In the 1990s, the wisest rejoinder to Adler lies somewhere between the poles of reaction and counterreaction, between male prejudice and feminist sentiment. Women’s equality cannot “cause” women to be aggressive, destructive, or coercive, because they had that capacity all along. Female aggressive strategies alter according to cultural practice, according to how women are permitted to channel their impulses. Girls today not only live in a generally more violent society, but their models are more assertive, in every realm from female rock to primetime TV to movie stars. The capacity to be physically forceful and volubly angry is much more evident to these girls, as it is to young women in other Western nations. Finnish psychologist Vappu Viemero has documented changes in girls’ aggression over the last decade in her country and found the gap between boys’ and girls’ aggression to be narrowing considerably. “In some of the aggression measures, the girls score even higher than the boys,” she notes. At the level of role playing and “doing gender,” the shift for girls from indirection to straightforward conflict appeared to be a good thing to Viemero. “Aggressive behavior seems to be something positive in girls’ social setting, something that makes the girl feel powerful, strong, and makes her popular.”
The severity of aggression committed by girls, whether indirectly or in-your-face, has less to do with shifting sex roles than with broader social stress. Violence by either sex intensifies in times of transition—such as in wartime, or during an upheaval of cultural norms. At the end of the twentieth century in North America, women are changing their patterns of aggression, but they are also, at the margins, engaging in violence more intensely. When Mohammad observed that prison reflected the world, she did not mean the feminist world, she meant one in which poverty, drug abuse, and family dissolution are tilting us all toward chaos.
In New York City in 1994, girls committed one third of all serious offenses—assault, robbery, harassment—against teachers. In 1991, they were arrested for more than one thousand felonies. Los Angeles now counts about six thousand female gang members, and research on the gangs finds that girls are engaging in vandalism, narcotics, assault, battery, rape, burglary, extortion, robbery, and murder. Perhaps most significantly, the shift is visible across the demographic landscape, from New York and L.A. to suburbs of Canadian cities like Toronto. “There’s an increase in the intensity of violence,” says Toronto youth worker Lew Golding. “Before, a girl might have pulled hair. Now she has a knife. It’s not necessarily more, it’s what they’re doing. We see girls who had to transfer schools because other girls were going to beat them up. That’s leading them to form gangs, and then they discover the power, [which is] something the guys have already been through. Girls are getting physically and mentally tougher.”
In general, girls appear to be committing the most severe acts of violence in groups, suggesting that they, like partners in crime, still need group permission to break their feminine taboos. For instance: In October 1995, two Maryland girls were charged with armed carjacking; in Lorrain, Ohio, two girls were charged with conspiracy to murder their teacher; in L.A., three sisters fatally stabbed an elderly woman in an apparent thrill kill; in Brooklyn, three teenage girls shot and killed a livery cab driver; in Calgary, in the same month, two teenage girls committed the identical crime.
“In the late ‘seventies, you got a pattern, more women were getting involved in crimes,” says Leroy Orozco. “It’s increased, the robberies, the gang violence. They always had gals in the gangs, when I grew up in East L.A., but never like now. They’ll go out on their own. This is the bank robbery capital of the world, and it’s always been just guys, maybe had a woman driver, and then it seemed like the last couple years women were participating. They’d shoot guards. We had one where the bank caught it on video, two girls shot an old lady.”
If the modus operandi of the teenaged girl is shifting, so, too, are the targets and motives of adult violent offenders. In a review of prison records of homicidal women in Julia Tutwiler Prison in Alabama from 1929 to 1985, the criminologist Penelope Hanke found that 95 percent of the stranger homicides committed by white women had occurred after 1970, as well as 60 percent of both family and friend murders. For black women, the nonfamily/business category had also increased. Ralph Weisheit, of Illinois State University, reviewed the records of 460 murderesses incarcerated between 1940 and 1983 and found that the most important change over time was motive. Murder in the course of robbery jumped from 18 percent of cases to 42 percent, while domestic violence fell from 22 percent to 17 percent. Refuting the feminist/economic basis of the liberation hypothesis, Weisheit found no differences in whether the women were married or single, or what kind of postfeminist employment opportunities they had—most murderesses were, and are, unemployed. In Coramae Richey Mann’s study of homicide in six U.S. cities, over half of the victims of women turned out not to be cheating lovers and abusive husbands but children, friends, siblings, and acquaintances. More than half of the homicide offenders had prior arrest records, and more than a third had violent arrest records.
