly gee whizz” kind of “good ol* gal,”
when she talks about how some of her best friends are johns,
and about how she believes in Jesus, always did, and that
He’s coming too. She “enjoyed” the sex-for-money with
men, she’s proud she was able to “please” her dates/cus-
tomers/johns. She’s an outlaw by default, not by choice.
The women who kill violent men are all “good girls”
who’ve bought into the very system that I dream of destroying.
When they realize they’ve been tricked (talk about “tricks”!),
had, taken, left for dead, and that no one will help them,
they’re invisible anyway, maybe that’s when they kill the man
who’s been breaking their bones for years; the one hundredth
john who’s taking his knife out and threatening to cut their
face/breasts/anus/vagina; the man who’s just walked out with
custody of their kids, the deed to their home, and a new wife
on his arm.
As THE (so-called) FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER,
she’s made headlines, not for what has been done to her, but
for what she’s done. Her bullets shattered the silence about
violence against prostituted women, about women fighting
back: and about what happens to them when they do.
No small feat.

Idoubt she was avenging the billions, no trillions, of

other women who were killed at birth, or abandoned,
starved, beaten, genitally mutilated, sold into marriage,
pornography, or prostitution, raped, impregnated, sterilized,

impoverished, all against their will, or killed: simply because

they were women ,
or prostituted women, or lesbians.
But even thought she’d led the equivalent of a slave-
if I

revolt, planned a raid on Harper’s Ferry, left the Massa’s

House in flames behind her, this is not something most

127
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PATRIARCHY

women can do. Our fear of certain, further, punishment is too

great.
For example, unlike her, I didn’t buy a gun. Instead, I

clipped and filed all the grisly notices of our dead: I mean to
have them engraved on a vast memorial tombstone or
stitched into a quilt, like the parents of murdered children do.
I’m angry, don’t think I’m not, but I just can’t go out and kill
someone. I’m a “girl.” We turn our terror and our anger
against ourselves, not against others.
So here’s what’s troubling me. How could she, a
“nobody,” have summoned up enough grit and righteous
rage to save her own life? (Is that it, she had nothing to lose,
she knew no one would save her but herself, so she did that
and got arrested for saving her own life?)
Wuornos is led into the room by two guards. She is
unsteady on her feet, a bit ungainly, not that tall.
remember how she looked when she was first arrested.
I

Spirited, defiant, drunk, the swagger and the smirk: all gone,
all gaunt, not an ounce of flesh on her bones. She is more

ghost than human.

Wuornos’s blond hair is pale, and pulled back into a
thin pony tail. Her face is taut, her features bony, inexpres-
sive: no energy to waste on “expressiveness.” Survival in
prison demands that she contract everything: movements,
even dreams, in order to conserve energy, call as little attention

to herself as possible.
She has great dignity. She has come from some truly far-
away place to meet me, she is jerky in her motions, but game-
ly, she’s trying to smile. As if it’s a social occasion. We hug
hello: briefly, carefully.
—
I’m always amazed although I shouldn’t be when —
those with no formal education, no money, no health, no
friends in high places, and nothing to hope for, absolutely rise
to the occasion of their 15 minutes of fame: and with extra-

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 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

ordinary eloquence and grace. Mary Beth Whitehead, in the

Baby M case, for example, was almost regal in how she han-
dled both the media and our little demonstrations outside the
courthouse. Whitehead was well-spoken and, of course, loved
the opportunity to “shine.” No crime, by the way.
Wuornos has been in jail for two years now, a lot of the
time in isolation. She says she was “railroaded” because she’s
a prostitute and “expendable,” and they’d just “bend, twist,
distort” any new evidence, so she’d rather die and “go home
to Jesus” than keep living (if that’s the word for what you do
on Death Row). “It’s all over” she says. Wuornos doesn’t
want to go to Chatahoochie (“I’m not crazy”), and she doesn’t
want to stayon Death Row, so she’s decided to die.
You don’t have to be crazy to come to this decision.
Wuornos is emphatic. Despite what she’s written: that
she wants me to and a private investigator,
find her a lawyer,
and to reassemble the team of pro bono experts I’d gathered
for her first trial, she’s changed her mind again. She grows
more animated, angry, and, trigger-finger pointed, orders me
to “Forget it. All I want you to do is help me expose the cor-
ruption, the crooked cops, the media deals, the capital gains
off a capital crime. Tell the world what’s going on. That’s all.
I’m not concerned about any more trials.”
In a not-yet-released 1993 BBC documentary Aileen
Carol Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer Wuornos ,

describes Arlene Pralle, the woman who adopted her before

the first trial and Steve Glazer, the lawyer who performed the
adoption and who helped Wuornos plead “no contest” or
“guilty” in trials two, three, four and five, as “the money-
—
hungry people. That’s their main purpose money and to see
me die. Steve and Arlene are doing a lot of lying in the media.
Their motive was just to make money. I’ll [expose them) later,
just before I go [die].... They convinced and connived me not
to contest. Arlene started it and Steve just fell in. Arlene told

129
 PATRIARCHY

me ‘I just can’t take it, all these trials, you’re killing your new
adoptive mother.... [In a death penalty state]why not go for
it and be home with Jesus?’ They’re not on my side, they’re
not very lawyerly or motherly, but it’s too late.”
On
camera, Glazer is shown taking money from BBC
film director Nick Broomfield for the right to interview
Wuornos, Arlene, and himself; Broomfield says that Glazer is
talking about “selling film rights to Wuornos’s execution to
the highest bidder.”
How can someone like Wuornos keep fighting back?
She held on, as best she could, did her best, actually acquitted
herself nobly in the first trial, and it didn’t matter, nothing
mattered, the “scumbags of America,” as she called the jury,
convicted her anyway.
I anyone ever helped her when she was a child,
ask her if

sleeping in abandoned cars and living on the street, or later

on. She says: “I raised myself. I did a pretty good job. I taught
myself my own handwriting, and I studied theology, psychol-
ogy, books on self-enhancement. I taught myself how to
draw. I have been through battles out there raising myself.
I’m like a Marine, you can’t hurt me. If you hurt me, I can
wipe it out of my mind and keep on truckin’. I took every day
on a day-by-day basis. I never let things dwell inside me to
damage my pride because I knew what that felt like when I

was young...”
A child is being beaten... how to intervene? What to do
when no one ever intervened and now it’s much too late, the
damage is done, the child is a woman, and the woman only
knows that she must sell (her body, and now her life-story,
her death), in order to live and to be of value. By now, she
hates having to sell, hates not being able to sell, hates the sell-

er, hates the buyer; she’s weary, cynical, heartbroken, used

up, and is, by now, simply not capable (if she ever was) of
doing something: anything, that will turn out right for her.

130
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Wuornos has been waiting, wanting, trying to die for a

long time. Now, she means to finish what the men, and We,
r
he People, have started. Her destruction.
October and early November, 1992, Glazer
In late
called and asked me to find a competent lawyer for Wuornos.
He admitted that although he “meant well” and would “do
anything to help Lee,” he might not have done “right” by his
client, and that he had a heart condition that required
surgery.
Christopher Quarles, of the Marion County Public
Defender’s Office, filed the state-level appeal of Wuornos’s
conviction in October, 1992. (This appeal was re-filed in
first

January of 1993.) Steven Glazer, however, never filed notice

that he or his client wished to appeal the second, third, and
fourth death sentences. Chief Assistant State Attorney Ric
Ridgway, who prosecuted Wuornos, said that Glazer’s fail-
ure to file the appeals could lead Wuornos to claim Glazer
was “ineffective.”
Ridgway said that he doesn’t know whether Wuornos
wants to appeal, but that her counsel inadvertently has pre-
vented her from exercising that right.
“Glazer, evidently, was operating under the impression
would appoint the public defender’s
that this court office to
handle the appeal,” Ridgway wrote in his motion to force
Glazer to appeal.
Glazer said he got a phone
from Tallahassee about a
call

month ago asking for Wuornos’s paperwork.

“[Lee] doesn’t want to appeal, but she doesn’t have a
choice,” Glazer said. “I told the judge my client has ordered
me not to appeal, that’s why the judge appointed the public
defender because it have a natural conflict.” 162
seems like I

In November of 1992, just after asking for my help in

obtaining another lawyer, Glazer pled Wuornos “guilty” in
the fifth case in Dixie County —and renegotiated (or “upgrad-

131
 PATRIARCHY

ed”) her contract with Hollywood producer Giroux. 16 ^

From the start, people consistently asked me if Wuornos
was “crazy.” (Never if she was “guilty”; most were convinced
she was.) probably wouldn’t be hard to diagnose Wuornos
It

as a “borderline” or “multiple” or “addictive” personality.

But, according to most recent studies, such diagnoses are sim-
ply ways of stigmatizing Wuornos for the consequences of
being an incest, child abuse, and serial rape victim 164 .

Everyone in Wuornos’s life — her family of origin, her

childhood neighbors, her teachers, the home for unwed moth-
ers, the Michigan juvenile and Florida adult correctional facil-
ities, her lesbian lover, and the entire cast of “serial killer”
characters: the prosecution, the defense, the private lawyers,
the judges, the juries, the investigating police officers,
Hollywood and the media, even We, the People —conspired,
through acts of commission, omission, indifference, and neg-
ligence, to deprive Wuornos of the most minimal justice.

NOTES
1. See Jean Dubail, “Police Seek Clues Along Trail of 8
Deaths,” Orlando Sentinel ,
Dec. 9,1990, at Bl; Tom
Lyons, “Two Sets of North Florida Killings Differ
Markedly,” Gainesville Sun Dec. , 7, 1990, at 1A; Marion
“Police FearSomeone’s Stalking, Killing Middle-Aged
Men,” Orlando Sentinel Dec. 1, 1990, at D9; Rick
,

Tonyan, “Voluisa Police Hunt for 2 Linked to Killings,”

Orlando Sentinel Dec. 19, 1990, at D3.
,

2. See Elizabeth Rapaport, “Some Questions About Gender

and the Death Penalty,” 20 Golden Gate U. L. Rev. 501
(1990); Victor Steib, “Death Penalty for Female
Offenders,” 58 Cinn. L. Rev. 845 (1990); Victor L. Streib

132
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

and Lynn Sametz, “Executing Female Juveniles,” 22 Conn.

L. Rev. 3 (1989); Victor L. Streib, “American Executions of
Female Offenders: A Preliminary Inventory of Names,
Dates, and Other Information” (prepared for distribution
to research colleagues) (1988) (on file with author); Victor
L. Streib, Punishment for Female Offenders:
“Capital
Present Female Death Row Inmates and Death Sentences
and Executions of Female Offenders” (May 1, 1991) (on
file with author).

3. See Freda Adler, Sisters In Crime : The Rise of the New

Female Criminal (1975); Lowell Cauffiel, Forever and Five
Days (1992); Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (1981); Beverly
Lowry, Crossed Over (1992); Rita J. Simon and Jean
LandiS, The Crimes Women Commit (1991); Charlene
Snow, Women in Prison (1981); William Wilbanks, Female
Homicide Offenders in the U.S. ); Coramae R. Mann,
(

“Women Who Kill Someone They Don’t Really Know,”

Paper presented at American Sociological Association
Meeting (1987); Coramae R. Mann, “Black Women Who
Kill,” in Violence in the Black Family
157-86 (Robert L.
,

Hampton ed., 1987); William Wilbanks, “Murdered

Women and Women Who Murder: A Critique of the
Literature,” in Judge, Lawyer, Victim, Thief: Women,
Gender Roles, and Criminal Justice 157 (Nicole H. Ratter
,

and Elizabeth A. Stanko eds., 1982); Angela Browne and

Kirk R. Williams, “Exploring the Effect of Resource
Availability and the Likelihood of Female-Perpetrated
Homicides,” 23 Law &
Society 75 (1989); Coramae R.
Mann, “Black Female Homicide in the United States,” 5 J.
Interpersonal Violence 176 (1990); Carol Smart, “The New
Female Criminal: Reality or Myth?”, 19 Brit. J.
Criminology 50 (1979).

