Women Who Kill

Contemporary Classics - The Feminist Press

by Ann Jones

Through tales of crime and punishment from Lizzie Borden to Jean Harris, this international best seller explores how and why women have killed throughout American history—and what their cases reveal about social prejudices and legal practices that still prevail.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, History, Crime, Sociology, Womens, Research

408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan, Ann Jones is a journalist and activist for womens rights around the globe. She is currently working on a book about women, war, and photography.

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Reviews

[NAT.orious reads ☾ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Women who Kill did not offer the insights I was hoping for. I thought this was a case psychoanalysis kind of thing, addressing racial discrimination in the justice system in particular since it's based in the US. What I got instead was an overall analysis of vvhite women in the justice system - which, although an important and under-discussed topic, was not what I was expecting. I'm glad I bought a used copy in which a previous owner already highlighted essential arguments so I did get the gist without the meandering around.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I. The American legal system: grotesque and ludicrous double standard between white men and everybody else, with modifiers for class, race, gender, and whether or not you have connections (see Borden, comma, Lizzie). This is especially clear in (although by no means unique to) the definition of "self-defense," which assumes two able-bodied men of roughly the same size. Not a woman and a man who may be a foot or more taller than she is and outweigh her by a hundred pounds.

II. Most women who kill are women in long-term abusive relationships with men who will not let them leave, women who have called the police, who have gotten restraining orders, who have done what they're "supposed" to do. (And if battered women have another option, any other option, the evidence shows they will take it rather than resort to homicide.) These are women whose boyfriends or husbands have threatened to kill them and in some cases have actually tried it, above and beyond the usual repertoire of battering and intimidation. Sometimes the police are still on the scene, having allegedly resolved the situation, when the man attacks again and the woman shoots. The especially horrifying part is the extremely clear evidence that if these women do not kill, they will be killed. As Jones says more than once, the question isn't, why don't the women leave? The question is, why won't the men let them go?

III. Otherwise, most women who kill, kill for the same reasons that men of their class, race, and age-group kill. They're desperate, frustrated, angry . . . and they happen to have a loaded gun in their hands at the wrong time.

IV. But then there's the case of Velma Barfield, who died by lethal injection for poisoning a number of people, including her mother. And here's where the problems start.

Problem A, since I seem to be writing this review in outline form, is the death penalty. The death penalty is totally problematic and I don't have a good answer, because the actual answer is drastic and draconian reform of our entire legal system on every level. You can't reform the death penalty if you don't deal with prison overcrowding. You can't deal with prison overcrowding if you don't address the problems of sentencing that sends all those prisoners to already overcrowded prisons. And you can't address the problems of sentencing if you don't want to tear apart the process that decides which people get tried for which crimes and why some people tried for the same crimes get radically different outcomes, which means questions about arrests, questions about public defenders, questions about prosecutors who are more concerned about their win-loss record than upholding the law . . . I think the adversarial model on which our legal system is built is incredibly, ludicrously, tragically wrong. As an example, the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold refused to be interviewed, on the absolutely correct advice of their attorneys that they would make themselves liable to prosecution. That's wrong--and I'm not talking about the Harrises and the Klebolds. In any situation where a crime has occurred, the first obligation of the legal system should be to find out the truth. And when the legal system itself is preventing that from happening--and Columbine is not the only case where that happens--then the legal system desperately needs reform. In the same way, and while I'm standing on this soap box, defense attorneys are absolutely obligated to do the best they can for their clients, but when did we get that twisted around to mean that it's okay (as in, not illegal and/or grounds for disbarment) for a defense attorney to work to get an acquittal for a client he knows is guilty? Because they do it all the time. And we all know it.

"Win-loss" is a very different cognitive structure than "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," and until we change that--which I don't see happening any time soon--legal or penal reform is going to be partial and only semi-successful at best. Probably not even that much.

