"I loved Joe, but I had to shoot him": homicide by women in turn-of-the-century Chicago.

• Author: Adler, Jeffrey S.

INTRODUCTION

During a 1914 murder trial, Chicago's State's Attorney Maclay Hoyne observed that "while the honest woman, or the average woman, is less prone to commit crime than men ... when a woman does become a criminal, she sinks lower and goes further in brutality and cruelty than the other sex." (1) Like many of his contemporaries, Hoyne believed that women were, by nature, less violent than men. (2) He felt that a homicidal woman tended to be particularly dangerous precisely because she deviated from her natural role in society. Few modern commentators embrace so biologically deterministic a view. (3) More often, scholars have argued that culturally defined roles have discouraged women from engaging in violent behavior and thus account for the modest proportion of homicides, typically between five percent and fifteen percent, committed by women. (4) According to this view, women have been socialized to suppress anger. (5) But some social scientists have also suggested that the loosening of traditional gender roles has produced "an increase in male-like criminality." (6) Charting a "rising tide of female assertiveness," one criminologist has described a "`masculinization' of female behavior," specifically with regard to criminality. (7) As gender roles have changed, this argument posits, differences in men's and women's criminal behavior have narrowed.

Cultural and social conventions about women's "proper" roles were in flux during Maclay Hoyne's lifetime. (8) As Chicago became a major urban and industrial center, economic opportunities for women burgeoned: hundreds of thousands of women entered the city's factories and shops, tens of thousands entered the growing clerical sector of the local economy, and a small but enormously influential group of Chicago women entered the professions. (9) Both locally and nationally, women enjoyed unprecedented social, economic, and cultural influence, helping to challenge long-standing assumptions about patriarchy and "natural" spheres. For example, women gained greater property rights, greater power to dissolve marriages, and greater claims to maintain custody of their children during this period. (10)

This essay examines homicidal women in Chicago between 1875 and 1920, a period that saw the city's population soar from 401,081 to 2,701,705. (11) It focuses on the circumstances that led women in turn-of-the-century Chicago to use lethal violence. Both the homicide rate for women and the proportion of homicides committed by women rose during this era. The homicide rate for women increased four-fold, slightly exceeding the overall level of increase in the city's homicide rate, while the proportion of homicides committed by women spiked by nearly one-third. (12) The latter figure is particularly significant, since it indicates that women committed a growing proportion of a skyrocketing total. Nor did lethal violence by women move in lockstep with lethal violence by men; the most homicidal years for women were not necessarily the most homicidal years for men. The nature of women's violence, however, changed in two important ways between 1875 and 1920. Although each reflected a shift in gender relations, neither signaled the demise of gender inequality.

1. PATTERNS OF HOMICIDE BY WOMEN, 1875-1920

   According to local police records, women committed 9.2% of Chicago homicides between 1875 and 1920, with the proportion rising from 6.7% during 1875-90 to 10% of all of the city's homicides during 1910-20. (13) Infanticides and deaths from botched abortions, which midwives typically performed, accounted for approximately one-third of the homicides committed by women. Local law enforcers, however, usually ignored such deaths until the early twentieth century, and even after 1900 they pursued these cases erratically. (14) Thus, it is impossible to measure the number of infanticides with precision and hence to chart changes in this kind of homicidal behavior. If the analysis is confined to clearer, less socially constructed forms of violence, police records indicate that women committed 325 homicides between 1875 and 1920, accounting for 6.5% of Chicago homicides. Although the proportion of homicides committed by women rose sharply during this era, increasing from 5.5% before 1890 to 7.2% after 1910, the gap between men's violence and women's violence remained a chasm. But even though men continued to commit the lion's share of the city's homicides, homicidal women were not rare. More than twice as many Chicagoans, for example, died at the hands of local women as died from labor violence in the city renowned for its bloody strikes, and Chicago women claimed more victims than Chicago policemen during this era.