4. See Angela Browne, When Battered Women Kill (1987);

Cynthia K. Gillespie, Justifiable Homicide (1989)(address-
ing legal status of abused women in the United States);
Jonathan Goodman, Thirteen Classic True Crime Stories

133
 PATRIARCHY

(1990); Ann Jones, Everyday Death: The Case of

Bernadette Powell (1985); Susan Schechter, Women and
Male Violence (1982); Jocelynne Scutt, Even in the Best of
Homes: Violence in the Family (1983); Snow, supra note 3;
Lenore E. Walker, Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women
Kill and How Society Responds (1989); Lenore E. Walker,
The Battered Woman (1979); Wilbanks, supra note 3;
Nancy Jurik and Russ Winn, “Gender and Homicide: A
Comparison of Men and Women Who Kill,” y Violence &
Victims 229 (1990).

5. See Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (1972, 1989);

Phyllis Chesler, “The Amazon Legacy: An Interpretive
Essay,” inWonder Woman (1972) (citing early works of
Hesiod, 720 B.C.; Homer, 820 B.C.; Plutarch, a.d. 80;
Tacitus, A.D. 100; Thuydides, 430 B.C.; Virgil, 40 B.C.).

Female warriors and killers have been the subject of litera-

ture dating back to the early nineteenth century: Johann J.
Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (Ralph
Manheim trans., 1967)(first published in three volumes in
Switzerland in the nineteenth century); Robert Briffault,
The Mothers (1963)(first published in 1927); Sir Richard
Francis Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome
(1966)(first published in 1864); Elizabeth G. Davis, The
First Sex (1971); Helen Diner, Mothers and Amazons: The
First Feminine History of Culture (John Philip Lundin
trans., 1973)(first published in Austria in the 1930s);
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire: and other selected writings (J.B. Bury ed., 1896);
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar
of Poetic Myth (1948); Jane E. Harrison, Prolegomena to
the Study of Greek Religion (1903); Charles G. Jung and
Caroly Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The
Myth of the Divine Child and the Divine Maiden (R.F.C.
Hull trans., 1949); Caroly Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal
Image of Mother and Daughter (Ralph Manheim trans.,
1967); Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society (1978); Margaret
A. Murray, The Splendor That Was Egypt (1963); Erich

134
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Neumann, The Great Mother (1955); Regine Pernoud,

Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses (Edward Hyams
The Glory of Hera: Greek
trans., 1964); Phillip E. Slater,
Mythology and the Greek Family (1971). The following are
more recent sources that have been helpful on the subject:
Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens: The Legends and the
Lives of the Women Who Have Led Their Nations in War
(1989); Abby W. Kleinbaum, The War Against the
Amazons (1983); Victoria Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc
(^991); Jessica A. Salmonson, The Encyclopedia of
Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Modern
Era (1991).

6. See, e.g., Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography

of a Singular Feminist 3 (1988) (discussing 1871 case of
,

prostitute Laura Fair, who killed local dignitary in self-

defense); Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: NYC Prostitution
and The Commercialization of Sex 790-1920 (1992);
i

Jones, supra note 3, at 147-52 (discussing 1843 case of

prostitute Amelia Norman, 1855 case of Mary Moriarty,
1865 case of Mary Harris, and 1872 case of Fanny
Windley); Melton A. McLaurin, Celia A Slave (1991) (dis-
cussing case of sexually abused Missouri slave, Celia, who
killed her master).

7. See U.S. Dept, of Justice, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice

Statistics, Table 4.19 (Kathleen Maguire and Timothy
Flalagar eds., 1990); Ann W. Burgess et a!., “Serial Rapists
and Their Victims: Reenactment and Repetition,” Annals
N.Y. Acad. Sci. (1987); Ann W. Burgess, “Murderers Who
Rape and Mutilate,” 1 J. Interpersonal Violence 273
(1986).

8. See, e.g.,Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, The Lust

to Kill (1987); Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime (1987);
Eric W. Hickey, Serial Murderers and Their Victims (1991);
Louise Malette et al. eds., (1991) The Montreal Massacre ;

Jill Radford and Diana Russell eds., (1992) Femicide: The

Politics of Women Killing-, Colin Wilson, Written in Blood:

135
 * ,

PATRIARCHY

The Criminal Mind and Method (1989); Steven J. Michaud

and Hugh Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness: A True
Account of Homicidal Insanity (1983); Tim Cahill, Buried
Dreams: Inside The Mind of a Serial Killer (1986); Art
Crockett, Serial Murderers (1990); Robert Graysmith,
Zodiac (1986); Robert Graysmith, The Sleeping Lady: The
Trailside Murder Above the Golden Gate (1991); Clifford
L. Linedecker, The Man Who Killed Boys: A True Story of
Mass Murder in a Chicago Suburb (1980); Clifford L.
9. Linedecker, Night Stalker (1991); Ann Rule, The I-y Killer
(1984); Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me (1981); Harold
Schechter, Deviant: The Shocking Story of Ed Gein, the
Original " Psycho (1989); Ted Schwartz, The Hillside
Strangler: A Murderer’s Mind (1982); Carlton Smith and
Thomas Guillen, The Search for the Green River Killer
(1991); Maury Terry, The Ultimate Evil (1987).

See Browne, supra note 4; Phyllis Chesler, Mothers on

Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody 293-96 (1986,
,

1991); Gillespie, supra note 4 , at 1-31; Jones, supra note 3,

at 320; Jurik and Winn, supra note 4, at 236; Schechter,
supra note 4, at 170-74; Walker, Terrifying Love supra
note 4, at 12; Walker, Battered Woman supra note 4; ,

Lynne A. Foster et al., “Factors Present When Battered

Women Kill,” 10 Issues in Mental Health Nursing 273
(1989).

10. See Chesler, Mothers on Trial , supra note 9, at 295-96;

Florida Supreme Court Gender Bias Study Commission,
Gender Bias in Criminal Justice 170 (Mar. 1990) [here-
inafter Gender Bias Rep.]. Sec Margaret A. Baldwin, “Split
at the Root: Prostitution and Feminist Discourses of Law
Reform,” Yale J.L. &
Feminisim (1993).

11. See Kentucky Task Force on Gender Fairness in the Courts

41 (Jan. 13, 1992). “In Kentucky, women accounted for
only eighteen percent of the total arrests in 1990. Of those,
only 2.9% were arrested for violent crime.” Id.; Chesler,
Mothers on Trial, supra note 9; Jones, supra note 3, at 12,

136
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

13; Ann Stanton, When Mothers Go To Jail (1980);

Dorothy Zeitz, Women Who Embezzle or Defraud: A
Study of Convicted Felons (1983); Charlene Snow,
“Women Who Go to Jail,” Clearinghouse Review (1981).
12. See Chesler, Mothers on Trial , supra note 9, at 291. For
more in-depth discussion of prostitution and sexual and
pyschological exploitation, see Ann Snitow et al., Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality 419-39 (1983); Kathleen
Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (1979); Kathleen Barry et al.,
International Feminism: Networking Against Female
Sexual Slavery: Report of the Global Feminist Workshop to
Organize Against Traffic in Women in Rotterdam, the
Netherlands April 6 -iy, 1983 (1984); Arlene Carmen and
Howard Moody, Working Women: The Subterranean
World of Street Prostitution (1985); Frederique Delacoste
and Prescilla Alexander, Sex Work: Writings By Women in
the Sex Industry (1987); Cecilie Hoigard and Liv Finstad,
Backstreets: Prostitution, Money and Love (1986); Barbara
M. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The
of Prostitution and
Politics
the American Reform Tradition (1987); Glen Petri, A
Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler
(1971); Gail Pheterson, A Vindication of the Rights of
Whores (1989); Maimie Pinzer, The Maimie Papers (Ruth
Rosen ed., 1977); Kathleen Barry, “Social Etiology of
Crimes Against Women,” 10 Victimology: An Int’l J. 164
(1985); M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, “Early Sexual
Exploitation as an Influence in Prostitution,” Soc. Work ,

July-Aug. 1983, at 285; Judith Walkowitz, “The Politics of

Prostitution,” in Women, Sex and Sexuality 145 (Catherine
R. Stimpson and Ethel S. Person cds., 1980); M.H. Silbert
and A.M. Pines, “Occupational Hazards of Street
Prostitutes,” 8 Crim. Just. &Behavior 395 (1981); Belinda
Cooper, “Prostitution: A Feminist Analysis,” 11 Women's
Rts. L. Rep.99 (Summer 1989); Evelina Giobbe, WHISPER
(Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution Engaged in
Revolt)(Educational Programs and Materials, Minneapolis,
MN), Winter/Spring 1992; Andrea Dworkin, Address at

137
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PATRIARCHY

the Michigan Univ. School of Law Conference on

Prostitution (Oct. 31, 1992).

13. See Adler, supra note 3;A.M. Brodsky, Women in Prison—

The Lonely Minority (1975); Simon and Landis, supra note
3; Smart, supra note 3; Snow, supra note 3; FBI Uniform
Crime Reports (1970-1989). According to a recent New
York Times article, the arrest rates of women are rising
more rapidly than men’s. “During the 1980s, the number of
women in state and more than tripled, to
federal prisons
40,566; but the number of imprisoned men more than dou-
bled, to 669,498. There are now approximately 90,000
women and federal prisons, and in city and county
in state
jails.” Peter Applebome, “U.S. Prisons Challenged by

Women Behind Bars,” N.Y. Times Nov. 30, 1992, at A10.

,

14. See Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness supra note 5;

Phyllis Chesler, Women, Money and Power (1976).

15. See Chesler, Women and Madness , supra, note 5; Chesler,

Women, Money and Power ,
supra note 14.

16. Hedda Nussbaum, formerly a children’s book editor in

New York City, was a battered common-law wife who
failed to protect the illegally adopted five-year-old Lisa
Steinberg from being tortured and ultimately killed by her
common-law husband, former criminal defense attorney
Joel Steinberg. Sec Gary Spencer, “Steinberg Conviction
Affirmed,” N.Y.L ./., June 12, 1992, at 1; see also People v.
Steinberg 79 N.Y.2d 673, 584 N.Y.S.2d 770 (1992).
,

17. Mary Beth Whitehead was the New Jersey woman who, in
1985, signed a surrogacy contract to bear a child for
William and Betsy Stern, and then changed her mind. In
1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned Baby M’s
adoption by Betsy Stern and allowed Whitehead to have
visitation. See Matter of Baby M., 537 A.2d 1227 (Sup. Ct.

N.J. 1988).

18. Amy Fisher, a teenager from Long Island, New York,

138
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

became sexually involved with Joseph Buttafuoco, a mar-

ried man twice her age, when she was 15 to 16 years old.
He prostituted her and then allegedly asked her to kill his
wife,Mary Jo. Amy shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco on May 19,
1992. To date, Joey Buttafuoco has not been charged with
statutory rape or with introducing Amy Fisher to a life of
prostitution. See Shirley E. Perlman and Stuart Vincent,
“Buttafuoco Won’t Be Prosecuted in Amy Fisher Case,
Nassau DA Says,” Newsday, Oct. 23, 1992, at 3. The 17-
year-old Fisher was sentenced to 5 to 15 years. See John T.
McQuiston, “Amy Fisher Gets a Maximum of 15 Years,”
N. Y. Times Dec. 2, 1992, at Bl.
, In addition, CBS/Tri-Star
Pictures reportedly paid the Buttafuocos between $200,000
and $3*00,000 for the rights to their story. NBC/KLM
reportedly paid the Fishers $80,000. See Jeff Silverman,
“Murder, Mayhem Stalk TV,” N. Y. Times Nov. 22, 1992, ,

at HI, H28.

19. Imelda Marcos was the wife of the late Ferdinand Marcos,
former President of the Phillipines. Ferdinand was appar-
ently defeated in the 1986 which
presidential vote, during
his government was accused of fraud and intimidation, and
later unseated by a popular uprising. See “Aquino Rejects
Latest Calls for Marcos Burial in the Phillipines,” N.Y.
Times Sept. 29, 1989, at B6. Imelda and Ferdinand were
,

later brought up on racketeering charges involving fraud

and embezzlement in assembling a “New York real estate
empire.” See “The Message of the Marcos Case,” N.Y.
Times Nov. 1, 1988, at A30.
,

20. Leona Helmsley, 71 -year-old millionairess, “queen” of the

Helmsley hotel chain, was convicted on tax fraud charges
and sentenced to four years in prison. See Constance L.
Hays, “Helmsley Conviction Upheld on Appeal,” N.Y.
Times July 31, 1991, at B2, col. 5.
,

21. Michael Milken was indicted in March, 1989 on 98 counts

of fraud and racketeering in connection with insider trading
and other alleged securities violations. See “The Milken

139
 PATRIARCHY

Sentence; Milken: Pathfinder for the ‘Junk Bond Era’,”

N.Y. Times , Nov. 22, 1990, at D4. Milken later agreed to
a plea bargain and entered guilty pleas to six felonies in
addition to paying $600 million in penalties. Id. He was
sentenced to ten years in prison, three years probation, and
5,400 hours of community service. Id.