And that's leaving aside the poison of privilege and the things people (mostly white, mostly men, but not exclusively) will do to keep the privilege they have, instead of understanding that it's poison. Privilege also works on a win-loss model, on the idea that if someone else wins privilege, you automatically lose yours. So you can't get anywhere until you can shift that paradigm to one of abundance, to the idea that there's enough to go around.

Problem B, in the meantime, is, as Jones very rightly says, the standards. Do we judge women by the same standards as men? How do we figure out what "the same standard" means when it's obvious (see above re: self-defense) that the identical standard is grossly unfair? (In the same way, do we--should we--judge people, men or women, living in extreme poverty, by the same standards we judge men or women living in the rarefied heights of Manhattan penthouses?) What is fair and what isn't?

I agree with Jones that women are often judged more harshly than men, partly because of the public perception that they are routinely judged less harshly, and thus in individual cases judges and juries feel they have to be harsh in order to correct the perceived (i.e., imaginary) imbalance, and partly because there are extenuating factors that you can't see if you look at a woman as if she were a man. Why, yes, it is reasonable and justifiable force for a 5'2" woman to use a gun against a 6'1" man who has beaten her up routinely for months or years, who has stalked her and harassed her and threatened her, even if it wouldn't be reasonable and justified for another 6'1" man who wasn't trapped in an abusive relationship to do the same thing. We have overwhelming evidence (Jones lists cases, and I don't even know how many more cases than that there must be) that if she doesn't use the gun, he will kill her, either intentionally or simply because he kicks her in the wrong place or punches her one too many times.

But Velma Barfield. Velma Barfield grew up in abject poverty. She was sexually abused by her father. She ended up addicted to pain-killers after a hysterectomy and was hospitalized several times for depression and drug overdoses. And she murdered her mother, her boyfriend, and two elderly people who had the misfortune to be married to people Barfield was hired to take care of. (She may also have murdered her second husband, although she denied it.) When there was a discernible motive for her murders, it was financial fraud--to cover up her habit of forging checks for drug money. One of her murders had no motive that even Barfield could find. In prison she detoxed from her addictions, became a born-again Christian, and was apparently in every way an admirable and valuable human being. So where do you draw the line between extenuating factors and personal responsibility? She murdered to fund her drug habit, but her drug habit could, by North Carolina law, be an extenuating circumstance to mitigate capital punishment. Barfield off drugs, and in the structured environment of a prison, was clearly not the same as the person who poisoned her mother with arsenic, but does that mean she should be exculpated of the murders she committed? The then-governor of North Carolina, James B. Hunt, Jr., chose not to commute her sentence for largely political reasons--although the families of two of her victims urged against commutation, so it wasn't just that he was running against Jesse Helms for the Senate. Should she have been put to death? If the death penalty is simply wrong, then obviously she shouldn't have been. That's easy. But if there are cases where the death penalty is justified, I'm not sure Barfield is a case where it wasn't. Okay, wow, syntactic scramble. What I mean is, Barfield murdered four (or five) people in cold blood--by arsenic, which is a terrible way to die--in order to hide another crime (forging checks) which was committed in order to fund her drug habit. (And, of course, in one case she seems to have committed murder for no reason at all.) If we admit the hypothesis that the death penalty can be a justifiable sentence, how can we commute Velma Barfield's sentence of death?

***
V. Obviously, this book made me think. In our current national zombie apocalypse, it is more than ever valuable and important reading, because what it's talking about more than anything else is the way in which patriarchy will defend itself, in which the men in power will continue to wiggle out of having to admit that all citizens are equal under the law and all have equal right to protection against (specifically) assault, whether the person doing the assaulting is a person in a domestic relationship with the victim or not. This is an excellent overview of the (appalling and infuriating) history of women in the American legal system and a sharp reminder that women (and other people who aren't white men) cannot trust blindly that the system will be fair to them. The system isn't necessarily set up to be fair to anyone who isn't a white man, and it is full of loopholes (i.e., "personal discretion") that allow its fairness to be adjusted to suit the views of police officer, prosecutor, judge . . .

