At her trial, Broderick’s defense team argued that she had been the victim of domestic psychological abuse. “I made up a term that applies to me,” she explains. “It’s white-collar domestic violence. A normal guy feels frustrated, losing control, and he physically intimidates and threatens. My husband didn’t have to resort to that. He could use the system.” Broderick recently organized a letter-writing campaign among her supporters, urging that notes be addressed to the Board of Prison Terms in Sacramento, to argue for her release on the basis of the new California law that authorizes commutation of sentences when “evidence of battered woman syndrome” is found. The evidence has been newly defined to include “the effects of physical, emotional, or mental abuse upon the beliefs, perceptions, or behavior of victims of domestic violence where it appears the criminal behavior was the result.”
When Broderick first entered Frontera, several dozen women were members of a group called Convicted Women Against Abuse, founded by Brenda Clubine, who attacked her husband with a bottle and then killed him with a gun. Thirty-four of the women in the group have applied to Governor Pete Wilson for clemency. Clubine also helped to start the California Coalition for Battered Women in prison, in San Francisco. Across the country, a movement toward clemency for battered women gained momentum in the early 1990s, resulting in releases and pardons in a number of states. It was and is a valid movement, rectifying the wrongs that had been done to these women when their entrapment was misunderstood by the courts. But it also spread into the general prison population as a mantra of self-justification and self-pity. “A lot of women do not act accountable,” Lieutenant Wong says of the inmates at Chowchilla, where Broderick spent her first two years. “They’re all saying they’re battered women. It’s a hell of a stretch. It’s in vogue.”
Well, what else can they say? What other model for redemption has been offered them? “Various factions within the [male] prisons have their spiritual leaders,” Veronica Compton wrote from Washington State in Prison Life magazine. “They claim to follow Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Zapata, Great Grandfather, Jesus, Marx … the list has no women. Why? Where are they? Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, Betty Friedan? Are they out there?”
“Women don’t need heroines,” Arlene Mohammad counters. “Their needs are different. What they miss from their lives is different. Men tend to think about self. [Male prisoners] look to self-growth. Their world revolves around them, whether it’s weight lifting—physical improvement—or studying in the law library—intellectual improvement. Females are nurturers, their world revolves around others.” With all due respect to Mohammad, an articulate, measured person, she herself is in prison for committing the ultimate antinurturant act of murder. Most women in prison are there because they took an antisocial, antirelational stand. At the moment of their crimes, their world did not revolve around their children, their families, or their community. It revolved around themselves. Of 254 female killers at Bedford Hills in 1994, only 12 percent had killed in a domestic dispute. Ten percent had killed children through “abuse or neglect.” The others shot or stabbed in drug-related conflicts, sexual rivalries, or for some other reason. Across New York State, 420 women were convicted of murder or manslaughter between March 1992 and May 1993. Of a cross section studied, 58 percent murdered people outside the family. A quarter murdered husbands or lovers, and 12 percent murdered children. For myriad reasons, these women rebelled against the relational universe in which their sex is expected to perpetually orbit. To perceive themselves solely as nurturers is to live a life exiled from their own experience.
When anthropologist Victoria Burbank talked to the Aboriginal women of Australia about their use of aggression, it struck her that there was something immensely positive in, simply, their awareness of their own power. “In being aggressive,” she mused, “[women] potentially augment rather than diminish themselves.” By taking “an aggressive stance,” they express their determination not to be victimized, not to be “acted upon.” They stop subscribing to a romantic view of their own submission, cease threatening to fling themselves into rivers of masculine pity, and start owning their own strength, ingenuity, and guts. In his memoir of boyhood aggression, the novelist Richard Ford concluded: “And in the end, it seems simply better and more generally informative that I know at least this much about myself—and learn caution from it, forbearance, empathy—rather than know nothing about it at all.”