22. Ivan Boesky pleaded guilty to insider trading in 1986. See

Kurt Eichenwald, Drexel Burnham Fights Back, N.Y.
Times , Sept. 11, 1988, 3, at 1. “The arbitrage king. ..admit-
ted using information about unannounced takeovers to
make huge illegal profits.” Karen W. Arenson, “How Wall
Street Bred an Ivan Boesky,” N.Y. Times, Nov. 23, 1986, 3,
at 1.

23. Neil Bush, youngest son of former president Bush, agreed to

pay $50,000 in a settlement with federal regulators for his
and
role in the collapse of the Silverado Banking, Savings
Loan Association, of which he was a director from 1985 to
1988. See Jeff Gerth, “The 1992 Campaign; The Business
Dealings of the President’s Relatives: What the Record
Shows,” N.Y. Times Apr. 19, 1992, 1, at 14.
,

24. Sol Wachtler, former Chief Judge of the New York State
Court of Appeals, was charged in a federal indictment of
February 1, 1993 with extortion, mailing threatening letters
to his ex-lover and her daughter, and lying to federal inves-
tigators. See Wayne King, “Ex-Chief Judge Pleads Not
Guilty to Extortion,” N.Y. Times , Feb. 18, 1993, at B6.
“[T]he indictment charges that Mr. Wachtler used ‘his

power, influence, and resources as chief judge’ to advance

the extortion plan.” Id. He faces as much as sixteen years
in prison and $1.25 million in fines. Id.

25. Bess Myerson, former Miss America and New

York City
Cultural Affairs Commissioner, was brought up on federal
fraud and conspiracy charges, together with a certain Mr.
Capasso and Hortense Gabel, a former justice of the State
Supreme Court in Manhattan. See Robert D. McFadden,

140
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

“Bess Myerson Accused of Shoplifting,” N.Y. Times,

Is

May 28, 1988, 1, at 29. The three were accused of trying

to reduce alimony payments in Mr. Capasso’s divorce case
and were acquitted on all charges in December of 1988. See
“Headliners: The Envelope Please,” N.Y. Times Dec. 25, ,

1988, 4, at 7. In addition, Myerson was arrested in a small

town in Pennsylvania for shoplifting $44.07 worth of
goods. See McFadden, supra.

26. See Freda Adler and Rita James Simon, The Criminology of
Deviant Women, 273-86 (1979); Chesler, Mothers on
Trial, supra note 9; Richard DeMihg, Women: The New
Criminals 170 (1977); Jones, supra note 3, at 293; Sarah K.
Feeney ^nd Samuel Roll, “Sex As an Extra Legal Factor in
Judicial Decision-Making: An Analogous Study,” 2 Am.
J.
Forensic Psychol. (1984).

27. Gender Bias Rep., supra note 11, at 87.

28. Id. at 93-97; Susan K. Datesman and Frank R. Scarpitti

eds., (1980) Women, Crime and Justice, 325.

29. SeeTape of Conference on Self-Defense and Battered

Women, The Frontiers of Legal Thought: Race, Gender and
Justice, held by the Duke Univ. Law Conference (Jan. 1991)
[hereinafter Conference, Race, Gender and Justice] (on file

with Duke University Law School).

30. Gender Bias Rep., supra note 11, at 99-100 (text renum-
bered). Additionally, inmates at the Kentucky Correctional
Institute for Women indicated that jail facilities in some
rural counties are not equipped to adequately house females
due to limited space and/or lack of female guards. As a
result, female services or privileges, such as laundry and
showers, are not available to female inmates with the fre-
quency that they are provided to male inmates. It appears
then that, in some rural areas where adequate space and
staff arenot available to house female prisoners, men may
receive harsher penalties at sentencing, but women experi-
ence greater deprivation if actually incarcerated.

141
 PATRIARCHY

The inmates’ complaints as to the inadequacy of jail space

for women were echoed by testimony at the public hear-
ings.
Another problem related to the lack of resources and jail
space for women offenders is that because some states have
fewer correctional institutions for women, incarcerated
women who are mothers are frequently housed a consider-
able geographical distance from their children.
Gender Fairness in the Courts, supra note 11, at 34-35.

31. See Gillespie, supra note 4; Conference, Race, Gender and

Justice, supra note 29.

32. See Browne, supra note 4; Conference, Race, Gender and

Justice, supra note 29.

33. See Chesler, Mothers on Trial, supra note 9, at 66. Non-

violent mothers lose custody when it is contested from 70%
to 82% of the time, often because they are nonviolent and
unwilling to employ violent means in order to win custody
of their children. Id.; Conference, Race, Gender and Justice,
supra note 29.

34. I am not talking about female sexual outlaws: women who

are “sexual” outside of marriage, women who use birth
control, have abortions, or are prostitutes and/or lesbians.

35. See, e.g., Browne, supra note 4.

36. See, e.g., Gillespie, supra note 4.

37. See, e.g., Jones, supra note 4.

38. See, e.g., Schechter, supra note 4.

39. See, e.g., Elizabeth M. Scheider and Susan B. Jordan,

Representation of Women Who
Defend Themselves in
Response to Physical or Sexual Assault, 4 Women’s Rts. L.
Rep. 149 (1978).

40. Diana E.H. Russell and Nicole Van den Ven, The
See, e.g.,
Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes
Against Women (1976) (discussing congresses on crimes

142
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

against women and women’s rights).

41. See, e.g., Walker, The Battered Woman ,

supra note 4;
Walker, Terrifying Love supra note
, 4.

42. See Jurik and Winn, supra note 4; Mann, “Black Women
Who Kill,” supra note 3; Scutt, supra note 4, at 271.
43. Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres (1969).

44. Monique Wittig, Across the Acheron (1987).

45. Nawal el Sadawi, Woman at Point Zero (1975).
46. Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1976).

47. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).

48. Suzy McKee Charnes, Mother-Lines (1976).

49. Sally Gearheart, The Wanderground (1976).

50. Kate Millet, The Basement— Meditations on a Human

Sacrifice (1979).

51. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

52. Jeannette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (1989).

53. Helen Zahavi, The Weekend (1991).

54. Diana Rivers, Daughters of the Great Star (1992).

55. Andrea Dworkin, Mercy (1990).

56. Id. at 331.

57. See Hickey, supra note 8, at 86.

58. See Ann W. Burgess et al, Serial Rapists and Their Victims ,

supra note 7; Cameron and Frazer, supra note 8; Caputi,

supra note 202; Hickey, supra note 8, at 223; Malette
8, at
et al., supra note 8; Jay Mathews, “San Diego Task Force
Joins Search for Seattle-Area Killer,” Wash. Post Sept. 20, ,

1988, at A6; Baldwin, supra note 9, at 70.

59. See Hickey, supra note 8, at 223; Baldwin, supra note 10,

143
 PATRIARCHY

at 138.

60. See Aileen Wuornos, Confession

Carol (Jan. 16,
1991)(transcript/videotape on file with author).

61. See “Highlights of the Wuornos Trial” (Court TV television

broadcast, Jan. 1991) (Channel 51).

62. Wuornos, supra note 60.

63. Aileen Carol Wuornos, Testimony (Jan. 25, 1992).

64. Wuornos, supra note 60.

65. Id.

66. Gilfolye cites to a number of early to mid-nineteenth-centu-

ry cases: People v. Mott Oct. 20, 1842; People v. Ford
, ,

Sept. 28, 1842; People v. Valentine , Mar. 11, 1842; People

v. Golding Feb. 11, 1842; People v. Wilson, Jan. 9, 1840;
,

People v. Samis Feb. 20, 1837; People v. Chichester May

, ,

11, 1836; People v. Cole Dec. 16, 1836; People v. ,

Dikeman , Dec. 14, 1836; People v. Harrison May 12, ,

1833; People v. Nosworthy Mar. 12, 1832; Weyman v. ,

Danon Dec. 12, 1832; People v. Lozier June 14, 1831;

, ,

People v. Van Dine Jan. 7, 1831; People v. Small Jan. 16,

, ,

1829; People v. Anderson Jan. 12, 1829; People v. Fink ,

,

July 14, 1825; People v. Lee Dec. 15, 1824; People v. ,

Johnson Jan. 9, 1821; People v. Halliday Mar. 11, 1820.

, ,

67. See Gilfoyle, supra note 6, at 78-79.

John Evans, for example, was arrested for throwing stones

at the house of Eliza Vincent after she “refused him admit-
Van Dine broke into Rebecca
tance.” Similarly, James
Weyman’s house “by forcing open the windows and shut-
ters... there most riotous and disorderly man-
behaved in a
ner.” Similarly, Hannah Fuller was awakened by William
Ford early one summer morning in 1844. After kicking in
her door, he removed his boots and pants, carried her to the
bed, and attempted “to ravish and... carnally know her.”
Only the last-minute intervention by the watch prevented

144
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

the rape. Fuller later dropped the charges because Ford was
an “old friend.”
Women on had even less protection from such
the street
assaults. Mary Smith, a Leonard Street prostitute, was
walking home in 1832 after an evening at the Park Theater
when William Nosworthy seized her “in a grossly rude and
indecent manner and raised her clothes so as to expose her
nakedness to the passers by.”

Id. at 79.

68. See Gilfoyle, supra note 6, at 79-80.

The three rioters who stoned Amanda Smith’s house on

Franklin Street also “destroyed her furniture, knocked her
down, 'beat her on the face and head so as to blind her
entirely, and after having knocked her down, kicked her.”
The invaders, charged the district attorney, then beat her
crippled son William “in a most shameful and outrageous
manner.” Witnesses testified that the same men forced their
way into two other Orange Street brothels, “making a great
noise and disturbance, breaking the furniture.” Likewise,
John Golding led four other men into Elizabeth Rinnell’s
Crosby Street house and demanded food, drink, money,
and entertainment. After their drunken orgy, Golding
assaulted and beat Rinnell. Similarly, when John Williams
entered an Anthony Street brothel, he threw oil of vitriol in
Mary Ann Duffy’s face, severely scarring her. And when
Edward Halliday and friends broke into a Bancker Street
house, each one “drew a sword and slashed before them,
[and] wounded Sarah Smith, the woman of the house, in
the face.”
The threat of rape was common in many of these brothel
riots. Five men, for example, broke into Eliza Logue’s
Thomas house when she refused them admittance.
Street
After breaking the cookery and throwing a lamp at the
head of a prostitute, they strangled Logue and “threw her
across the foot of a bed and endeavored by force and vio-
lence to have connection with her.” Only the nearby watch,

145
 PATRIARCHY

hearing the commotion, prevented the consummation of

the 1840, after beating Mary Lee, Benjamin
act. In
Waldron and his gang followed her as she tried to escape,
striking “her in the face several times and threatening] to
commit other outrages.” In another instance, more than ten
laborers broke into Eliza Ann Potter's Suffolk Street house,
violently assaulted her, and “threatened to pickle and rape
her before hastily departing.”

Id. at 80-81.

69. Id. at 84-85.

70. Id. at 90.

71. Susan Hunter et al. Council For Prostitution Alternatives,

Inc Annual Report (1991).
.

72. Id. at 2.

73. Id.

74. Id. at 3.

75. Gender Bias Rep., supra note 10, at 179-80.

76. Phillipa Levine, Florida— A Report

Prostitution in
Presented to the Gender Bias Study Commission of the
Supreme Court of Florida 34-35 (Sept. 1988).

77. Id. at 43.

78. See Dorothy H. Bracey, “Concurrent and Consecutive

Abuse: The Juvenile Prostitute,” in The Criminal Justice
System and Women 317, 321 (Barbara Raffel Price and
Natalie J. Sokoloff eds., 1982) (indicating risk of physical
abuse and mugging); Dorothy H. Bracey, Baby-Pros:
Preliminary Profiles of Juvenile Prostitutes 62-63 (1979).