Jones writes clearly, incisively, and with devastatingly sharp analysis. I didn't agree with her on all points (which isn't a criticism, just a fact), but I was fascinated throughout. And even though the book was originally written in 1980, it is (sadly) not an iota less relevant today.

[Lois · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting.
Unfortunately this really only applies to white women. The author uses incomplete statistics for Black Women and it's frustrating.
A Black Woman is killed every 21 hrs by a domestic partner. The statistics for white women are considerably kinder. This author just takes raw numbers without acknowledging how racism impacts the way data like this is collected for POC. So the statistics about white women are accurate but not for Black Women. Also no discussion of the relationship between black citizens and police, which also result in under reporting.
I'm tired of 'feminists' doing this to Black and POC marginalized genders and actingine what applies to white women applies to all women, when that's ludicrous.
Feminism is also about addressing how white women are the white men of the feminist movement.

[Susanna Sturgis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I sold Women Who Kill as a feminist bookseller in the 1980s but didn't read it because customers found it on their own. Almost 35 years later, I found it for myself. I was reviewing Alexis Coe's Alice + Freda Forever, about a young woman who murdered her ex-girlfriend in Memphis in 1892. I wanted some historical background on "women who kill." I got what I was looking for -- and a lot more besides.

After its initial publication in 1980, Jones added a afterword focusing on Jean Harris's killing of her lover, the "Scarsdale Diet doctor," Herman Tarnower, for the paperback edition in 1981. That case was much in the news at the time; the publisher requested the addition. For the Beacon Press edition in 1996, the afterword was expanded into a full section on "Women's Rights and Wrongs." The Feminist Press edition of 2009 includes a lengthy and excellent introduction that, among other things, examines cultural and criminal trends since 1980. Perhaps the most significant is that, contrary to the dire predictions of the anti-feminists, the women's liberation movement has not led to an upsurge in violent crime by women. When women killed their husbands, it was generally because they could see no other way out of a bad, usually violent marriage. As women's economic options have increased, divorce laws have been liberalized, and support networks have developed for battered women, women are far less likely to murder their abusive male partners.

Women Who Kill is not just about women who kill: it's about how women who kill are treated in the courts and by the press. This evolves over time and is most definitely affected by the murderer's class and ethnicity. Before well into the 20th century, no woman charged with murder was ever tried by a jury of her peers. Women couldn't serve on juries, they couldn't vote, and until fairly recently they didn't appear as defense counsel. Often the trials became touchstones for male anxiety about the changing role of women. Verdicts and sentences were often influenced as much by what male juries and male judges thought about "feminine nature" as by the evidence presented. In her in-depth discussion of the famous Lizzie Borden trial, Jones makes a good case that Lizzie was acquitted primarily because the men simply couldn't believe that a woman of her class could have done it.

The more recent sections of Women Who Kill direct our attention to the issue euphemistically these days called "domestic violence." Despite popular fascination with women who kill their husbands, the more common scenario is that of men who kill their wives and ex-wives, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, usually in spite of the women's attempt to seek protection from the legal system.

Jones doesn't discuss the case that prompted me to read her book, that of Alice Mitchell, who murdered her beloved Freda Ward in 1892, the same year that Lizzie Borden did or didn't kill her father and stepmother. No surprise there: in 1980, the case was barely on anyone's radar. The absence of women killing women from this book is noteworthy but completely understandable -- a historian is limited by her sources, and what was barely acknowledged in public rarely makes it into print. But I'd still love to hear Ann Jones's take on the Mitchell case, and especially on its handling by the courts and the press.

[Nick Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very interesting - unexpectedly so. I assumed when I bought this that it'd be a fairly typical true crime book - a list of female murderers, details of their crimes, case studies of this nature (and as this is a fat book, I expected there to be many discussed). What this in fact aimed to do, however, was discuss the questions of *why* women kill, and place this in a historical context.

