Eve’s Reviews > Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender > Status Update

look about what this is all about, i think it's good that the author doesn't take a firm stance on whether she did it or not because that's not really in the scope of this book, it's more about the sociocultural circumstances around her trial that led to the acquittal when perhaps a different outcome would have befallen a different defendant. also side note i heard they were making a musical out of this and making...

not finished with the book yet, but i was considering just posting a review then updating it because the way this is going these are probably going to be my main thoughts at the end.. though i could be wrong! the repetitiveness can't be taken back tho lol. i feel like this is kind of a north east pop culture phenomenon but i only vaguely knew about it (mainly from spn lol) so its been interesting to get an in depth..

painstakingly, the investigation, the intial inquest, the indictment, the first trial, the appeal, that everything starts to sound the same. when the same thing is brought up to make the same point just at different trials, bright idea, maybe you only need to say it once and not every single time! but the format of the book would not allow that. but we'll see. as you can tell im doing this in updates because i'm...

this is foremost an academic book literally about the legal process so maybe my criticism is off, but it would have been much more of an easy and enjoyable (and therefore more fruitful) reading experience if he had not gone chronologically but instead split the book up into these different ideas, then referenced the case happenings to make the point. as it stands, he goes through every step so thoroughly and...

in the face of scrutiny, it was infuriating to read, so props to the author for illustrating that, but again, you could only be told this so many times before it was rote and dull. i think a large part of this had to do with the structure of the book. it was written chronologically with first an overview of the town, the reconstructed events of the day of the murder, then it proceeded through the trial. i get that...

victorian woman, and her lack of tears or emotion could be attributed to the fact that it was her role to stand strong. so paradoxically, stereotypically, women are weak which is why she couldn't have done it, and she also didn't do it because she was strong? it's this whole idea that a woman's natural disposition in this situation would by hysterics, but she somehow "rose above her gender" to be strong in the face..

but it was actually indicative of something deeper because the prosecution actually backed off because they didn't want to seem like they were prying into her "feminine business," even with no evidence that's what it actually was! But that goes back to the point of the weird gender politics that were going on, that she was seen by the public and even by the personal opinion of the prosecuters as this genteel...

interestingly propping her up as some kind of symbol of the movement, hilariously backward thinking for a progessive movement that there was no way she could have done this because of her femininty and stature within society. but then again, that characterized many movements of its time. Ugh and just a side note here, i was not prepared for them find bloody rags and deflect by saying it was "her cycles" like ew. but.

seen as both unfeminine, for the brutality and violence of it, and also actually feminine, because the amount of whacks it took to take the parents down suggested that they were less strong. it is unclear from historical record how involved lizzie was in the womens movement of the progressive era before or after this whole ordeal began, but organizations like the wctu came flocking to her defense, interestingly...

and xenophobia, that the police force was mostly irish which was interesting because it put them in power for a change, all of this was interesting on its own, the first time, and there is something to be said about hammering in a theme, but at some point, you've got to give up the ghost. The same thing occurred with the gender aspect- Lizzie was an interesting suspect because at the time, the murder was conversely..