79. Eleanor M. Miller, Street Woman 138 (1986).

80. See Bracey, supra note 78, at 317 (“[a] growing body of
evidence [indicates] that the juvenile [prostitute]... is the
product of a specific history... that most likely involves sex-

146
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

ual abuse, incest, ...[and] abandonment”); Bracey, supra

note 78, at 62-63; Jennifer James, “Motivations for
Entrance into Prostitution,” in The Female Offender 177 ,

(L. Crites ed., 1976) (“Prostitutes are not the cause of pros-
titution.”); Jennifer James and Jane Meyerding, “Early
Sexual Experience as a Factor in Prostitution,” 7 Archives
of Sexual Behavior 31-42 (1978); Richard Phillips, “How
Children Become Prostitutes,” Chi. Trib ., Feb. 1, 1981, 12,
(quoting Mimi Silbert); Berme Schaffer and Richard R.
DeBlassie, “Adolescent Prostitution,” 19 Adolescence 689,
689-696 (1984); Carmen and Moody, supra note 12
(chronicling church and social work with prostitutes);
Mimi H. Silbert and Ayala M. Pines, “Entrance Into
Prostitution,” 13 Youth &
Soc’y 471, 479 (1982) (tabulat-
ing statistics on physical and sexual child abuse).

81. Letter from Susan Kay Hunter, Executive Director, Council

for Prostitution Alternatives, to Phyllis Chesler (Jan. 6,
1993) (on file with author).

82. See Silbert and Pines, Occupational Hazards of Street

Prostitutes , supra note 12, at 397.

83. Id.

84. Baldwin, supra note 10.

85. For more information on the trauma of sexual and pyscho-

logical abuse, see E. Sue Blume, Secret Survivors:
Uncovering Incest and its Aftereffects in Women (1990);
Sandra Butler, Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest
(1985); Phyllis Chesler, Sacred Bond— The Legacy of Baby
M. (1988) (psychological consequences of surrendering a
child to adoption); Judith Louis Herman, Trauma and
Recovery (1992); Marian Sandmaier, The Invisible
Alcoholics: Women and Alcohol Abuse in America (1980);
Bessel A. Van de Kolk, Psychological Trauma (1987); Gail
Wyatt and Gloria Johnson Powell, Lasting Effects of Child
Sexual Abuse (1988); Roland Summit, “The Child Sexual
Abuse Accommodation Syndrome,” 7 Child Abuse and

147
 PATRIARCHY

Neglect , 177-193 (1983); sec also Ellen Bass and Laura

Davis, The Courage to Heal : A Guide for Women Survivors
of Child Sexual Abuse (1988); Toni Ann Laidlaw and
Cheryl Malmo, Healing Voices: Feminist Approach To
Therapy With Women (1990).

86. See Don R. Kates and Nancy Jean Engberg, “Deadly Force
Self-Defense Against Rape,” 15 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 873,
873-74 (1982) (“Resistance short of homicide is clearly
condoned. Moreover, American law... has always recog-
nized a right to use deadly force if reasonably necessary to
prevent rape.”) The experts I chose and proposed to the
defense either wrote the following books and conducted the
following studies, or were knowledgeable about the infor-
mation contained therein: Louise Armstrong, Kiss Daddy
Goodnight (1978); Pauline B. Bart and Patricia H. O’Brien,
Stopping Rape— Successful Survival Strategies (1985);
Katherine Brady, Father's Days: A True Story of Incest
(1979); Gillespie, supra note 4; Margaret T. Gordon and
Stephanie Riger, The Female Fear— The Social Cost of
Rape (1989) (tabulating case studies on rape and fear of
crime); Judith Louis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest
(1981); Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (1988) (chron-
icling wife abuse, child abuse, and family violence in the
United Dean H. Knudsen and JoAnn L. Miller,
States);
Abused and Battered: Social and Legal Responses to Family
Violence (1991); Lee Madigan and Nancy Gamble, The
Second Rape— Society’s Continued Betrayal of the Victim
(1991); Florence Rush, The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse
of Children (1980); Russell and Van den Ven, supra note
40; Diana E.H. Russell, Rape in Marriage (1982); Peggy
Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood,
and Privilege on Campus
(1990); Diana Scully,
Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted
Rapists (1990); Walker, Terrifying Love , supra note 4;
Judith Fabricant, “Homicide in Response to a Threat of
Rape: A Theoretical Examination of the Rule of
Justification,” 11 Golden Gate U.L. Rev. 945, 947 (1981)

148
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

(identifying historical
background of attempted rape as jus-
tification for homicide); Laura E. Reece, “Women’s
Defenses to Criminal Homicide and the Right to Effective
Assistance of Counsel: The Need for Relocation of
Difference,” 1 UCLA Women’s L.J. 1101 (1991); Laurie J.
Taylor, “Provoked Reason in Men and Women: Heat-of-
Passion Manslaughter and Imperfect Self-Defense,” 33
UCLA L. Rev. 1679, 1679 (1986) (“legal standards that
define. ..provocation. ..reflect a male view”); see also supra
note 85.

87. Telephone Interview with Aileen Carol Wuornos (Apr.

1991).

88. See Chesler, Women and Madness supra note 6, at 138

,

(“prostitution, rape, and sexual molestation of female chil-

dren by adult males are so common they are usually invisi-
ble”); Herman, supra note 85, at 87; Van de Kolk, supra
note 85.

89. Such inquiry would not have implicated the “rape shield”
laws, which prevent the use of evidence of the victim’s past
sexual conduct in rape cases. See Ann Althouse, “Thelma
and Louise and the Law: Do Rape Shield Rules Matter?”
25 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 757 (1992); Letter from Margaret
Baldwin to Susan Bender, President of the Women’s Bar
Association of the State of New York (Nov. 1992)(on file

with author). Professor Baldwin stated:

During the course of the William Kennedy Smith
Trial, it became very clear to me that the rape
shield rule had been taken as a hostage to guar-
antee silence about men, as in “if you don’t have
to tell, neither do we.” This is phony symmetry,
but one that has garnered strong surface appeal.
Formal logic, like formal equality, has never
interested me terribly. What has interested me
profoundly in this turn of events is the whole
question of “shield rules” that run to the benefit
of men as johns: never arrested, never held to

149
 PATRIARCHY

account, while the prostitutes who might give

witness are discredited when not wholly
destroyed. It bears mention that johns are com-
monly white, middle-aged, married men with
some disposable income; that is, real people.

90. See Horzepa deposition, infra note 96.

91. See Deposition, infra note 96.

92. See Robert Nolin, “Jurors Seated for Wuornos Trial,”

Daytona Beach News /., Jan. 15, 1992, at Bl.

93. See Laura Kauffman, “Dancer’s Story Adds Twist to

Killing,” Ocala Star-Banner, Jan. 5, 1992, at 1A.

94. Id.

95. Nancy Peterson appeared on NBC-Dateline on November

10, 1992. See NBC Dateline (NBC television broadcast,

Nov. 10, 1992).

96. See Deposition of Lawrence Peter Horzepa (Oct. 15, 1991),

State v. Wuornos (7th Jud. Cir., Volusia Co., Fla. 1992)
(No. 91-0257).

Horzepa told Jenkins:

In speaking to Jackie Davis, which was the last

known girlfriend of Mr. Mallory, she also said

that he would like to drink, he enjoyed the strip

bars, he was into some pornography....

. . .We found that in doing a search of the business
that he appeared to be heavy in debt; he owed
several thousand dollars for the rental of the
store-front property that he had. We found hostile
notes from customers who had dropped items to
be repaired, which he apparently never did, and
they were calling back or writing notes appar- —
ently he wasn’t returning phone calls —asking
when they were going to get their items back. We
took a look and saw over a hundred items that

150
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

were need of repair which he hadn’t even start-

in
ed to work on. We found correspondence from
IRS. Apparently he was in trouble with them, and
he was, appeared to be, looked like he was going
to be audited.
Jenkins asked:
I know ultimately you had a suspect... Chastity
Marcus.... And how exactly did you get to her?
Horzepa replied:
It was from —
we had found some notes, hand-
written notes, on a scrap piece of paper that
were found in [Mallory’s] living quarters....
[Marcus] had told us that she had had a date
-

with Mr. Mallory, her and Kimberly Guy. And I

asked her what “a date” meant, and she told me
that “a date” to her and Kimberly Guy was that
they went back to his place of business and had
sex with him.. ..And I asked her if she received
payment for this service, and she said that she
did, that it was in the form of a 19-inch color
TV and a VCR. ..probably somebody’s that
were there for repair.... Chastity Marcus was
fuzzy on [the date]. Kimberly Guy, to the best of
her knowledge, thought that it was the evening
of November 30th.
...[Kimberly Guy] advised that she was a lesbian
and had a lesbian lover. She brought us
that she
over to her apartment where there had been a
TV and VCR she had claimed that Mr. Mallory
had given her.

97. I had three meetings with Jenkins and a conversation with

investigator Don Sanchez in the spring of 1991 about this.
I again referred to the need to delve into Mallory’s past vio-
lence toward women Jenkins dated June 12,
in a letter to
1991. See Letter from Phyllis Chesler to Trish Jenkins,
Public Defender, Marion County (June 12, 1991)(on file

with author); Interviews with Patricia Jenkins, Public

151
 PATRIARCHY

Defender, Marion County (Apr. to May 1991); Interviews

with Donald Sanchez, Private Investigator for Marion
County Office of the Public Defender (Apr. to May 1991).

98. I obtained Richard Mallory’s criminal record from the

Circuit Court, Montgomery County, Maryland. In 1957,
Mallory entered the home of a woman married to a wealthy
and powerful man and attempted to rape her. He did not
succeed. It is puzzling that in 1957, a young white man was
actually convicted for attempted rape, sentenced to four,
and ultimately imprisoned for10 years. Class and race bias-
es always predominate in determining which man actually
gets arrested and convicted for a crime of sexual violence
against a woman.
99. Telephone with Jack Kassewitz, Private
Interview
Investigator for NBC Broadcasting, (Nov. 5, 1992).
Kassewitz boasted that it took him “about 20 minutes” to
commandeer Mallory’s record. Id.

100. NBC-Dateline (NBC television broadcast, Nov. 10, 1992).

101. Id.

102. Question of Silence (directed by Marleen Gorris, 1983).

103. The most and hard-working of public defenders is

idealistic
still too overworked and lacks the resources to do more

than a perfunctory job. At the time of her assignment, Trish

Jenkins was defending 12 other capital cases. Her pre-trial
motions for continuances in the Wuornos case invariably
met with unnecessarily acerbic opposition from the state, so
much so that at one hearing, exasperated, she asked the
judge: “Do I spend all my time on Ms. Wuornos’ case and
let the others slide? Or do I do it in reverse? I am in a bind.”

104. See Michael Clary, “A Mother’s Love,” L.A. Times Dec.

,

17, 1991, at El, (quoting Phyllis Chesler on subject); Laura

Kauffmann, “Wuornos: Victim of Society?” Ocala Star
Banner Dec. 11, 1991, at 1A (same); Chris Lavin, “Deaths
,

Fade in Backdrop as Trial Takes Center Stage,” St.

152
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Petersberg Times , Jan. 12, 1991 (same); Keith Maranger,

“Trial Begins for Lesbian Serial Killer,” Our Town Feb.
,

1992, at 1 (same).

105. For an expansion on these points, see Phyllis Chesler, “A

Double Standard for Murder?” N.Y. Times Jan. 8, 1992, ,

at A19.

106. See Wuornos, supra note 60.

107. See “Highway Slayings May Go Hollywood,” Sun-Sentinel ,

Feb. 10, 1991, at 20 A. Maj. Dan Henry later resigned after

the release of a taped telephone conversation in which he
discussed depositions taken for a civil lawsuit between
Wuornos and Hollywood filmmaker and producer. See
a
“Deputy Resigns After Conversation About Wuornos,”
Miami Herald Nov. 12, 1992, at 2B. In an early version of
,

the CBS script, Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story the ,

only names not fictionalized were Moore’s, Munster’s,

Binegar’s, and Henry’s.

108. See “Movie Deal ‘Didn’t Prejudice’ Probe,” Miami Herald ,

Dec. 4, 1991, at IB.

109. Telephone Interviews with Steven Glazer, Defense Attorney

for Aileen Carol Wuornos (Mar. 1992 to Nov. 1992).

110. Id. Numerous newspaper and magazine articles and two

books on the Wuornos case have already appeared: Dolores
Kennedy and Robert Nolin, On A Killing Day (1992) and
Michael Reynolds, Dead Ends (1992). A number of televi-
sion programs about Wuornos have aired, some repeatedly.
Court TV aired highlights of the January 1992 trial pro-
on “A Current Affair,”
ceedings; in depth features appeared
“Inside Edition,” Montel Williams, NBC-Dateline (August
and November, 1992). The Republic Pictures/CBS Movie
Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story appeared on CBS on
Nov. 17, 1992.
Wuornos actually attracted a minimal amount of money.
The three sheriffs and Tyria Moore allegedly shared

153
 ,

PATRIARCHY

$200,000 from CBS/Republic Pictures; Wuornos, to the

best of my knowledge, has received and dispersed to others
between $30,000 and $40,000.