One Friday night at Miracle House in Merced, seven women, Latina and white, gather in Marti’s living room for their weekly motivation session. They are trying to learn the lessons their own lives have taught them without the benefit that Richard Ford had, of behavior being culturally acknowledged. It is late February. The air outside is soft and fragrant and damp, and the women sit on plush brown carpet and two donated sofas, with their notebooks scattered on the plywood coffee table. Over the nonworking fireplace hangs a big, framed photograph of the participants: Marti, Lisa, Tina, and Cat all decked out on a Sunday afternoon, grinning into the camera with newfound pride.
Earlier in the day, Marti took her youngest charge, twenty-year-old Yvette, to court to appear for a sentencing hearing. Yvette is olive-skinned, doe-eyed, and demure; she was arrested for possession of crank. “Man, can a woman fool men,” booms Marti. “You get up there, dress nice, put a smile on. Man!” Everyone chuckles.
Yvette says that that’s why Marti’s program is so good: “I never had nobody discipline me before.” She means somebody looking her in the eye, saying, “Yo, girl, don’t pull that shit with me. Respect yourself.”
Tina, a graduate of Marti’s program, is a tough-minded twenty-eight-year-old former crank dealer, now a working citizen with a trim nine-to-five hairdo and spiffy new glasses. She’s impatient and shrewd and deems a lot of stuff around her to be bullshit. Tina had contempt for the counselors in prison, “with their degrees and their big words.” She didn’t think they got it. “Come to me on my level,” she told them, “then we’ll talk.” Marti had a hard time bringing Tina into line: “It took me sixty days to break her.” Tina says it’s because the one thing she had to learn was to “humble” herself: “You ain’t runnin’ nothing but your mouth,” she told herself in the mirror, deciding to cooperate with Marti. Tina thinks Marti’s program is terrific, not for the Christian part, per se, more for Marti’s strength of personality and her insistence on personal responsibility.
Themes of self-restraint and accountability are uppermost in these women’s lives. They do not perceive themselves to be victims. They see themselves as having gone willfully and rebelliously down the wrong road, damaging themselves and their families en route. As one—an ace drug dealer at Chowchilla who dealt a dime bag over the wall as she was being released—tells the others: “The wisdom, I always had. But I didn’t have the constructive motivation to use it.” She is borrowing the term from an ex-con turned motivational speaker named Gordon Graham, who is something of a guru to these women. On Friday nights, Marti has her girls watch his videos, which come in seven sessions, with a workbook to use in between as homework.
“We give up accountability,” Gordon Graham says on his video, addressing a classroom of cons, “and then we’re always waiting for somebody else to fix it for us. It’s not my fault. Society did it.” A thin man, balding and bespectacled, Graham sports a short-sleeved plaid dress shirt and looks like a high school math teacher. The last time he got arrested for robbing a bank, he tells his class, he never dreamed it was his own fault. All his fury focused on the fact that his partner hadn’t told Graham that he couldn’t drive standard, the knucklehead, and foiled their getaway. If the cops showed up, that wasn’t his fault, either. The cops were cheating. Marti grins; she knows what he means. She remembers her own busts for heroin. “You get it so twisted around,” she says, “it’s like the cops’ fault for being there if you get caught.”
Gordon Graham’s point is that anybody can play the part of a victim, even when they’re victimizing. It’s guilt-f
ree. It’s also a dead end. “You gotta make your own choices,” he says, “or you’re always going to have somebody jerking you around. You cannot get motivated by looking at losing.” The Miracle House women nod, as if to say Amen. They are strong, these women, and opportunistic, ever hip to their own advantage. Perhaps they are victims, in a broad systemic sense, but merely broadcasting that fact has given them nothing to work with, just righteous air to breathe. What interests them is finding a way to act constructively. In the absence of any sort of feminist conversation about women’s responsibility, they wound up cobbling together their own script. The church gives them a way to struggle openly with their conscience and promote their own complexity in a manner that is not preoccupied, exclusively, with how they are acted upon. God lets them own their mistakes. Gordon Graham, a guy on a video, gives them a way to address them.