   Gender-based conventions shaped women's violence throughout the period, with most of the homicides revolving around women's roles as mothers and wives. Relatives and lovers accounted for nearly eighty percent of women's victims, compared with only twenty-seven percent of men's victims, and the figure for women fluctuated little over time. (15) While Chicago women gained legal, cultural, and economic autonomy during this era, they continued to kill in gender-specific ways. Put differently, women engaged in homicidal behavior at one-fifteenth the rate of men, but when they resorted to violence, they overwhelmingly killed relatives or suitors. In turn-of-the-century Chicago, men killed a greater number of loved ones than women, committing 3.8 times as many spouse homicides, 3.4 times as many non-spouse relative homicides, and 7.4 times as many jealousy-related homicides as women. But when women engaged in homicidal behavior, they were 3.5 times more likely to kill a spouse, 3.8 times more likely to kill a (non-spouse) relative, and 1.8 times more likely to kill a lover. Reflecting the same pattern, 77% of the homicides committed by women occurred in the home, compared with 27.6% of those committed by men. Local law enforcers could take some comfort from the fact that violent Chicago women seldom struck in public settings or preyed on strangers. Chicago husbands, fathers, and brothers, however, no doubt shared Maclay Hoyne's fear of violent women.

   Although the city's homicidal women killed loved ones and disproportionately killed in the home, their violence assumed many different forms, depending on the relationships among the participants. In nearly all cases, the homicides resulted from deep emotional attachments, but the violence directed against lovers, not surprisingly, differed significantly from that directed against children or spouses. Most of the killings by women, for instance, appear to have been premeditated. Women typically bought or borrowed weapons, made post-murder arrangements, and some even anticipated the arguments that they would offer to policemen, judges, and juries when planning the murder of their lover. (16) But the weapons, plans, and explanations depended on the victim. Louise Dimick's preparation for the 1920 murder of her lover proved to be particularly meticulous and focused. Fearing that her younger lover would spurn her, the thirty-five year old Dimick worked long and hard to ready herself for the murder of Thomas Schweig. She purchased a revolver, carefully tracked Schweig's movements, and labored to improve her aim. For a month before she killed her lover, Dimick practiced shooting in a vacant lot adjacent to her rooming house, using "one of Schweig's discarded derby hats as a target." (17)

2. MURDERING MOTHERS

   Children accounted for the second largest category of victims, even when infanticides are excluded from the category. More than one woman killer in five was a murdering mother. The women who killed their children were remarkably similar to one another. First, relatively few poor women killed their children--though poor women probably committed most infanticides. Only ten percent of murdering mothers were from families headed by an unskilled worker, compared with fifty percent of the women whose victims were not their children and forty-one percent of male killers. More than a third of homicidal mothers were from households headed by skilled workers, and an additional fifteen percent were from white-collar-headed households. In short, unlike the women who killed their newborn infants, the women who killed their children were not mired in poverty.

   Thus, they did not resort to filicide as a family survival strategy in an attempt to marshal scarce family resources for other children as some "evolutionary psychologists" have argued. (18)

   Second, the Chicago women who killed their children were not particularly young. The average age of murdering mothers was thirty-three. Seventy-five percent were over thirty and forty-two% were over forty. By comparison, the average age for Chicago women whose victims were not their children was 30.2, and the average age for all Chicago killers between 1875 and 1920 was 30.8. Just as poverty seldom drove Chicago mothers to kill their children, these filicides were rarely committed by young women struggling with the new pressures of parenthood.

   While murdering mothers tended to be relatively older, their victims were quite young. Most, in fact, were very young children. Nearly two-thirds were under five, and more victims were under the age of one--but not neonatal--than any other single age. The average age for the victims of murdering mothers was 4.7 years, whereas the average age of children murdered by fathers in Chicago during this period was 6.5 years. (19) Forty percent of these women killed only one child, and even when the death toll included more than a single victim, the women often spared the lives of relatively older sons and daughters.

   The Chicago women who killed their children during this era typically explained their acts in great detail. A few women, enraged that their husbands favored children from previous marriages, killed stepchildren. One such killer asked her husband, "did not...