111. Judge Graziano recused herself in December 1991, about

three weeks before trial.

112. Telephone Interview with Dawn Botkins, Michigan resi-

dent and childhood friend of Wuornos (Nov. to Dec. 1992);
Communications with Arlene Pralle, Florida resident and
adoptive parent of Wuornos (Apr. 1991 to Mar. 1992);
Communications with Aileen Carol Wuornos (Apr. 1991 to
Dec. 1992).

113. See “‘Fascinated’ By a Famous Killer,” Atlanta J. & Const .

Jan. 29, 1992, at A2.

114. See Larry Keller, “Victims,” Sun-Sentinel , Jan. 24, 1989, at

1A.

115. See Rule, supra note 8, at 360. Many lawyers are horrified
by how grievously the state of Florida has gone about vio-
lating Wuornos’s civil and constitutional rights. Early on, in

the spring of 1991, lawyer Linda Backiel led me to Len

Weinglas who agreed to defend Wuornos pro bono in the

first of her six trials, but who needed at least$50,000 in

expense money. Once I became ill with Chronic Fatigue
Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, I could no longer continue
fundraising. No one else ever took on this enormous,
exhausting, and volunteer responsibility.
However, a number of lawyers have since expressed inter-
est in the case and are willing to write amicus briefs and
assist counsel pro bono: Margaret Baldwin, Professor of
Law, Tallahassee Law School; The New York State
Women’s Bar Association, especially Naomi Werne, Chair
of the Criminal Law Committee; Alan Dershowitz of the
Harvard Law School; Ruthann Robson, Professor of Law
at CUNY Law School. Nevertheless, despite at least 50 or
60 requests for pro bono assistance, no one lawyer ever
agreed to take responsibility for coordinating a legal team

154
 ,

A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

or for the remaining trial work.

116. See Williams v. State 110 So. 2d 654, 662 (Fla. 1959). The
Williams rule provides for the admission of evidence of a
defendant’s other crimes or alleged crimes if the court deter-
mines that the facts are sufficiently similar to show a com-
mon scheme or pattern. Id.

117. James G. Driscoll, “In Smith Trial, Legal System Forced

Jurors to Operate Partially in the Dark,” Sun-Sentinel Dec. ,

15, 1991, at 7G.

118. According to Florida law, the jury first determines guilt or

innocence and, if guilty, then makes an initial sentencing
recommendation to the judge, who may override that rec-
ommendation. See Parker v. Dugger 111 S.Ct. 731, 735 ,

(1991); Fla. Stat. ch. 921 (1991).

119. Telephone Interview with Dr. Lenore Walker, author of

Terrifying Love: Why Women Kill and How
Battered
Society Responds and The Battered Woman (Dec. 1991).

120. See “Prosecutor Who Prayed With Bundy To Leave

Ministry,” Sun-Sentinel, Jan. 29, 1989, at 17A.

121. See Phil Long, “Prostitute Called Abused Victim, Enraged

Killer,” Miami Herald, Jan. 16, 1992, at 1A.

122. Deposition of Elizabeth McMahon (Jan. 8, 1991), State v.

Wuornos, (7th Jud. Cir., Volusia Co., Fla. 1992)(No. 91-
0257).

123. Robert Nolin, “Wuornos Described as ‘Borderline’,”

Daytona News Journal, Jan. 29, 1992, at IB.

124. See Phyllis Chesler, “Sex, Death and the Double Standard,”
On The Issues (Summer 1992) (comparing Wuornos’s
treatment with that of Bundy).

125. See Laura Kauffmann, “Wuornos’ Brother Disputes Abuse

Tale,” Ocala-Star Banner, Jan. 30, 1992, at 1 A.

126. Telephone Interview with Steven Glazer, Defense Attorney

155
 PATRIARCHY

for Aileen Carol Wuornos (Mar. 1, 1992). While Glazer’s

behavior may be legal, I must question whether it is ethi-

cal — especially since Glazer agreed to represent Wuornos

civilly as well as criminally.

127. See supra note 6 and accompanying text.

128. See, e.g., People v. Matthews 154 ,

629-30
Cal. Rptr. 628,

(Ct. App. 1979); People v. Taylor, 9 Cal. Rptr. 390, 391-

93 (Ct. App. 1960); State v. Harris 222 N.W.2d 462 (Iowa ,

1974); Commonwealth v. Lamriniy 467 N.E.2d 95, 97-98

(Mass. 1984); People v. Heflin , 456 N.E.2d 10, 12-13
(Mich. 1990), rev’g People v. Landrum 407 N.W.2d 614, ,

615-16 (Mich. Ct. App. 1986); People v. Barker , 446

N.W.2d 549, 550 (Mich. Ct. App. 1989), aff’d 468 N.W.2d
492, 493 (Mich. 1991); State v. , Goodseal 183 N.W.2d
258, 260-61 (Neb. 1971), cert, denied, 404 U.S. 845

(1971); People v. Williams 553 N.Y.S.2d 818, 819 (N.Y.

,

App. Div. 1990); Commonwealth v. Carbone 544 A. 2d ,

462, 463-64 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1988), rev’d, 574 A.2d 584,
588 (Pa. 1990); Thomas v. State 578 S.W. 2d 691, 694-95 ,

(Tex. Crim. App. 1979).

129. See State v. Wanrow 538 ,

P.2d 849 (Wash. Ct. App. 1975),
aff’d, 559 P.2d 548 (Wash. 1977) (en banc).

130. See Morris Dees, Season for Justice: A Lawyer's Own

A
Story of Victory Over America's Hate Groups (1991). Joan
Little was a black woman who killed a white jail guard who
attempted to rape her in the jail cell in which she was incar-

cerated for a burglary conviction. She was acquitted in

1975 following a murder trial that attracted nation-

capital

al attention. State v. Little 74 Cr. No. 4176 (Superior

,

Court, Beaufort County, N.C. 1975).

131. See People v. Garcia , 126 Cal. Rptr. 275 (Ct. App. 1976),
cert, denied, 426 U.S. 911 (1976); see also Kenneth W.
Salter, The Trial of Inez Garcia (1976).

132. 559 P.2d 548 (Wash. 1977).

156
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

133. Id. at 559.

134. Id. at 550.

135. Additionally, Ms. Hooper had noticed someone prowling

around her house at night a week earlier, and someone had
slashed her bedroom window screens in an attempt to enter
the house only two days before; Ms. Hooper suspected that
Wesler was responsible. Id. at 55.

136. Id. at 551.

137. Id. at 555.

138. Id. at 550.

139. Id. at 558-59.

140. Id. at 555.

141. Id. at 557.

142. Id. at 558.

143. Id.

144. Id. at558-59. According to papers on file at the Center for

Constitutional Rights in New York, Wanrow’s second trial
never happened. Wanrow pled guilty to reduced charges of
manslaughter and second degree assault. She received two
concurrent sentences of 10 and 20 years, which were simul-
taneously suspended, the period of suspension and termi-
nation being five years conditioned upon probation during
this time —
which probation apparently also eliminated a
concurrent 12-month sentence. Center The for
Constitutional Rights, 853 Broadway, New York, New
York 10003.
145. At the risk of frustrating the reader, I have chosen to sum-
marize and evaluate most of these articles at a later date.
See generally Fabricant, supra note 86; Kates and Engberg,
supra note 86; Mackinnon, infra note 148; Taylor, supra
note 86; Reece, supra note 86; Schneider and Jordan, supra
note 40; Lita Furby, et al. “Judged Effectiveness of

157
 PATRIARCHY

Common Rape Prevention and Self-Defense Strategies,” 4

J. Interpersonal Violence 44 (1989); Julie Blackman,
“Potential Uses for Expert Testimony: Ideas Toward the
Representation of Battered Women Who Kill,” 9 Women's

Rts. L. Rep.227 (1986); Morrison Torrey, “When Will We

Be Believed? Rape Myths and the Idea of a Fair Trial in
Rape Prosecutions,” 24 U.C. Davis L. Rev ., 1013, 1013-
71.

146. See Schneider and Jordan, supra note 39, at 156.

147. Id.

148. See Catherine MacKinnon, “Towards Feminist

Jurisprudence,” 34 Stan. L. Rev. 703, 729-30 (1982) (book
review).

149. Id. at 734.

150. Schneider, “Representation of Women Who Defend

Themselves Response to Physical or Sexual Assault,”
in
Women’s Rights Law Reporter Vol. 4, No. 3, (Spring,
,

1978); Fabricant, “Homicide in Response to a Threat of

Rape: A Theoretical Examination of the Rule of
Justification,” Vol. Golden Gate University Law
II,

Review ,
P. 945, (1981); Kates and Engberg, “Deadly Force
Self-Defense Against Rape,” (15) Univ. of CA Davis, 873,
(1982); Mackinnon, “Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,”
Stanford Law Review Volume 34, No. 3, (February 1982);
,

Laurie J. Taylor, “Provoked Reason in Men and Women:

Heat-of-Passion Manslaughter and Imperfect Self-
Defense”, 33 UCLA L. REV. 1679, (1986); Furby, Lita, et
al., “Judged Effectiveness of Common Rape Prevention and

Self-Defense Strategies,” Eugene Research Institute.,

Journal of Interpersonal Violence Vol. 4 No. 1, (March
,

1989); Laura E. Reece, Ibid. “Women’s Defenses to

Criminal Homicide and the Right to Effective Assistance of
Counsel: The Need for Relocation of Difference,” UCLA
Women’s Law Journal Vol. 1, No. 1, (Spring, 1991);
,

Torrey Morrison, “When Will We Be Believed? Rape

158
 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Myths and Rape Prosecutions,”

the Idea of a Fair Trial in
University of California, Davis Law Review Vol. 24:931, ,

(1991); Naomi R. Cahn, “The Looseness of Legal

Language: The Reasonable Woman Standard in Theory
and in Practice,” Cornell Law Review Vol. 77:1398, ,

(1992).

151. See Coker v. Georgia 433 U.S. 584, 592 (1977).

,

152. See People v. Caudillo , 580 P.2d 274, 289 (Cal. 1978).

153. The government-subsidized “takeover” of the grass-roots

shelter movement for battered women, with the co-opera-
tion of mental health professionals, made an open exchange
of ideas even more difficult.
#
154. Based on an interview with G. Kristan Miccio, Director and
Attorney-in-Charge, Sanctuary for Families and Center for
Battered Women Legal Services, New York, NY.

155. See Schneider and Jordan, supra note 39; Walker, The
Battered Woman, supra note 4; Walker, Terrifying Love ,
supra note 4; see Elizabeth Schneider, “Equal Rights To
Trial for Women: Sex Bias in the Law of Self-Defense,” 15
Harv. C.R.-C.L. Rev. 622, 630-47 (1980).

156. Communications with Arlene Pralle and Aileen Wuornos

(1991).

157. Telephone Interview with Steven Glazer, Defense Attorney

for Aileen Wuornos (Mar. 1, 1992).

158. See Simon &

Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York
State Crime Victims Bd., 112 S.Ct. 501, 503 1 991 )(hold- (

ing New York’s Son of Sam Law, which prevented people

“accused or convicted of a crime” from profiting from their
stories, as inconsistent with the First Amendment).

159. From April to July of 1991, Pralle often, and her husband
once, asked me to provide Pralle with money to pay for
Wuornos’s collect phone calls. Pralle also asked me for val-
ium for “bodily pains,” for money to pay someone to help

159
 PATRIARCHY

her with her horse-farm work, and to consider moving in

with her myself.

160. Wuornos stopped writing to me again as of December,

1992. Although she has complained bitterly about Steven
Glazer, she has not fired him as her lawyer.

161. Laura Kauffmann, “Wuornos Asks Judge To End It All,”

Ocala Star-Banner Apr. 1, 1992, at 1A, 6 A.
,

162. Laura Kauffmann, “Wuornos To Return For Appeals,”

Ocala Star-Banner Nov. 22, 1992, at 1A, 4 A.
,

163. Communications with Aileen Wuornos, Steven Glazer, and

Jaqui Giroux (1992).