After the session, the conversation turns to this and that, anecdotes and musings, and, after some prodding, disinterested reflection on the famous women they served time with in the mix: Broderick, the Manson girls, Dorothea Puente, Carol Bundy, none of whom are half as titillating or inspiring to ordinary inmates as they are to the world beyond. Then someone brings up another woman, now seeking clemency, who also had her time in the sun: forty-one-year-old Ellie Nesler. In the spring of 1993, a middle-aged man who had been accused of molesting several boys at a summer camp, including Nesler’s son, sat quietly, shackled, at his preliminary hearing in Jamestown, California. Also sitting in court, Nesler thought she saw the accused man smirk. She left the courthouse, got a gun, somehow evaded the metal detectors on her return, and shot Daniel Driver five times, point-blank, in the head. Overnight she became a heroine, an applauded representative of what one op-ed writer called “the spontaneous eruption of American motherly virtue.” Fundraisers were held to raise money for her defense; telegrams and letters arrived; talk shows offered her star appearances. The fervor died down somewhat when reporters discovered that “Mrs. America” had a criminal record for auto theft. She retained a strong contingent of feminist and provigilante supporters and was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. At her sentencing, on January 16, 1994, Nesler said: “I don’t want my little boy growing up thinking it’s okay to kill someone.”
Surely she has just taught him that it’s so.
Our deeds have long spoken for us. It is time that we found the right words.
The consequences of our refusal to concede female contributions to violence are manifold. It affects our capacity to promote ourselves as autonomous and responsible beings. It affects our ability to develop a literature about ourselves that encompasses the full array of human emotion and experience. It demeans the right our victims have to be valued. And it radically impedes our ability to recognize dimensions of power that have nothing to do with formal structures of patriarchy. Perhaps above all, the denial of women’s aggression profoundly undermines our attempt as a culture to understand violence, to trace its causes and to quell them.
EPILOGUE
When I put this manuscript to bed, three weeks before the birth of my daughter in December 1996, I didn’t know whether female aggression would be in the news when the book came out. I wondered if people would want to talk about such a dark subject. Would there be some person or event in the news that compelled them?
As it happened, infanticide, which I could no longer contemplate without rage, flared as a media concern. In the fall of 1996, two well-heeled college students—Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg—gave birth to their son in a motel in Newark, Delaware, and immediately dispatched him to a dumpster. In the spring of 1997, eighteen-year-old Melissa Drexler of New Jersey produced a son in a bathroom stall at her high-school prom. She summarily stuffed him in the rubbish and returned to the dance floor. Both crimes were so blasé that they sparked a clamor of punditry. Women’s magazines and TV shows rushed to run features on infanticide. Spot-news reporters picked up cases of neonaticide with new interest, generating the impression that it was happening more often than in previous years. The public mood was judgmental. Prosecutors vowed that they would ask for the death penalty in the Grossberg-Peterson case, and the prosecutor in the so-called Prom Mom case told the press that an act that might once have been a crime of necessity for an isolated pregnant woman had now become one of indifference and greed.
A year later, Grossberg and Peterson both pled guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter, insisting that they thought their baby was born dead. Drexler’s trial is pending but she, too, is expected to plead ignorance about childbirth and the look of living children. None of the teens have explained why, assuming the babies were dead, they found it convenient to toss them into the trash.
In the fall of 1997, another young woman found herself caught in the nation’s news as the result of the death of a baby. The local trial in Boston, Massachusetts, concerning the fatal abuse of an eight-month-old in the care of his nanny, ignited a media firestorm. The story about the British au pair Louise Woodward and her mournful employer, Deborah Eappen, flared up and spread internationally, briefly growing hotter than O. J. Simpson’s before it burned out. A CNN reporter found himself encamped in a satellite trailer in Boston for six weeks, frantic, bleary-eyed, and baffled by the blanket coverage that had been assigned to the trial. Events and emotions moved so swiftly that no one could say why the case had taken on such importance. In fact, it was an old morality play. The dramatis personae were a frightened, emotional woman who “meant no harm but was prone to hysteria” and an ambitious, intellectual woman who, it seemed, had abandoned her children and exploited the caretaker. The reality that children are at far greater risk of abuse in the care of mothers than in the charge of nannies never surfaced. Deborah Eappen was excoriated; Woodward was sentenced to time served. The media, having clarified nothing, whirled off.
