by Kim Todd
Even outside the prison, the area could feel claustrophobic. Nearby Fall River, McGuirk’s hometown, was dominated by textile mills, powered by eight waterfalls on the Quequechan River, and ruled by rigid New England social hierarchies that made the distance between the mill workers’ tenements by the water and owners’ houses on the hill seem greater than it was. A reporter for the local paper described Fall River residents as “families who lived, all of them, drab, narrow, and dreary lives, apparently deriving nothing from their rapidly increasingly wealth but the pleasure of mere possession and the joy of keeping expenses down.” The city was near the ocean, but perhaps not near enough for a salty breeze to stir the heavy air.
McGuirk, twenty-six, had just escaped the stifling environment the year before, moving to Washington DC to further her journalistic career. Her witty articles, syndicated all over the country, offered an insider’s view of the Capitol and humanizing details about politicians. She traveled to Vermont to document President Benjamin Harrison’s vacation. In another article she reversed the usual scrutiny of women’s clothes by commenting dryly on the attire of male senators: “It is very hard to have any veneration for a body of men costumed with the lack of care displayed by the senate for the last few weeks.”
Her work was eminently respected and respectable. The St. Paul Globe lauded her as “clever Mrs. McGuirk, who knows the ins and outs of Washington life better than any woman in the country.” A Boston Globe columnist declared, “‘Kate,’ as her numerous friends call her, is, in my opinion, a rare journalist for a woman.” Despite the casual affection of the Globe writer, and the fact that her husband stayed behind when she moved south, her signed articles always referred to her as “Mrs. McGuirk,” wielding the “Mrs.” like a shield.
How strange to be back in this sleepy part of Massachusetts as an out-of-town reporter for the New York Recorder, pencil and notepad at the ready, evaluating familiar landmarks with a journalist’s eye. But here she was, waiting to interview an acquaintance from her Fall River days, accused of hacking her father and stepmother to death with a hatchet.
“How do you get along here, Miss Borden?” she asked.
A few weeks before, on a hot day in early August, someone had killed Lizzie Borden’s father, leaving him slumped on the sofa in the parlor, his skull crushed, blood arcing over the walls. The multiple wounds appeared to have been made by a heavy, sharp, tool.
Upstairs, Borden’s stepmother lay crumpled on the floor in the guest room. When the dead body was turned over, it was clear she had also been hit many, many times. Maybe with an ax.
The crime was mystifying. The doors to the house, on a busy street, were locked. Nothing had been stolen; Mr. Borden’s watch and cash were undisturbed. The killing took place in the middle of the day when both Lizzie Borden and the maid were home. And where was the weapon? Where were the blood-covered clothes of the killer? Surely such brutal murders, accompanied by screams and falling bodies, must have made some noise, some disturbance.
Suspicion quickly turned to Lizzie, rumored to hate her stepmother, whose alibi was that she’d stepped outside to the barn for a few minutes to look for sinkers for an upcoming fishing trip, then lingered, eating pears. A few days after the crime and after a series of contradictory accounts of her actions, she was arrested. At a preliminary hearing, the judge determined she was likely guilty. Now she sat in the Taunton Jail, awaiting the grand jury.
Her sister, lawyers, and ministers visited, but Borden had no use for reporters. Every twitch of her eyebrow triggered an avalanche of criticism. The cruelty and forceful violence of the crime was such a repudiation of femininity, as upper-middle-class white women were supposed to perform it, the papers and their mostly male reporters were beside themselves. The New York Herald described her as a “masculine looking woman, with a strong, resolute, unsympathetic face” and a voice with a “peculiar guttural harshness.” The Boston Post noted, “Her hands and arms are as muscular as a man’s.” Indiana’s Logansport Reporter suggested that Lizzie had “a repellent disposition, at times sulky, at other times haughty and domineering.” She wasn’t distraught enough. Descriptions of the crime scene left her unmoved. Her mourning outfits were insufficiently somber. She laughed at odd times. In short, she was a perversion of nature, a monster.