164. See generally Herman, supra note 85.

160
 Sister, Fear Has No
Place Here

Some say lesbians are dangerous. I’d always hoped this

was so, but'time and experience soon taught me that les-
bian —and for that matter, heterosexual feminists, are not
always dangerous enough. Feminists of all sexual persuasions
often sport a brand of politics more royalist than democratic,
more academic than activist. And, like brotherhood, sister-
hood is an ideal, not a reality; feminists are no more sisterly
than anyone else is. Feminist homophobia, racism and misog-
yny have, over the years, driven many feminists out of coali-
tions and into “queer” or “racial” organizations —or back
into civilian life.

hard to remain radical in feminist terms when, in

It’s

addition to gender or skin-color, your sexual preference is

also feared and hated, not only by your opponents, but by
your comrades; it’s hard to remain “in service” to others,
when you yourself remain unsafe at every moment which is —
precisely why Camp Sister Spirit in Ovett, Mississippi, (pop-
ulation 200), is so important. Brenda and Wanda Henson
have not dropped out —nor have they sold out. They—and
their full-time supporters: Pam Arthur Henson, Andrea
Firth,
Gibbs, Cheri Michael and Kathy Wilson, are maintaining a
level of visibility and virtue that is almost pure science fiction.

Ovett is about 3 hours northeast of New Orleans, and

161
 PATRIARCHY

about 40 minutes northeast of Hattiesburg. Driving from

New Orleans to Hattiesburg, I search the horizon for some
sign that we’re in the south: a bayou, a creek, a weeping wil-
low. You can drive for miles and never know where you are,
at any given moment you could be anywhere: in New
England or in the Pacific Northwest, the same familiar
chain-stores and motels you’ve just passed fifty or a hundred
miles ago, are always waiting to greet you. For three thou-
sand miles, it’s as if you haven’t left home; wherever you are,
there’s always a Holiday Inn, a Day’s Inn, a Howard
Johnson’s, a Ramada Inn, a Burger King, a Wendy’s, a
—
McDonald’s it’s as if there’s nothing indigenous left in
America, except the trees maybe, and the sky. Whoever’s left
ismoving fast, hurtling forward into the future, on the great
American highway.
At a local restaurant in Hattiesburg, a woman tells me
she lives in Ovett. “Ovett?” I say. “Isn’t that where Camp
What’s going on there? “Oh”, she sighs, “I
Sister Spirit is?
think the media’s been exaggerating things. Local folk as —
long as you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. Well,”
she says, lowering her voice, “truth is, they’re very strict in
Ovett. They’re not as liberal as they make out. Things are real
black and white. They’re Baptist.” (So much for media exag-
geration). “I’m glad to meet someone from a big city. I miss
that. I once spent some time in Chicago.”
“Greyhound still goes to Chicago,” I say.

“Oh, I can’t leave” she says, in a resigned and

matter-of-fact voice. “If you’re married to a redneck, you
can’tgo nowhere. And even if you do, he’ll come after you
and bring you back.”
At another meal, in another restaurant, another hostage
in Ovett says this: “Those women (at Camp Sister Spirit) are
going to die. It’s only a matter of time. Y’see, Ovett folk don’t
like outsiders and they don’t like anyone who’s different. The

162
 Sister, Fear Has No Place Here

people in Ovett are crazy. They’re all kin, or married to kin.

Once, the phone company installed a phone booth in the cen-
ter of town. Some of the boys just wrenched that booth loose,
and towed it out of town, on top of their car.”
Given the local attitudes, I found it remarkable that
American feminists: lesbians mainly, but not exclusively, are
risking their lives, not as saleable commodities, not for their
own bedroom entertainment, not even for the sake of money,
or careers, but for the right to practice feminism.
Iwanted to meet the Hensons and their supporters,
gauge who’d be there after the media and the federal media-
tors were gone, the initial money depleted, and the national
community’s-attention diverted honorably elsewhere.
Volunteers Lucy, 37, a hairdresser, and a long-time
abortion clinic defender from Sacramento, and Sasha, 23, a
recent college graduate from Pittsburgh, drive us on the back
roads from Hattiesburg to the camp. Our headlights are the
only lights for miles around; there are no streetlights and few
houses. Lucy makes casual conversation. “Yes, we still hear
gunshots around the periphery of the property.” Sasha says:
“The fear we feel is so real, but we’re learning to deal with it.
—
The fear you work it out by keeping busy. This creates a
positive energy. It helps you distance yourself from what can
happen.”
Lucy cuts in to remind us: “Pam Firth, she’s from
Mississippi, she’s here permanently, was shot at 5 times in a
drive-by shooting. She had to jump into a ditch to avoid being
killed. She tried to make a citizens arrest. It took a long while
but now the police are at least charging the man, Marty
Blackwell, with disturbing the peace.”
There we are, myself, and my friends: unarmed visitors
with over-active imaginations, being driven a long distance in
the darkness, without guns, or walkie-talkies, trying to act

163
 PATRIARCHY

safe, not scared. For one moment, I allow myself to feel terri-

fied. It’s not hard. Many warriors have both waged and ulti-

mately lost the “good fight” in Mississippi. In the 1960’s, civil

rights workers were killed, their supporters’ homes

fire-bombed and their businesses ruined.
I think of James Meredith, Medger Evers
Emmett Till,

and Martin Luther King, of Violet Liuzzo, and especially of

James Chaney, Micky Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. I
think of how in 1970, the Jackson city police attacked a black

dormitory at Jackson State, killing two and wounding 12 stu-

dents in their search for a sniper. Early in 1971, 20 acres had
been purchased near Jackson for a separate nation, to be
known as the Republic of New Africa. The FBI and the state
police smashed the residences on the land, and arrested 11
people and sentenced all 1 1 to long prison terms for sedition.

I am carrying a book:Sojourner Truth’s Narrative

it’s

of her Life, recently published by the Schomburg Library of

19th century Black Women Writers. I touch it for courage.
And remind myself of the steadfast bravery of Mississippi
I

black women like Fanny Lou Hamer, Ruby Doris Smith

(Robinson), and Unita Blackwell, who is now the mayor of
Taylorsville, and the extraordinary courage of all their local
supporters.
In 1954, the recently deceased white journalist, Hazel
Brannon Smith, condemned a local sheriff for shooting a
young black man in the back. In 1964, Smith also became the
first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her editorial crusad-

ing. But her newspaper, The Advertiser was boycotted for ,

ten years by local businesses and ultimately forced to close.

In the mid-to late 1980’s, Mississippi mothers Karen
Newsom and Dorrie Singley were forced to ‘kidnap’ their
daughters and/or flee the state to rescue their (allegedly) sex-

abused children from court-awarded paternal custody.

ually
Newsom was jailed in Forrest County. (The Hensons picket-

164
 Sister, Fear Has No Place Here

ed the jailon her behalf.) Dorrie Singley died, while

Underground; her lawyer, Garnett Harrison was disbarred
for her role in the case and no longer practices law or lives in
Mississippi. I half expect the Mississippi state police or the
Klan or Church terrorists to suddenly stop our car, but no
one does, and we proceed on to Camp Sister Spirit.
The moon’s out, and it’s enchanted. Twenty women,
from 10 states, are sitting in an open-air circle in the
at least
sultry southern night. They introduce themselves by name,
age (21 to 65), and sun sign, and when I mention that hours
before I was hit on the head and neck in a freak accident, a
woman immediately materializes out of the darkness and
starts giving me a massage; someone else brings me ibupro-
fen and an ice pack. It’s unimaginable that guns and hate are
trained on women like these.
Camp Sister Spirit Woodstock, Lesbian Nation,
is like
and the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, but it’s also like
Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo, a Goddess Grove, and a Girl Scout Camp. Ah, it’s like
nothing else. It’s as if Diana Rivers’ tale about a tribe of psy-
chic-military lesbian feminist warriors (Daughters of the
Great Star) has come to life, and I’m sitting with them.
(Magically, Rivers herself is here too).
Camp not a young, Butch para-military
Sister Spirit is

encampment. True, there are swaggers, buzz cuts, muscles

and bared breasts galore, but there are women in skirts and
jewelry here too, women in their 50’s and 60’s, mothers and
grandmothers with gray hair, and smiling wrinkles. No one
has come here to die. They are here to support the kind of
grass roots work that feminists have been doing for years.
We’re so naive, so American, we don’t believe we can be
killed for our (feminist) beliefs, not in the land of the free, the
home of the brave.

165
 PATRIARCHY

And yet, Camp Sister Spirit has been under siege since
November, 1993. The Hensons and their supporters have
become high-profile symbols of feminist resistance. Pve wait-
—
ed 27 years to see feminists gathered together not on televi-
sion panels, or at conferences or parties, but on collectively
owned land, taking a stand for what they believe in.
Brenda and Wanda Henson did not have confrontation
in mind when they first bought these secluded, 120 acres. In
fact, they wanted to get away from the harassment they’d pre-
viously suffered on rented campgrounds. Although the
Henson’s have painted the tractor and many trees (!) laven-
der, their version of feminism is essentially one of service.
They’re not “do me” feminists; they “do” food banks and
clothes closets, they counsel battered women and incest and
rape victims. After witnessing numerous prisoner-beatings
and some so-called prisoner “suicides,” including the “sui-
cide” of the son of the President of the NAACP in Mississippi,
the Hensons’ daughter, Andrea Gibbs, led a successful cam-
paign to close the Jones County jail down. (It’s back in busi-

ness, though.)
Camp was created as a feminist and pro-
Sister Spirit
gressive education retreat. The Camp is utterly sober: chemi-
cally, psychologically, and politically. The women are
security-conscious —they have to be. Like nuns, they patrol
the property in pairs, and communicate with walkie-talkies.
Camp been forced, very much against their
Sister Spirit has
will, to build a fence around the property. (“We could have
fed 100 families for ten years with the money the fence is cost-
ing us?”, Wanda Henson says.) Everyone knows where every-
one else is. The women are legally armed. It’s scary, isn’t it,
when women enough to draw
really start loving themselves
boundaries, defend their bodies, minds and way of life from
attack.
Questions abound. Why should the feminist-govern-

166
 Sister, Fear Has No Place Here

ment-in-exile choose Jones County, the historical heart of the

Klan, as it’s first outpost on earth? Why build a future where
you’re not wanted? (Tell that to the Israelis and the
Palestinians). “Why not in Mississippi —the poorest state in
the nation, and the most oppressed,” Wanda says. “It’s where
I was born, it’s where I’m from.” Anyway where, exactly,
are
radical lesbian feminists wanted —
and is land as cheap there
(120 acres for $60,000) as in Ovett, Mississippi?
I you afraid?” “Absolutely,” Brenda says.
ask: “Are
Wanda tells me about her trips to San Salvador and Mexico to
help women and children. On one occasion, most volunteers
had canceled making the trip out of fear. The organizer,
who’d been previously tortured and imprisoned in San
Salvador said to Wanda: “Sister, fear has no place here.”
Wanda can thicken her southern accent until it becomes
thick as the sweetest syrup and I’m tasting it and it’s making
me giddy. The only time that tears interrupted Wanda’s
high-spirited flow was when she told me that “black bodies
still float down the Mississippi rivers. Where are they coming

from? Who’s killed them?” she asks, and she cried for others,
not for herself.
Brenda and Wanda met on January 15, 1985, defending
an abortion clinic in Pascagoula. Each had been married at
16, quickly had two children, and then fled violent husbands.
Brenda had vowed that “if I ever got away from this fool and
got some place safe that I would devote time and energy to
the battered women’s movement.” Wanda was also bat-
tered — by a man and by one lesbian lover, and lost (but re-
gained) custody of her children for being a lesbian. Brenda
and Wanda took the single name of Brenda’s support-
legally
ive mother: Henson.
When the Hensons decided to buy land, with the help of
a grant from Lesbian Natural Resources, they sought to
establish a place of refuge, not confrontation. Harassment,

167
 ;