In early December, other reporters found themselves encamped on the opposite coast, in a satellite trailer in Victoria, British Columbia. They were there to spread news of the shocking case of seven Canadian high-school girls who’d beaten a female classmate to death. Here the point seemed all at once more apparent and more subversive: girls, like youth in general, were getting totally out of control. They were behaving like a mob of sociopaths, like the boys in Lord of the Flies.
The question was: Why had it happened? Were girls indeed more violent than their mothers? Was this feminism’s fault? Did their use of violence have to do with being empowered or was it about lacking power? Did we need to compose a requiem for femininity? And if so, if you could separate extreme violence from straight-up aggression, was that such a bad thing? The most important question, put searchingly by some of North America’s best journalists, was: Where do girls go from here? If they have discovered a capacity for confrontational aggression, so be it. Now, how do we channel that? How do we train girls in the rules of engagement? How do we make their force-fulness work constructively for them and for us?
Dr. Sybille Artze, a professor of social work who lives in Victoria, British Columbia, happened to have interviewed a number of violent schoolgirls shortly before the murder. Artze found that brawling with fists and steel-toed boots was a major extracurricular activity for these girls. They wanted to be part of the local boxing club but weren’t allowed in because they were female; they wanted to join the male snowboarding clubs on Whistler Mountain but were shut out. Impulsive fights were their only outlet for aggression. Why were they aggressive? Artze discovered that, without exception, the fighting girls had fighting families. Their mothers were violent, and so were their fathers and uncles and brothers. That left only one question: Why had no young girls been beaten to death during their mothers’ high-school years? Why had schoolgirl nastiness and pride and hurt now turned lethal?
The school massacres in Jonesborough, Arkansas, and Springfield Oregon, begged this question with a horrible intensity. The boys who picked off their classmates as if they were skeet had grown up with guns, true. But so had their parents and grandparents. G
un control couldn’t be the only issue. There is something in their willingness to use weapons that is catastrophically different. There’s a basic distortion of perception, an inner reality check gone AWOL, in the disenfranchisement of this generation. Like the girls in Victoria, and the infanticidal sweethearts in Delaware, the boys in Jonesborough and Springfield conceived of murder as a plausible resolution to their adolescent tumult. Maybe it’s pop culture’s Dionysian gore-fest finally fermenting into poison; maybe it’s the ruination of moral purpose in the aftermath of the sixties, the legacy of rebellion cut adrift from its purpose.
Whatever it is, there is a coincidental convergence between that trend and a secondary one, in which girls and women are feeling more confident about public self-assertion. The rise of female boxing and martial arts and military involvement and louche behavior à la Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones are all a part of this trend. Women are beginning to take self-determination for granted. Now they are keen to explore some masculine attributes. You can see it emerging just as academics and educators discover the more fragile, victimizable quality of boys—another big story in 1997. Ideally the two trajectories of perception will cross so that the sexes will finally converge in the middle, in a place which is fully human.
Finally, in February 1998 came the tense, unfolding tale of a woman’s execution in Texas—the first at the state’s hands since the Civil War. It would have been easier for Texans to cross this gender threshold with a more repugnant female killer. But the appeals ran out for Karla Faye Tucker, arguably the most likable, articulate, and attractive Death Row inmate in America. Tucker had committed a bloody crime. No one disputed that, least of all Tucker herself. She possessed a keen sense of responsibility for the violence she had done and refused to seek pity or to promote her gender as a cause for preferential treatment. Hers was the flip-side story of female empowerment, the story of consequence and accountability, the story of this book. Tucker had courage, and it was that quality, not just her prettiness and femininity, that moved those of us who watched the clock during her final hours.
When She Was Bad Page 29