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. Gun 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.

I remember sitting in Newark airport, waiting for a flight to Toronto after an unsettling and hectic day of media appearances in New York related to Tucker’s last day on earth. I was in the boarding lounge watching TV—with ten minutes left until the execution—when up popped a satellite transmission of Camille Paglia snapping grumpily at CNN’s Bernard Shaw that Tucker’s case was just “a big soap opera.” Get on with the penalty and put away the hankies.

I disagree. The execution of Karla Faye Tucker was genuinely disturbing for thousands of people. Tucker’s death altered irrevocably the rules of chivalry: within a month, another American woman—Judi Buenoano of Florida—would be put to death. Tucker’s execution was also important for reasons that have nothing to do with gender, and it was difficult to be interviewed about the case without touching on the challenge she posed to Americans to confront their beliefs about spirituality, redemption, and the purely vengeful act that is execution. Perhaps, with her passing, we can indeed begin to talk about men, women, crime, and punishment in broader human terms.

—Patricia Pearson, Toronto, June 1998