Jones does this from a feminist viewpoint, and raises a number of interesting points whilst doing so. It's approached from a US-centric point of view, and there is some justified criticism that the author concentrates on white women almost exclusively (there is a lack of evidence for other races due to how the press focussed historically on white women and recorded little detail about black women), but there are some very insightful discussions about women's place in American society over the past two or three hundred years - their expectations, rights and responsibilities.

It was, however, long. It was patchy in places, and I guess I was left with the impression that focussing on a relatively small number of cases - no matter how illustrative they were supposed to be - meant I was less convinced than I would have been by an analysis based less on anecdotal evidence and more on statistical facts. Thought-provoking though.

[6655321 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think when people say books are timeless they are usually lying. This isn't to say that books should never be re-released (and obviously by the four star review i think this book deserves to be released again in the feminist classics imprint) but that often books age poorly (because situations change). What is impressive about Women Who Kill is how much of the content is still relevant. Partially because Ann Jones very artfully constructs a history (any reviewer who is expecting a lurid true crime sort of mass market based on the title will be dissapointed) that explains the agency of women who chose to kill (for reasons that can be called better or worse in some cases) and because her work is grounded (largely) in history it lacks the sort of dated feel that many books get (when their hot topics suddenly run cold due to a new set of circumstances). What particularly helps is how Jones frequently turns phrases so artfully for example "The Great War slaughtered men, Progressive ideals, and optimism. It also enlisted in the labor force women who afterward had to persuaded to return to housewifery, an occupation stripped by industrial technology of all but the most menial drudgery"(277) or "If the rewards of being a good wife and mother- the illusory vaginal orgasm, gold stars, flowers once a year on Mother's Day- seemed paltry, the penalties for being a bad woman were not." (282). I chose these quotes because they struck me as artfully summing up the Feminine Mystique yet somehow being able to be a description of a time rather than a condition which makes the whole work age better. There are quibbles i have with the project (her account of "seduced" women migrating into prostitution manages to drag out the trope of the disease ridden prostitute dying in an overcrowded hospital, a canard that is historically disprovable but was definitely rhetorically real for a period of time) but I think this is an impressive book (and for its relative age one that aged very gracefully). Obviously it has shortcomings (it is a book about ciswomen and i think talking about the ways violence impacts transwomen in similar ways could be grafted on to the account without unnecessarily broadening the scope) but for the deconstruction of "battered mens syndrome" as a distraction from the reality of domestic abuse (as a thing that had a historically horrifying impact by drawing attention away from a serious problem much like the MRA movement) alone is an important section. I guess it's late to say this but obviously this book is extremely triggering but is (provided that isn't an issue) really worth the read.

[Joan Colby · Rating 3 out of 5]

A scholarly study of women who kill. Some for revenge, some for profit like Belle Gunness who advertised for handymen/investors and murdered them. Others killed their relatives including their children for the insurance money. The book relies on anecdotes which can become repetitious. The prevailing view of women killers in earlier days was that uterine inflammation rendered them insane. Social isolation, poverty and abuse were factors, but were not commonly considered. Many of the women who killed had been seduced as young girls, then abandoned. Often they endured pregnancy and abortion at the hands of an older lover. One can see how desperation would drive them to strike back. By the late 19th century, women convicted of killing were imprisoned rather than burned at the stake which was the previous penalty—especially for murdering a husband, a crime known as petit treason, which indicates the position in which women were held. In general, the weapon of choice was arsenic which was readily available in preparations to kill rats. While this book is interesting enough, it never really gets into the psychology of the individual women.

[D.K. Greene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book wasn't exactly what I was expecting. It did have the biographies of women killers, but primarily focused around the inequality of the legal system that both caused women to feel that they had no choice but to murder, and protected those who killed in cold blood from prosecution due to their being "ladies".

The stark contrasts between classes, public opinion and time period of history was incredibly interesting.

[Maureen Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of good information, some of it quite interesting buuut I really wish they would have organized the information and chapters a little better. Things seemed pretty sporatic and it was hard to keep up with some of the information. I think this is something I'd rather watch as a documentary.