PATRIARCHY

however, has been persistent: a 9mm bullet hole tore through

their mailbox; two sanitary napkins and a dead female puppy
shot through the stomach were draped across their mailbox;
they received a stream of threatening phone calls and letters
and bomb threats; shots were fired at their front gate, roof-
ing tacks placed on their roads (with 8 tires flattened as a
result); their American and rainbow flags were torn down;
intruders kept appearing on their property, low-flying planes
took photos. “The local shopkeepers won’t sell to us, or they
charge us two to three times the going rate for something,”
Brenda said. A local lesbian supporter’s house was mysteri-
ously burned down three weeks ago. One caller warned:
“expect the KKK to burn a cross on you.”
Combatting violent, visible racism is part of what Camp
Sister Spirit is about. (The Hensons conduct a Passover seder
every year partly because they’re entranced by it’s vision of
freedom— and as their way of taking a stand against anti-
semitism.) Until the media ‘discovered’ Ovett, one drinking
fountain outside the local courthouse was painted white,
the other black. Overnight, both were painted white. The
firsttime the Hensons, Pam, and Shirley, believed the
death-threats might be real, they put out a call for help, Ben
Chaney (yes, the brother of murdered civil rights worker
James Chaney) came and spent the long night with them.
The media descended on Ovett in November of 1993.
By mid-February or 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno had
directed the Department of Justice to mediate the situation.
The Hensons were thrilled that Janet Reno’s mediators both
turned out to be African-Americans; they thought this was
ironic, a comeuppance, a measure of progress and they also —
wondered, wearily, if that had contributed to making the
mediation impossible. (“But who’d better understand how
things are in Mississippi but an African-American, someone
who comes from the state?”, Wanda said.) In a letter to the

168
 Sister, Fear Has No Place Here

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Reno wrote “The

intolerance and bigotry demonstrated by some of the people of
Ovett have no place in this country.” It was likely the first
time in which federal mediators have been called into deal
with violence directed at homosexuals.
Ironically, understandably, despite everything they
know, the Camp is work ‘within the system*.
also trying to
They’ve turned to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,
to local lawyers, and to the Center for Constitutional Rights,
the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, the National Center for
Lesbian Rights, and to the Justice Department. But Camp
Sister Spirit is without protection
totally —and is prohibited,
by both law and custom, from arming itself. Everyone at
Camp Sister Spirit knows they exist in “No-Man’s land”
where, although the law may punish them for trying to protect
themselves, (they cannot carry loaded firearms anywhere but
—
on their own property), the law including the FBI, may not
be able to protect them or punish their persecutors. (The fact
that FBI agents were still active in conducting an investiga-
tion into the death-threats, attempted shootings, and other
intimidation, and the existence of several, ongoing lawsuits,
may partially explain the absence of further or greater vio-
lence).

“The Hensons are feminists who happen to be lesbians,”

Lucy tellsme. “Their deeds speak for them. Despite every-
thing, calls for food, and for help with abuse are starting to
come in. A grandmother gave her pregnant 14 year old grand-
daughter the number here.” Gifts of tools, machine-parts,
vegetables or other staples are made surreptitiously; local,
especially local black supporters, have chosen to remain
anonymous lest they suffer reprisals. (This year’s Memorial
Day Festival drew women from 18 states, all white. Women of
color who’d attended before felt their presence would put
themselves and the camp at even greater risk.)

169
 PATRIARCHY

Sasha tells me that the Hensons’ son Arthur, who is 20,

and “incredibly hard-working and loyal”, is the only man
who permanently lives on the land. “He left to make the
Festival an all-woman space.” Sasha also says that other men,
including a friend of hers from Pittsburgh, have come to help.
“What we’re doing is for a principle. The Camp’s outreach
to the poor infuriates the locals. I’ve always stood up for what
I believe in. If harm came to anyone, it wouldn’t scare any-

one away. We’d be right back there. The fences signal that
we’re here to stay. We’re not going to back down.” Sasha also
points out that, in the ten miles stretch between the towns of
Petal and Ovett, there are about 16 churches. “Local lesbian
support isn’t that good. A lotta the dykes and fags are
Republicans in the closet.” Brenda says that the local folk,
who most stand to gain from the Camp’s presence in the com-
munity, are being lied to and stirred up by “outside agitators”
sent in by the Baptist Church.
—
That the Hensons and their valiant volunteer support-
ers face danger daily can neither be denied nor exaggerated.
The extraordinary willingness of so many presumably ‘ordi-
nary’ and life-loving American women of all ages to share the
Camp’s fate is what’s newsworthy. The fact that thousands
more haven’t been able to set aside their apathy, or narcis-
sism, or terror, is old news. Camp Sister Spirit has received
thousands of letters of support, (from both women and men
who live in every state in the union, and in Europe and Asia
too); they’ve received donations, and volunteers. This is noth-
ing less than a miracle.
Nevertheless, at the recent Gay Pride March in New
York City, men said to the Hensons: “Kick ass, right on, and
here’smy donation.” There were exceptions, but women said:
“Why is the Camp courting such danger? Why not retreat to
some safer place? That would be nice, but women are always
in danger: in our homes, on the street, at work. As we’re

170
 Sister, Fear Has No Place Here

picked off, one by one, most other women

(and men) deny
that things are that bad, or they look the other way when
women, themselves included, are humiliated, harassed, cut
down to overworked, underpaid, raped, beaten or killed.
size,

Refusing to become conscious about one’s oppression doesn’t

make you safe; it just keeps you confused about what’s hap-
pening to you.”
At Camp Sister Spirit, the women are very conscious of
danger: their own, and women’s everywhere. They’ve cho-
all

sen to face the danger together, collectively. At Camp Sister

Spirit, no one will die by her own hand, and no death will go
unmourned or misunderstood.
#
As Wanda told me: “A woman at the farmer’s market
put her hands on me and stood real close to me and said,
‘Honey, what’s your name?’ I told her my name was Wanda
Henson. She said, ‘I thought so. This doesn’t have anything
to do with the fact that you’re different.’ I asked her what she
was talking about. She said ‘What’s happening to you has to
do with the fact that you’re a woman. Look. I’ve been living in
Ovett for 53 years and I’m a woman land owner and I still
have men coming on my property. Keep doing what you’re
doing because you’re doing it for all of us.”

171
 8

Index
A Baby selling, 44-45
Abolitionists, 37-38 Baptist church, 170
Abortion, 35-36, 50 The Basement: Meditations on
clinics, 163, 167 a Human Sacrifice , 93
and fathers’ rights movement, Basic Instinct , 93

49 Battered husbands, 50

and surrogacy, 40 Battered woman’s syndrome,

About Men, 47 122-123
Across the Acheron 93 ,
Battered women, 63, 86-87, 93

Adler case, 76-82 BBC, 108, 130

The Advertiser, 164 The Beauty Myth 56 ,

Aids, 68 Beecher, Catharine, 19-20, 23

Aileen Carol Wuomos: the Beloved 80 ,

Serial Killer , 129- Binegar, Steve, 108

Selling of a
132 Bisexuality, 58

Amazon archetype, 1 Blackwell, Marty, 163

Amazon Odyssey 69 Blackwell, Unita, 164

,

American Psychological Blaming the victim, 81

Association, 5-6, 9, 16-18 Blount, Judge Uriel, 103-104,

Amniocentesis, 40 110-111, 114

Anorexia nervosa, 79 Bly, Robert, 47
Anthony, Susan B., 22, 37-38 Bobbitt case, 10-11

Antifeminist new Right, 48 Boesky, Ivan, 88

Anti-pornography activists, 70 Bonnett, Ed, 101-102

Anti-semitism, 168 Boone, Carol Ann, 112-113

Aphra 68 “Borderline personality,” 76
,

Association for Women in Bowman, Patricia, 91

Psychology, 5-6, 16-18 Breast cancer, 67-68

Asylums, 15-33 list of victims/friends, 69

brutality in, 25-30 Brinckle, Adriana, 16, 23, 25

Atwood, Margaret, 93 Broomfield, Nick, 130
Broward County Corrections
Facility for Women, 114
B Browne, Angela, 93
Baby M case, 11, 35-46, 129 Brutality in asylums, 25-29

172
 ,

Index

names of victims of, 25-30 Class action lawsuit, 8

Bundy, Ted, 110-114 Clinton, President Bill, 58-59
The Burning Bed 92 , Clinton, Hillary, 59
Bush, Neil, 88 Coalition for Family Justice, 77
Butler, Sandra, 69 Commonwealth v. Carbone ,

Buttafuoco, Joey, 88 121

Commonwealth v. Lamrini,

c 121
Callas, Maria, 59 “Communitas,” 70-71
Camp Sister Spirit, 161-171 Co-parenting, 53-54

Cancer in Two Voices 69 Council for Prostitution

,

Cass, Ray, 108-109 Alternatives, 99, 100

CBS/Republic Pictures, 108 “Crazy” label, 10-11

Center for Constitutional Creation myths, 48

Rights, 115, 122, 169

The Criminal Practice Law
Chambers, Jane, 69 Report 8
Chaney, Ben, 168 Crime rates, 86-92
Chaney, James, 164 Custodial siege, 36, 37

Charnes, Suzy McKee, 93

Chattel, 37 D
Chesler, Phyllis, 16, 47, 52, 68 “Daddy’s girls,” 7
books of, 47, 78 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 110
and CFIDS, 9, 69, 124 Date rape, 62
suit against APA, 5-6 Daughters of the Great Star,
Child custody, 37-39, 47-54, 84, 165
73-83 Daughter’s rebellion, 61
battles, 52-53 Davis, Jackie, 103
cases cited, 74 Davis, Phebe B. 19,21,32, 33
contested, 38-39 “Deadbeat dads,” 49
Child sex molestation, 74-75 Death penalty, 111, 114
reports of, 73-82 Death Row, 1 24
symptoms of, 78-79 Dees, Morris, 115
Child support, 38-39, 49 Deming, Barbara, 69
Chronic Fatigue Immune Depression, 19-20
Dysfunction Syndrome Diagnoses, 18
(CFIDS), 9, 69,124 Civil The Dialectics of Sex, 70
rights activists, 164 “Diminished capacity” defense,

173
 Index

122 media-annointed, 55-65

Dixon, Judge Herbert, 75 second-wave, 61, 63
Double standards, 10-11, 87- Femme glitter, 59
92 La Femme Nikita 93 ,

Drum-beating, 48 Films, 92-94

Dukes, David, 115 Firestone, Shulamith, 70
Dworkin, Andrea, 62, 94 Fire with Fire , 61
Firth, Pam, 161, 163
First Amendment, 19
E
Fisher, amy, 88
Equal Rights Amendment, 43
Fisher, Elizabeth, 68
Evers, Medger, 164
Fitzgerald, Zelda, 17
“Flight into mental health,”
F 122
Fake 55
statistics,
111,114-115
Florida,
False memory syndrome, 55
State Supreme Court Gender
Farmer, Frances, 17 Bias Report, 89
Farmer, Millard, 110 Flowers, Gennifer, 58
Fatherhood, 54 Fourteenth Amendment, 121
Fathers’ rights, 35-36, 47-54
Frankfurt, Ellen, 68
activists, 48-49
Freedom Summer, 165
against Chesler, 51-52
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 17, 58
against women, 50 Friedan, Betty, 36
feminist supporters of, 50
Father-wounded sons, 47
FBI, 164, 169
G
Garcia, Inez, 115
Female aggression, 87
Female self-defense, 87
Gay men, 68
The Female Man 93 Gay Pride March, 170-171
,
Gearheart, Sally, 93
Feminism, 8-10, 55-65
Geller, Jeffrey, 9
Feminist academic programs,
“Gender Bias in the Courts,”
12-13
74
Feminist “backlash,” 8, 51, 52
Gender discrimination, 62-63
Feminist government-in-exile, 7
“Gender-neutral” approach,
Feminist-induced hysteria, 55
35, 52, 54
Feminists, 6, 12, 55-65
“Genderquake,” 56, 63
battle fatigue of, 67-71
Gender stereotyping, 54
and homelessness, 70

174
 Index

Genetic narcissism, 44 Hill, Anita, 55, 91

Gibbs, Andrea, 161, 166 Hane, 25
Hillyer,
Gilfoyle,Timothy J, 97-98 Hite, Sher, 59
Gillespie, Cynthia, 93 Homelessness, 70
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 19- Homicide, 92-94
20 “Horizontal hostility,” 57
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 59 Horzepa, Larry, 103, 104
Giroux, Jacqui, 108-109, 112, House Armed Services
132 Committee, 10
“Glass ceiling,” 56 Hunter, Susan Kay, 100
Glazer, Steven, 108-109, 123
124, 129-132
I
called “pimp,” 124
Illness, 8, 9-10, 67-71
described by Wuornos, 129-
Incest, 63, 79,121-122
130
allegations, 50
Goddess archetype, 18
Incestuous fathers, 76
Goddess Grove, 165
Infertility Center of New York,
Goodman, Andrew, 164
40, 46
“Good men,” 61-65
Insane asylums, 19-33
Grahn, Judy, 64
Graziano, Judge Gayle, 109,
110 I
Greer, Germaine, 59 Jackson State College, 164
Les Guerilleres 93 Jarvis, Brian, 105
,

Jenkins, Trish, 101-102, 104,

107, 109, 110, 123-132
H Jensvold, Dr. Margaret, 10
Hagan, Kay Leigh, 9
Joan of Arc, 17
Hamer, Fanny Lou, 164
Johnson, Dr. Miriam, 54
Hamilton, Dr. Jean, 10
Joint custody, 49, 51, 53-54
Harris, Maxine, 9
Jones, Ann Jones County, 161-
Harrison, Garnett, 165
171
Hays, Brian T., 110
Jordan, Susan, 119, 123
The Handmaid’s Tale, 93
Justice Department, 169
Helmsley, Leona, 88
Henry, Dan, 108
Henson family, 161-171
K
Hickey, Eric, 95 Kassewitz, Jack, 105
Keane, Noel, 40, 41, 46

175
 Index

Kennedy, Dolores, 123-124 Protecting the Role of the

Kidnapping, 49 Fathers,” 9
King, Dr. Martin Luther, 164 Marcos, Ferdinand and Imelda,
Krop, Harry, 112 88
Ku Klux Klan, 167, 168 Marcus, Chastity Lee, 104
Marion County Public
Defender, 131
L
Lambda Legal Defense Fund,
McMahon, Elizabeth, 112
169 McMullen, Mrs. H.C., 31-32
.