As a result, Lizzie refused all interviews, except this one. She knew Kate Swan McGuirk from their work with Fall River Fruit and Flower Mission, bringing bouquets to hospitals, food to sick families, picture books to orphanages.
Of course, they were distinct from each other, particularly in the light of New England’s rigid class rules. Both came from long-time Fall River families, but Swan edited her high school newspaper, married local journalist Arthur McGuirk at nineteen, went to work first as a proofreader and then, fired with determination, as a stringer for outlets in Boston, New York, and, eventually, Washington DC. A photo shows a long face, dark eyes under peaked brows, and a mischievous look behind a black speckled veil. A newspaper friend described Kate as “the embodiment of laughter and fun.”
Borden, five years older, had been a listless student, eventually dropping out of high school. She never married and had no need to scramble for money. Her father had owned a bank, sat on the board of two mills, and was rumored to be worth half a million dollars. In contrast, Kate Swan McGuirk’s father was a bookbinder, and her grandfather had been a mill watchman into his late sixties.
But still, they knew each other outside this bloody business, and McGuirk remembered Borden piling turkey on the plates of poor children during charity holiday dinners. Now, sitting across from each other, one asked the other how she was finding life in jail and wondered whether she was really facing some sort of demon.
“To tell the truth, I am afraid it is beginning to tell on my health,” Borden said. “This lack of fresh air and exercise is hard for me. I have always been out of doors a great deal.” Insomnia plagued her, maybe because of the enforced stillness, maybe because of the dark nights, not even relieved by a candle. Looking at the prisoner, pale and drawn, with red eyes protected by a “shade” from the glare of the whitewashed brick walls, McGuirk felt for her.
“It know I am innocent” is the first line of the September 19 interview, published in the Recorder. McGuirk gave the opening to Lizzie, and what follows is a meticulous defense, including an evaluation of the evidence, under the headline “A Persecuted Woman’s Plea.”
McGuirk used investigative skills to formulate her rebuttal to prosecutors and other journalists. A rival paper mentioned an unknown woman “whose card has taken her into the Bordens’ inner circle. She is a detective for a New-York paper, or a stenographer from Boston, or an every-day spectator from Providence.” Though she’s never named, odds are high that this person poking her way into the funeral home and crime scene was McGuirk.
One of the critics’ complaints about Borden was that she didn’t cry, proof of her monstrous nature, so McGuirk tallied the tears. When Borden viewed the cleaned-up body of her father the night after the murders, she burst out crying with a vehemence almost frightening, according to the undertaker’s assistant. The prisoner’s letters documented the many nights she cried herself to sleep. The matron at Fall River witnessed Borden crying so much she (almost) couldn’t eat supper before she was taken to Taunton Jail. “When the State comes to argue its case again it will have to give Lizzie Borden credit for every tear that she has shed,” McGuirk wrote.
One suggested motive for the crime was Borden’s desire to wrest her inheritance from her infamously tight-fisted father. She resented living in a spartan house in the unfashionable section of town, people said, near the tenements (just a few blocks from the McGuirks) and not perched on the hill with other mill owner’s daughters. But Lizzie Borden didn’t lack for money, as the reporter showed by giving the balance of the Borden sisters’ bank accounts and the annual dividends on mill stocks they owned. Exploring the Borden home, McGuirk recorded pretty blue carpets and other decorative t
ouches. If a bathtub and running water on the second story were missing, she reasoned, it was because the family was planning a move, the father finally yielding to his daughter’s desires. The reporter prowled the house, gauging angles, trying the soundness of locks, looking for hiding places for any murderous stranger who might have crept in.
Hatred for the stepmother? They could often be found sharing a church pew. The letter, whispered to exist, where Borden told friends that when she joined them on a vacation to a Connecticut cottage, she’d bring a hatchet? Just a joke. Piece by piece, McGuirk addressed the evidence in a lawyerly effort to explain it away.