[Kristen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected this book to be more about what the women actually did. Like a description of each woman, their lives and what led them to murder and what those murders entailed. Instead it was based more on social factors that cause women in general to commit crimes.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this on my shelf for years and assumed it to be a compendium that could be subtitled, "Profiles of Female Serial Killers". It is quite different being an overtly feminist view on women who kill through the ages, particularly those who kill men. From the Foreword:

If this book leaves the impression that men have conspired to keep women down, that is exactly the impression I mean to convey; for I believe that men could not have succeeded as well as they have without concerted effort.

It's a wild ride: Witch burnings, women so idolized that capitol sentences cause hangmen to resign ("...ladies remained the same pretty, foolish, harmless, and despised creatures.."), the scorned woman, legalized corporal punishment from their husbands, greater equality under the law bringing in women for execution, then the awareness of the complexity of long-term abuse leading to a murderous act. (I recall this being "in the cold of passion" in another book I can't locate.)

In the 1860s:

Feminists...found fault with the man-made legal system. They campaigned for woman suffrage specifically so that women would have a say in formulating the laws under which they were forced to live. They argued women should be tried by a jury of their peers.

One case apparently caught in the violent birth of this new view of women who kill was Alice Crimmins. Crimmins was charged with killing her two children, 5-year-old Eddie and 4-year-old Alice Marie, known as Missy, who went missing on July 14, 1965. After numerous criminal trials and appeals, Crimmins was convicted of the manslaughter of Missy. No evidence could be found tying anyone to the deaths. Crimmins was followed and covertly recorded by the New York Police Department for three years, before finally being charged and going to trial in 1968. She was found guilty of the manslaughter of Missy and sentenced to five to twenty years' imprisonment. This conviction was overturned on appeal, and in 1971 a second trial resulted in Crimmins being convicted of the first-degree murder of Eddie Jr. and the manslaughter of Missy. In 1973 both convictions were overturned, before Crimmins was re-convicted of the manslaughter of Missy in 1973. She was paroled in 1977. The Casey Anthony trial has been compared by some in the media to the Crimmins trial.

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know why it is (maybe I have some theories, wont get into here), but feminist texts from the 70s through 90s just seem better written, researched, and reasoned. I picked this up because somehow it came up in an unrelated search in the library catalog and I liked the title (and the last book on women serial killers I tried to read was one of my rare DNFeds, due to the rabid, hysterical maleness of the author--he was SEETHING). Every single "battered woman," even if she only did it because she was scared, felt out of options, or regrets it now, who has turned the tables on her piece of shit abuser husband or boyfriend is a hero and absolutely did the right thing. Too bad the law isn't made for women.

[Shirley LeRoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I learned from this book which is written more like a textbook on the history of women in crime is that the laws are decidedly biased against women when it comes to justice and abuse.
Although we have put more laws on the books to protect women from abusive husbands and boyfriends, the law rarely is enforced. And then when the woman does take things into her own hands, the criminal justice system which is run by men for men favors the abuser and not the victim, and it is the woman who most often ends up in jail.
Tedious reading, but a real eye-opener nonetheless. Seems nothing much has really changed.

[H. Woodward · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should like this. I love history, especially US Criminal history. However, this is a tome filled with minute details that are not of tremendous interest. I don’t need the entire story of the attorneys involved in each case, a summary understanding of qualifications would be sufficient. Sad. So much potential here.

[Hillary Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

some interesting stories in history but a little dense and repetitive - liked the other books I’ve read on the subject more. wish it was more personal/in depth on the women themselves not just their crimes

[mari · Rating 3 out of 5]

i felt like this honestly didn't need to be as long as it was. especially when it felt like she would repeat the same thing over and over. like i definitely think she could've written an essay with the same information and have it be a) less of a slog and b) still informative

[Kathleen Einwich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. I read this in the early 80s, along with "Women and Madness" by Phyllis Chesler, and "The Female Man" by Joanna Russ. I went off on a tear....great books, all.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative.
thanks Glen

[Hanana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked how Jones discussed historical context alongside the lives of the women she analyzed. I also thought she included a good mixture of well-known and obscure cases.