Media-annointed feminists, 55-

Lathrop, Clarissa Caldwell, 16
Laws for the Protection of the
65
Insane, 31
Men’s rights movement, 48-49
Lee, Kate, 32 and feminists, 50-51
Mental health practitioners, 5-
“Left-wing” fathers’ rights
48-49 6
activists,
Mental patients, 19
Leithold, Dorchen, 9
Lemisch, Jesse, 69
Mercy 94 ,

Meredith, James, 164

Lesbian adoption, 51
Metcalf, Ada, 22
Lesbian feminists, 36, 37, 58
Michael, Cheri, 161
Lesbian Nation, 165
Mikulski, Barbara, 59
Lesbian Natural Resources,
Milkin, Michael, 88
167
Levine, Philippa, 99-100
Miller, Angie and Chuck, 116-
Liuzzo, Violet, 164
117
Lunt, Adeline T.P., 19, 20-21,
Miller, Eleanor, 100
Miller, William, 123
24
Millett, Kate, 93
Lupo, Judge Mary, 111
Molestation, 74

M Moore, Tyria, 107-108, 113

Morgan, Dr. Elizabeth, 75-76,
Mackinnon, Catharine, 120 78-79
Madness accounts, 7, 15-17 The Morning After, 55
Male feminist movement, 48 Morrison, Toni, 80
Male-male rage, 47 Mortal Thoughts 92 ,
Male parenting, 50, 53-54 Mother-Lines 93 ,
Mallory, Richard, 11, 96-97,
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,
102, 103 165
“The Men’s Auxiliary:
Mothers on Trial: The Battle

176
 7

Index

for Children and Custody , Onassis, Jackie, 59

48, 51, 78 “Mothers on On the Issues , 8
Trial: Custody and the Baby Ovett, Mississippi, 161-171
M Case,” 9
Multiple personality syndrome,
P
78
Packard, Elizabeth, 17, 19, 31
Munster, Bruce, 108
Paglia, Camille, 55, 62
Murder, 85-87, 92-94
Pappenheim, Bertha, 1
as self-defense from rape,
Parenting standards, 74
116-123
Pascagoula, Mississippi, 167
Myerson, Bess, 88
Passenger 57, 93
Patriarchy, 11-12, 47-54
N Patriot Games 93 ,

National Center for Lesbian Pedophiles, 63

Rights, 169 “Penis envy,” 6, 18
National Gay and Lesbian Pennell, Mrs. L.C., 23-24, 25,
Task Force, 169 31
National Institutes of Mental Pernoud, Regine, 17
Health, 10 Peterson, Nancy, 104
National Organization for Phelps, Mrs, 37-38
Women, 36 Piercy, Marge, 93
Legal Defense and Education Pitman, Leo, 102
Fund, 36 Plath, Sylvia, 17
Nestle, Joan, 59 Plutonium by-products, 69
Neustein, Sherry, 79 “Politically correct” feminism,
New Jersey Supreme Court, 45 13
Newsom, Karen, 164 Pornography, 63, 121-122
Nolas, Billy, 123 and serial killers, 95
Nolin, Robert, 123-124 Post-partum depression, 19-20
Noncustodial motherhood, 51 Post-traumatic stress syndrome,
Nonfeminist behavior, 57 122
Nussbaum, Hedda, 88 Pralle, Arlene, 106-107, 108,
NYU Law School, 9 124, 129-130
and the media, 113-114
Primary child care, 35
Olsen, Sophie, 25 Prison conditions, 89-90

On a Killing Day 123-124 Pro-feminist men, 61

,

177
 Index

Prostitution, 63, 79, 87 Russell, Alice Bingham, 22-23,

and death 101
rates, 95, 31
incest survivors and, 79 Russell, Diane, 93
suicide and, 100 Russell, James, 110
and violence, 97-105
Psychiatric patients, 10, 18 s
Punitive labelling, 18 Sadawi, Nawal el, 93
Salk, Dr. Lee, 39-40

Q
Quarles, Christopher, 131
San Martin, Jose de, 13
Sawaya, Judge Thomas, 124
A Question of Silence, 92, 105- Schechter, Susan, 93
106 Schneider, Elizabeth, 93, 119,
123
Schomburg Library of 19th
R Century Black Women
Racism, 60-61, 168
Writers, 164 Schwerner,
Radiation exposure, 69
Micky, 164
Radical feminists, 8, 12, 56
Second-wave feminists, 61, 63
“Radical heterosexual femi-
Self-defense plea, 116-123
nism,” 58
by battered women, 86-87
Rape, 116-123
Serial killers, 12, 63, 95-132
crisis centers, 62
Sex discrimination, 118-119
Reno, Attorney General Janet,
Sexing the Cherry 93-94
59, 168-169
,

Sex-role stereotype, 12
Rent parties, 69-70
in psychotherapy, 16
Reproductive rights, 35-46
Sexual harassment, 10
Republic of New Africa, 164
The Sexual Liberals and the
Ridgway, Ric, 131
Attack on Feminism 9 ,
“Right-wing” fathers’ rights
Sexual violence, 63
activists, 48-49
Shalala, Donna, 59
Rimland, Marcia, 8, 11, 73-83
Shedd, Tirzah, 16, 21-22
suicide of, 77
Silence of the Lambs 93
Rivera, Geraldo, 108-109
,

165
Simmons, Darlene, 10, 13
Rivers, Diana, 94,
Singley, Dorrie, 164-165
Roiphe, Katie, 55, 59, 61, 62
Skinheads, 110
Rosenblum, B., 69
Skoloff, Gary, 41
Rubinow, Dr. David, 10
Sleeping With the Enemy 92 ,
Russ, Joanna, 93

178
 1 5

Index

Smith, Hazel Brannon, 164 T

Smith, Ruby Doris, 164 Tailhook scandal, 10
Smith, William Kennedy, 110, Tanner, John, 105, 112
111 “Temporary insanity” defense,
Son-of-Sam law, 124 122
Sons of Silence, 104 Terminator 2, 93
Sorkow, Judge Harvey, 41-42, Thelma and Louise 92 1 1 ,

44,45 Thomas, Clarence, 55

Southern Poverty Law Center, Thomas (Shirley Mae) v. State ,

115, 122 120-121

Sovereign feminist government, Till, Emmett, 164
13 Truth, Sojourner, 164
Speakouts, 63 Tubman, Harriet, 64
Spillman, Df. Emil, 110 Tyson, Mike, 110
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 22
Starr, Margaret, 21
State v. Wanrow 116-123,
u
Underground railway, 64
Steinberg, Joel, 88
“Uterus envy,” 48
Steinem, gloria, 59
Stern, Betsy, 1
Stern, Melissa, 40-42 V
Stern, William, 11, 38, 40-45, Vaginal Politics, 68
88 Validators, 82
The St. John's Law Review ,
8 Van den Ven, Nicole, 93
Stone, Elizabeth T., 16, 19 “Victim feminists,” 63
Strong Mothers, Weak Wives Violence, 97-105, 168-169
,

54
Suffragists,
Suicide,
37-38
68-69
w
Wachtler, Chief Justice Sol, 88
Supreme Court Gender Bias The Wanderground, 93
Report, 99 Walker, Lenore, 93, 123
Supreme Court of Washington, Wallerstein, Dr. Judith, 53-54
116-123 Wanrow, Yvonne, 115-123
Surrogate parenting, 11, 35-36, crime of, 116-118
44-45 Warren, Judge William P., 77,
80
The Weekend 94 ,

Weir, Dr. S. Mitchell, 20

179
 Index

Weisstein, Naomi, 69 Women at Point Zero, 93

Welfare mothers, 53 Women, Money and Power 47 ,

Whitehead, Mary Beth, 11, 35- “Women of the Asylum,” 9

46, 76, 88, 129 Women Respond to the Men’s
arrested, 42-43 Movement 9 ,

denied parental rights, 38 Women’s Creation: Sexual

sold out by feminists, 45 Evolution and the Shaping of
Whitehead, Sara Elizabeth, 40- 68 Women’s Music
Society,
42 Festival (Michigan), 165
Williams, Montel, 108 Women’s studies, 12-13
Williams rule, 111 Women vs. women, 56
Williamson, Marianne, 55, 59, Woodstock, 165
62 Woolf, Virginia, 17
Wilson, Kathy, 161 Writers, 70, 92, 93-94
Wilson, Margaret Isabel, 25, Wuornos, Aileen, 11, 85-132
32 Chester’s Death Row visit to,

Winterson, Jeannette, 93-94 125-129

With Child: A Diary of confession of, 96-97. 107-
Motherhood 50 ,
108and death penalty, 114
Wittig, Monique, 93 and the media, 108-109
Wolf, Naomi, 8, 55-65 number of sex partners of,
against gender discrimination, 105
62-63
and radical feminism, 57-58,
z
64 Zahavi, Helen, 94
Woman on the Edge of Time ,

93
A woman’s Worth , 55
Women, 6-7, 10, 17, 60-62,
87-92, 116-123
in asylums, 15-33
brutality toward,56
“excitable,” 31-32
hatred of, 105-108
and madness, 6, 10, 15-33
in prison, 89-90
who murder, 92-94
Women and Madness , 6, 47

180
 About the Author

Phyllis Chesler was active in the civil rights movement in the

early 1960s and in the radical feminist movement from 1967
on. Since then she has lectured and organized political and
legal campaigns all over the world, and has written many
articles and ^six books, including Women and Madness ,
Women Money and Power and Sacred Bond: The Legacy of
,

Baby M. Now on leave from her professorship at the

College of Staten Island at the City University of New York,
she is editor-at-large for On the Issues Magazine.
$12.95 Feminism/Politics/Women’s Studies

Phyllis Ghesler has remarkable courage: these

are brave and far seeing essays, brilliantly
written and conceived. The essay on women of
the asylum is a any work to come,
model for
superb in its understanding of family betrayal
—
and social condemnation a heroic piece of
insight.
—Kate Millett

both honor and grace in these strong and

There is

beautiful essays. This isn’t feminism for cowards.

Phyllis Chesler
Chesler stands up for real women in trouble, in
pain, hurt by patriarchy’s cruel domination.
These are intellectually exciting, truly visionary essays; and they
may just remind those with feeble convictions and political amnesia
that the women’s liberation movement is deep and wide, stubborn
and brave, hates injustice, loves freedom, and ain’t dead yet.
—Andrea Dworkin

Phyllis Chesler is our leading feminist beacon, reminding us of the

roads we still have to travel, the issues yet to be resolved. She
remains one of the most radical and uncompromising of passionate
voices, in this collection her intelligent analysis and sense of outrage
creating a torch in our present post-feminist darkness.
Jill Johnston —
Assesses sexual inequality in America
changes for th
in challenging
to have stalled. 1

neutrality. . .an

“Heroism is the
important book,
only to be erode
tion. To prevent
whiplash, this constant e
we must take Dr. Chesle
with utmost seriousness i
translate them into action
essential text for our time
—Er