Throughout, the reporter stressed that the prisoner, despite her physical strength and lack of emotion, was a woman. True, she’s strong, McGuirk argued, but she used her muscles for good purposes—running the sewing machine when her stepmother was too weak, offering to chop wood for those who needed it.
Leaning on the authority of an insider, McGuirk presented Lizzie as representative of regional stoicism: “To let her stand before the world as the prosecution has pictured her would be unjust to Miss Borden, to all her family and to all New England women.” She questioned whether the animosity against Lizzie was a result of her not playing the expected role of emotional female and “because she does not wave a tear-wet handkerchief in public.”
McGuirk’s interview was dismissed by local reporters as “a magnificent ‘fake,’” but elsewhere she was lauded as “Mrs. McGuirk, that able and enthusiastic newspaper woman.”
This defense, of a woman, by a woman, was significant as women didn’t serve as jurors in the early 1890s.* The Sixth Amendment, which required criminal defendants face “an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed,” hadn’t been interpreted to mean the pool could or should include women. Female jurors had been tried in Washington and Wyoming but the experiments were short-lived, and now the concept was more of a joke, the snickering, for example, about one female juror being “sequestered” with eleven people of the opposite sex. Borden’s guilt or innocence would be argued by male lawyers, in front of a male judge, and determined by a panel of twelve men.
The jury question, similar to that posed by journalism, came down to objectivity. Could women—given their fundamental nature—be unbiased and impartial? Or did the fact of their bodies mar their ability to reason? Historian Francis Parkman didn’t think they were fit. The government had enough problems with hasty decisions that ignored consequences. “This danger would be increased immeasurably if the most impulsive and excitable half of humanity had an equal voice in the making of laws,” he wrote in the North American Review. And it would be impossible for a man to argue with a woman because he couldn’t strike back, “literally or figuratively.” This made women’s speech particularly dangerous: “A man’s tongue is strong only as the organ of reason or eloquence; but a woman’s is a power in itself.” Dividing up qualities between the sexes, he listed “the essentially masculine one of justice.”
The entire legal system was hostile to women’s participation. When a female lawyer applied to try a case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in 1876, the chief justice argued against her, saying he wanted to protect those of her sex from hearing about “indecencies” such as “sodomy, incest, rape, seduction, fornication, adultery, pregnancy; bastardy, legitimacy; prostitution, lascivious cohabitation, abortion, infanticide, obscene publication, libel and slander of sex, impotence, divorce. . . .” He glossed over the fact that almost every one of the listed activities required a woman’s involvement.
Those in favor of women on juries pushed back in a variety of ways. No one should be barred from participation in the government of the society in which she lives, one argument went. A second suggested that women offered some quality currently missing from an all-male jury box, maybe a particularly feminine sympathy. A third proposed that perhaps just by moving through the world in a female body, women had some needed perspective on seduction (gaining sex with a promise of marriage that is then revoked) or rape, or abortion.
And Borden’s trial in particular, where the nature of womanhood was a central theme, made people question banning one sex from the jury box. Suffragist Lucy Stone saw the Borden case as a turning point: “Slowly, perhaps, but surely, the idea is growing that a jury ought to be composed of men and women, and that a woman especially should have a jury of her peers, not her sovereigns, as in the case of Lizzie Borden.”
Chapter 9
1892
A Place to Speak Freely
Woman in stepping from the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in the domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak,—to undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, is merely completing the circle of the world’s vision.
—Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, 1892
The same summer when the press would convulse over the Fall River murders, major papers were ignoring a multistate crime wave. Lynching was on the rise, growing more ornate and cruel, incorporating elaborate torture—burning, shaming, mutilation—a display of dominance that perpetrators celebrated by taking photos and souvenirs. By one count, lynchers killed 150 in the first nine months of 1892.