Under the circumstances, which suggest a widening diversity in women’s aggressive behavior, it is increasingly urgent that our culture acknowledge violence as a human, rather than gendered, phenomenon. This is true not only as it applies to family violence research, and biocriminology, and studies of youth crime, but also in the way it applies to women themselves. Women have reached a dangerous crossroads. On the one hand, we are discovering our capacity for explicit masculine-style aggression. On the other hand, even as we commit traditionally male acts of violence, a chorus of voices rises to proclaim our innocence. We assert our victimhood. We champion our righteous rage. We are acquitted in the courts and by the community for lashing out at our husbands and lovers, at strangers, at men as symbols of our oppression.
Now that more than twelve million American women own handguns, we must develop a vocabulary of motive that incorporates concepts of female power and accountability. It is essential that the paper silhouettes on the firing range don’t evolve into flesh-and-blood targets; that men do not become the targets of our guns purely on the basis of their maleness. Consider such slogans, circulating in the early 1990s on bathroom walls: “Dead men tell no lies.” “Dead men don’t rape!” “The way to a man’s heart is through his chest.” “So many men. So little ammunition.” The individual man is not relevant; all men serve as symbolic targets. And this is true along a wide continuum, from permissibly sexist jokes about men to the applause garnered by women who kill. The message being conveyed is that women, being blameless, are entitled to victimize without consequence. It was in that context that Aileen Wuornos killed, and in that climate of sanctimonious wrath that she gained her sympathizers. As Candice Skrapec observed in 1993, in an essay about female serial killers, “A woman’s anger and need for empowerment will be directed at the power-brokers, those she has experienced as victimizing her. She will seek to punish them for being men.” With what result? “The victim becomes the victimizer.”
Betty Broderick, a heroine in parts of America for shooting her husband dead, breezes into an interview room at Frontera Prison for Women in southern California with all the aplomb of the celebrity she has become, tossing jokes over her shoulder to the public relations woman who follows cheerfully behind. Broderick wears an expensive and sporty baby-blue track suit, a paler shade of her impossibly wide blue eyes. Her bobbed blond hair flips pertly at each earlobe, and she is plump and healthy and high-spirited, apparently unaffected by the first four years she has spent incarcerated for double homicide.
She plops down on a cushioned leather chair and throws her elbows onto the table, fixing her interviewer with a high-beam smile. The room, adjacent to the warden’s office, appears to be a meeting room for prison officials, with business and management books strewn about. Broderick has received everybody who’s anybody, from Oprah Winfrey to Vanity Fair writer Bella Stumbo. “I have visits from very far away,” she says, “like Pennsylvania, Ohio, North C
arolina, and Canada and—not professional people, just normal people who want to spend money to visit me!” Her gestures are exuberant and oddly teenaged, with exaggerated sighs and rolled eyes, as if the currency of her charm as a San Diego housewife, married to an esteemed medical malpractice lawyer, was to be irrepressibly cute.
“Anyway,” she continues, “my out-of-town visitor this weekend had a very interesting thing to say. He doesn’t think the real, true Betty Broderick story can ever be told until I’m dead, because society does not allow women to protect themselves and their children, to use self-defense. In fiction,” she explains, “you can have a Rambo character. But in reality, you cannot tell the real Betty Broderick story where I come out to be the hero in the end, because I withstood incredible forces for so long, and then did this outrageous thing, because I’m real, and you can’t applaud a real person.” She sits back in her armchair to emphasize her point.