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of the patterns of murder done by women - and men's reactions. I'd love to see the study extended past the 1980s, and to have a study like this done in other countries.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grabbed this thinking that it would be a catalogue of female killers, but what I got is an extensive book on not so much why women kill, but how the law, culture, and society treat women that kill. This book has an unapologetic feminist angle that the author is quite upfront about saying, and is extremely comprehensive and flat out dense. Feminism, classism, religion, race - all are examined here. A must read for anyone who has ever expressed an interest in criminal justice, history, or second wave feminism.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Women Who Kill was at first confusing (what did the arrival of women in colonial America have to do with murder, I wondered?) but gets better and better as the individual examples coalesce to form a narrative about women driven to murder. For sure, there are valid criticisms: Jones is definitely not an unbiased observer, and most of the women murderers are presented as being driven to do so by abusive or drunkard spouses, with the women having no other recourse. Lizzie Borden is the first woman to get unsympathetic treatment from Jones, and ironically she was acquitted. The tale of Belle Gunness, new to me, also stands out, but is riveting for its sheer oddity. Was murder in the 19th century more difficult because firearms were a much less developed technology, or was it incredibly common and poisonings merely went under the radar most of the time? The reader is left to wonder and feel a little bit safer with modern forensics.

Biases and an abundance of good yarns aside, this is a fascinating look at how attitudes towards women and crime change over time, and how the attitudes of a male-run justice system, constantly reflecting the society of its day, determine the accused women's treatment and the outcomes of their trials.

[Juliana Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I'm interested in true crime, and while the book does contain those stories,it's really a feminist argument. Jones's basic thesis is that violent crime committed by women is rooted in inequality, and that inequality also influences the treatment of violent female offenders in their trials and sentencing. She begins with the Puritans and other colonists, examining some early murder cases (such as indentured servants murdering their illegitimate babies in attempts to conceal their guilt of the crime of adultery), and works her way through the 1930s. Then she skips ahead for a very detailed and well-argued examination of battered women in the 1960s and 1970s, and how self-defense laws were applied (or failed to be applied) to them when they fought back against their abusers. I don't agree with everything Jones says in this book-- for example, she assumed that Lizzie Borden murdered her parents, despite the lack of physical evidence and Borden's acquittal-- but her analysis is extremely interesting.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a lot of crime fiction, so I thought I would enjoy this. Unfortunately, it was a little too "text book" for me. The tales of the injustices perpetrated against women were definitely thought provoking, but were presented so matter of factly that it was hard to get into the book. It wasn't until over half way through, when the case of Lizzie Borden was presented, that I started to enjoy what I was reading.

This book certainly points out the inconsistencies in sentencing women throughout the past few hundred years. Political considerations swing from overly harsh punishments, to much too lenient. It was definitely eye opening. Unfortunately, this book was not very exciting to read.

[Celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked the book up thinking it was about cold blooded women killers(i.e. Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde).

A better title of the book might women who kill due to being opressed and being judged overly harshling by men in powrer.

It is a history of women who have killed in American history. The writer makes the best case for her thesis for women in colonial times who were indentured servents/slaves and in modern times women who kill abusive men in domestic relationships.

Some of the women who poisened their husbands in the nineteenth century I thought were killers.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a Gender Studies class and found it pretty interesting. The author uses the crimes of women who have committed murder to reveal class, gender, and racial prejudices. Not a light read.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historical accounts of women throughout history who overcame their feminine station and engaged in the masculine act of murder.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brooke and I stayed up late reading this to each other - so terrifying and disturbing. But I had great nightmares about it.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely fascinating. Shows the reasoning and the motives behind why women are driven to murder and how the law has and continues to hinder equal protection and equal justice. Highly recommended.

[Greynomad · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am still trying to figure out why she even wrote this book but the author is the author………...