Ann Jones - Women Who Kill

acknowledgments

Thanks are in order, for during four years of research I have incurred many debts. I am grateful to librarians and archivists of many institutions: the Historical Societies of Fall River and Worcester (Massachusetts) and New Castle (Delaware) and of the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Delaware, and Massachusetts; the Pennsylvania State Library, the Library of Congress, the libraries of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Cornell University, Rutgers University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Smith College, and the law libraries of Columbia University and the University of Missouri; the San Francisco Public Library, the Ithaca (New York) Public Library, and the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts; the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Massachusetts) and the Board of Trade of New Castle, Delaware. I am indebted to the New York Historical Society and to librarian Barbara Shikler, who cheerfully searched stacks and on fruitless days took me to lunch; to Jane William-son, who put the library of the Womens Action Alliance at my disposal; and to director Abby Schaeffer, who provided work space in The Writers Room. My debt to the New York Public Library is enormous. It offered me a desk in the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room (where I have maintained a typewriter and a toothbrush since 1978), the services of its concerned and patient staff (particularly in the American History and Newspaper divisions), and its incomparable collections. There is simply no place quite the equal of the Library. I couldnt have written this book anywhere else.

Carol Kramer of the New York Daily News and Sherry Brown of the Lafayette(Indiana) Journal and Courier provided information from their files, and the clerks of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the Hampshire County (Massachusetts) Court, the Worcester County (Massachusetts) Court, and the Kings County (New York) Court searched records for me. Dr. Donald B. Hoffman, chief toxicologist of the New York Medical Examiners Office, pored over old cases and offered expert opinion. Only three institutions declined to aid me: the law libraries of Harvard and Yale and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Correction.

It was exciting to me to move out of my self-imposed isolation in libraries and into research on contemporary feminist problems, for other women working on these issues willingly gave me a hand. Betsy Warrior and Del Martin, who led the way in the concerns of battered women, generously advised me. Attorney Elizabeth Schneider, Kathleen Ridolfi, and Elizabeth Bochnak of the Womens Self-Defense Law Project offered enthusiasm, help, and stacks of information. (The Project, in consultation with attorneys across the country, is developing important theoretical approaches to legal representation of women facing criminal charges for defending themselves against physical or sexual assault.) Among others who helped in my research on battered women were Rebecca Allerton of the Tompkins County (New York) Task Force on Battered Women and JoAnn Dunn of the Lincoln (Nebraska) Task Force on Abused Women, Ruth Childers, Betty Evett, Marie de Jong-Joch, Bill Johnson, Mary McGuire, Bernadette Powell, Mary Randolph, Lucy Slurzberg, Cheryl Smith, Judy Sturm, Mary Thom, David Trevallion, and Carol Ann Wilds. Providing information on other topics were Sharon Wiggins, Susan Reed, Odette L. McCartny, and the New York City Department of Correction.

Several attorneys helped me ferret out information or clarify points of law: Fern Adelstein (student), David Burres, Linda Fidnick, John Gambs, Mark Gasarch, Martin Luster, Jay Seeger, Martin Stolar, and especially Susan Thon. Among many friends who offered information, advice, or help were Barbara Bader, Rayna Green, Linda Hamalian, Leo Hamalian, Marvin Kaye, Claudette Kulkarni, David Lowe, Harry Maurer, Elizabeth Meyersohn, John Clair Miller, Lynn Myers, B.J. Phillips, Pat Sackrey, Anne Summers, and Kathleen Swaim. Others who shared their own work with me included Margaret Culley, Sarah Hoaglund, and Robin Morgan. Lynn Campbell, Elisa Evett, Jeffrey Hessing, and Mary Lea Meyersohn criticized sections of one draft or another. Jennifer Josephy, my editor, remained encouraging through it all.

And there are special debts: to Maynard Cat and Big Randolph, two gray friends who sat up many a long night with me and my murderers; to my literary agent and dear friend Frances Goldin; to Ann Ellen Lesser, director of the Millay Colony for the Arts, who made it possible for me to work at the Colony, where this book was finished, then brilliantly dissected my manuscript; to Norma Millay, who offered me her sisters studio and her incisive criticism; to my Allen Room croniesJane Alpert, Susan Brownmiller, Nancy Milford, and Paula Weidegerwho read, ripped apart, comforted, and challenged; and particularly to Susan Brownmiller, who set a model of feminist scholarship for me long before I met her and who became an unstintingly generous colleague; to Joan Silber, who read everything, put to rights many a clumsy passage, and listened to more murder tales than one could want to hear; and to Anne Bowen, who lived with me and this book from its inception and whose mighty intelligence informs every page.

Three decades later, the Feminist Press has brought this edition to print. I thank Amy Scholder, editorial director, and Gloria Jacobs, executive director, of the Feminist Press, and my agent and friend Ellen Geiger of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency for the idea. For the execution, my thanks to managing editor Jeanann Pannasch and her dedicated team: Drew Stevens, Caitlin Williams, Michelle Dennis, Elizabeth Otter, Ruth Brandes, Grace Kiser, Katherine Mancera, and Vaidehi Joshi. For offering research, analysis, and writerly advice, Im indebted to Kit Gruelle, Elizabeth M. Schneider, Sue Osthoff, and Valerie Martin. And for giving me shelter on Ossabaw Island to work on this project again, as she first did thirty years ago, I am grateful to my dear friend Eleanor Torrey West.

For all their help, encouragement, and devotion, my friends are not to be blamed. I committed this book myself.

A SEAMSTRESS NAMED MARGARET NICHOLSON WAITED by the garden entrance to the Palace of St. Jamess for the returning carriage of King George III. In her gloved hands she carried a memoriala written petition to the kingand, concealed beneath it, a long knife. The carriage arrived, the king descended, and Margaret Nicholson pressed forward to deliver her memorial and a stroke of the knife; but the king was saved by his exceedingly fine manners. As he took up the paper he bowed deeply to Miss Nicholson and so avoided the blow. Soon enough, the kings attendant yeomen caught her drift and disarmed her. Under questioning Nicholson claimed she had not meant to kill the king but only to terrify him so that he would grant her petition. The paper, however, was blank. When her landlords testified that Nicholson mumbled to herself a good deal, the king clucked over the poor woman, magnanimously refused to press charges, and committed her temporarily to the custody of one of his messengers who, for lack of anything else to do with her, took her to his home in Half Moon Street. What else was the fellow to do? It was 1786, just a few years too late to pack her off to America, where for years England had been dumping her riffraff.

From the very beginning of colonization, England had seen North America as (among other things) a convenient refuse heap. Abrupt changes in England from a feudal to a commercial economy had produced an enormous class of rootless, migratory poor people who turned for survival to crime. For the most part, their crimes were fairly trivial matters of shoplifting or pickpocketing, but the seventeenth-century Englishmen of property were alarmed and saw to it that the law defined more than three hundred crimes, including even such petty offenses, as major felonies punishable by death. Soon the country seemed to be overrun with felons, but the American colonies provided an out. Enforced transportation of felons to the New World, argued supporters of the policy, offered three distinct benefits: it relieved England of its criminal population; it improved the character of the individual criminals by giving them employment; and it provided labor needed to sustain the colonies.