Broderick has, however, been widely applauded for her violence. For a giddy spell of two or three years, she was the toast of California housewives, a heroine on the talk-show circuit, the subject of a major true-crime biography. Many San Diego residents wrote approvingly on her behalf to the newspapers. “She worked hard to send her husband through law school,” read one letter to the San Diego Tribune, “and how did he reward her? He traded her in for a younger model.” Ergo, he and the younger model had to pay.
One quiet, sea-scented dawn in her hometown of La Jolla, California, Betty Broderick awoke to reread another letter from her ex-husband’s lawyer, quarreling with her about yet another fractious point in their wildly bitter custody battle. Infuriated, stressed to the breaking point, feeling very black indeed, Broderick drove her GMC Suburban from her newly purchased condo to her ex-husband’s home. She broke in, fumbled her way around through the shadows, found the bedroom, and shot him dead. His young wife, Linda, whom Broderick still refers to as “that cheap bimbo nothing,” died beside him in the bed.
The violence of November 1989 was the culmination of hostilities between Daniel and Elisabeth Broderick dating from the start of that decade, when Betty first suspected he was having an affair with his legal assistant, twenty-two-year-old Linda Kolkena. Initially, her response to her husband’s affair was to burn his clothes, wreck their bedroom, and break the windows to their home. She spray-painted the walls; she smeared cream pies on his sweaters and shirts. Daniel Broderick coldly refused to respond. He kept being her husband; he kept having his affair. The tension grew extreme, and so did the displays of temper. Finally, Dan filed for divorce. The experience was shattering. In many ways, Broderick’s life mirrored the world in which millions of women once dwelled. It was Betty Friedan’s world, described in The Feminine Mystique as one in which country clubs, cocktails dos, and well-tended gardens passed for wifely fulfillment. The women who entered this world in the 1950s and 1960s, after educations at Smith and Vassar and Radcliffe, left their intellectual passions behind in exchange for a vow. Although it may have been unconscious and was certainly unspoken, the vow they expected their husbands to give them was this: “I will remain true to you, and to the life that we build, in honor of what you invested.” When that vow was broken, which in so many cases it was, women felt a degree of betrayal and fury that far exceeded their objective predicament—one that often involved the end of a loveless marriage, and an alimony settlement that helped them build their lives anew.
In her late thirties, when her husband left, Broderick was a beautiful and literate woman. It wasn’t difficult for her to start a new life. There are photos of her at Club Med in Tahiti; taking her sons camping in the Rocky Mountains; palling around with a girlfriend up the coast in San Francisco. She began dating a new man. “I met Brad two weeks after my husband walked out, and Brad is a major babe. He’s just a really nice guy.” Was all that enough to carry her through from the generational frustration articulated by Betty Friedan to the freedoms championed by subsequent feminists? It’s hard to outgrow one’s paradigm, one’s model for survival.
So it was that a woman who was granted sixteen thousand dollars a month in alimony in the aftermath of her divorce felt entitled to say: “He took my home … and my money,” and to ram her car through Daniel Broderick’s new front door. “There’s lots of men out there who would love to wad the ex-wife up in a ball and throw her in that trash can,” she says, lowering her voice. “Well, you can’t do that. Can you?”
After the murders, Broderick began to assemble an account from the vocabulary of motive, describing herself alternately as a mama bear defending her cubs and a battered wife fighting back. “I didn’t go there in a rage,” she says, of what happened on that catastrophic morning, “I didn’t go there like, ‘I’ve had it with these two.’ I went there—unfortunately for the feminists, because they’d love to think I just, ‘Blam’ [she laughs], and I guess it makes a better movie—but I went there as such a wreck, and I was literally going to go down to the beach and just blow my brains out, and I just thought of my kids. Because if I did that … I’d leave them with him. And I couldn’t do that. So I’m going to go over there and I’m going to talk to that son of a bitch one more time, human being to human being, not in court where he was the big shot and I was spit.”
Broderick insists that she was actually going to kill herself but shot in the bedroom out of panic. “I didn’t aim at those people, I aimed at the telephone. They were going for the telephone and they moved into the line of fire!”