The initial years after the Civil War had been filled with optimism for a new society, as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments made formerly enslaved men and women full citizens and gave Black men the right to vote. Initially, federal troops stationed in the South protected these rights. But after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, when these troops left, much of the optimism left with them. The newly formed Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black citizens, uprooting them from their homes, stealing or destroying their belongings. Legislatures passed Jim Crow laws separating Black rail cars and schools from their white counterparts. Literacy tests and poll taxes frustrated attempts to vote. And in 1892, more men and women, mostly Black, would be lynched than ever before. Despite the growing violence, northern papers rarely reported the murders. Or if they did, they painted them as something far away and irrelevant to life in Boston or New York, or justified by claims of rape.
One reporter paying close attention, though, was Ida B. Wells. Though only twenty-nine, Wells already had a lengthy and varied writing career by the summer of 1892. As early as 1889, the Journalist profiled Wells, who wrote for papers like The Living Way in Memphis, the New York Age, and the Little Rock Sun, as part of a feature on African American female reporters. The Journalist highlighted her nerve, her appeal to readers of both sexes, her advocacy for her race, and her nickname—“Princess of the Press.”
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly right, 1891. Illus. in: The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, by I. Garland Penn., 1891. (Library of Congress)
Though stunt reporting was on the upswing, Wells and the other writers featured by the Journalist were not stunt reporters. The tightrope the stunt reporters walked—an ostensibly respectable woman dipping into disreputable waters, only to resurface unscathed!—wasn’t available to Black women. The genre was tied to white-owned newspapers that rarely hired Black reporters or covered their communities. And when Black subjects did appear, they were often depicted as destitute or criminals rather than artists, intellectuals, or activists. These papers, and the way they wrote about Black people, were the target of frequent criticism of Wells and writers in her circle.
Though not a stunt journalist, Wells actively experimented with voice and persona. This is clear from the diaries she kept between 1885 and 1887. Diarists, especially young ones, write themselves into being, playing with handwriting styles, turns of phrase. In her journal, Wells tried on roles, literally and figuratively, aware that none quite fit. She wanted to be better—spending less money on clothes, writing wonderful sentences, wasting less time looking for lost keys—but she also took pleasure in a rich social life. Despite teaching and taking care of younger siblings (they had all been orphaned by yellow fever when Wells was sixteen),
she played a scene as Lady Macbeth for a literary society, attended baseball games, chatted and corresponded with a bevy of suitors. Noting that she enjoyed the company of men but didn’t want to get married, she wrote: “I am an anomaly to myself as well as to others.”
At the same time as she explored different perspectives, she had a sense of how the world should be, what justice looked like. In 1883, at only twenty-one, she defied the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company that sold her a first-class ticket but expected her to ride in the “colored” car. When a drunk white man entered Wells’s carriage, she got up and moved into the one designated for “ladies.” When asked to leave, because to the railroad “ladies” meant “whites,” Wells stood up for herself to the point of gripping the seat as the conductor dragged her out the door, ripping her sleeve. Then she sued.
One day in September 1886, just as she wondered whether a plot for a novel she wanted to write might be too sensational, she read a newspaper article that ignited a rage so powerful it tore through her diary’s often lighthearted tone. In Jackson, Tennessee, about eighty-five miles from Wells’s home in Memphis, a white woman had died of arsenic poisoning. When her Black cook was found to have rat poison in the house, the cook was arrested, dragged from jail, and murdered. Her naked body was hung up for everyone to see. “O my God!” Wells wrote. “Can such things be and no justice for it?” Outrage undergirded an account she wrote for the Gate City Press. And then, almost immediately, she feared punishment for voicing these thoughts, for unleashing her anger. But her need to write outweighed her worry about consequences. “It may be unwise to express myself so strongly but I cannot help it,” she wrote in her journal. The article might be used against her, she concluded, “but I trust in God.”
In early 1889, after her lawsuit, which she’d won in the lower court, had been overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court; after the husband confessed that he’d been the one who poisoned his wife and that the Black cook was innocent; after she’d put away the diary, Wells decided to take a concrete step toward forging the future she wanted—both personally and politically. She invested in the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, becoming editor and part owner. This would, she thought, give her the freedom to speak her mind. And it did, at least for a while.