Broderick’s rage, however, is abundantly evident in a conversation (recorded on Dan’s answering machine) with her youngest son, Danny, which would later be played in court:
Sobbing, the boy asked her, “Don’t you think being mad for two years is enough, Mom?”
Her response was unequivocal. “No … that money is mine. I earned it for twenty years of hard work and total shit from that asshole.”
Danny wails, “What else do you care about besides your money and your share of things to own?”
Broderick responds, “I put up with shit in my face and you kids never even knew it. You never knew he was fucking Linda while he was married to me, did you?”
“No,” the boy says, “but now, you know, if you care about your family you would stop saying bad words.”
But Broderick had lost what was sacred; now all is profane: “I’d rather be a lady and wonderful person and call a cunt a cunt … I wish he’d just die. I wish he would get drunk and drive his fucking car … then he’ll be gone off the earth.”
Broderick is a study in the contradiction between script and reality for women in her generation. Socialized to behave without ego, she is completely unaware how strongly she displays one; socialized to be sunny and supportive, she is totally unaware of how destructive she has been. By interpreting herself as girlish, kind of incompetent, vulnerable to abuse, and supremely maternal, she incorporates many of the self-exonerative dodges of her sex, even while her fury and indignation shine through. “Never for a moment,” she says about Linda Kolkena, “was I jealous [of her].” Yet the woman is dead by her hand.
Broderick’s behavior is hers alone, but her account of it, and the way that account was received, reflects a widely accepted idea in this era about permissible female aggression. The idea, and the perceptions it springs from, haven’t evolved since the case of Jean Harris, who shot her lover Herman Tarnower in 1980. If the roles had been reversed in that case, with Tarnower arriving at Harris’s home in darkness, armed with a.38, leaving her bloodied corpse in the bedroom, we would have a straightforward instance of violence against women. Instead, many women hailed Harris’s deed as judicious revenge against men who throw older women over for younger lovers. The fact that Harris claimed her intent was suicidal, that somehow the gun ended up pointing at Tarnower, did not prevent her, like Broderick, from accepting kudos for her deed. After receiving clemency from New York Governor Mario Cuomo, she embarked upon a vigorous lecture tour. In 1994, when she flew to Toronto to talk in a “Unique Lives” serie
s presented by female celebrities, she was shocked to find herself turned back at Pearson International Airport for her record as a felon. “They’re treating me like a criminal!” she huffed. Her supporters loudly protested. Yet what Harris had benefited from all along was not a feminism that applauds women for standing on their own two feet, but a deeply paternalistic view of white, middle-class women as good girls with good manners, who couldn’t possibly have the guts to blow someone away in a rage.
Then came Lorena Bobbitt, emasculating her husband, blaming it on madness, and finding herself feted both in the United States and in her native Ecuador. Aileen Wuornos was honored with art exhibits and protests in The New York Times. When the Miss Canada International beauty queen punched another woman out in a bar in September 1996, knocking her victim’s tooth out, she held a press conference blaming the incident on her own sexual abuse, and supporters flooded her with mail. Lesser-known women gained support within their communities all over the continent for this illogical psychological couplet of standing up and lying down. Shoot with a bang and dodge with a whimper. Bravo to the violent and pity them. Do women have no better way to stake their claim?
Insofar as female violence is incorporated into a victim-feminist heroic, the failure to take explicit responsibility for our actions poses a conundrum whose implications extend well beyond the lot of the criminal woman. Cheering on people who gain fame through sensational crime yet fail to concede their own culpability directly undermines what good can come of women’s recognition of their capacity for aggression. It sabotages the credibility of every female cop and combat soldier; every battered wife who stands up to abuse and wants to own it; every criminal woman—from Marti Salas-Tarin to the death row inmate Guinevere Garcia—who wants to concede the destruction she has caused and promote herself as a rational actor; every teenaged girl who knows herself to be powerful, but can only articulate her status as victim. Women have virtually no access to anger management counseling, sex offender therapy, child abuse prevention programs, and prison security—all because we won’t concede their fundamental agency.
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