Violence Against Women in Europe and America, Part III
An even stronger example of “moral panic” occurred three years later with the murder of five women between August and November 1888 in the East London borough of Whitechapel by “Jack the Ripper.” Unlike Stead’s expose of child prostitution, the Ripper story “represented a different kind of media production, with a decidedly more ambiguous political message.” (p. 192) Thus, there were numerous focuses of the media. The media focused mostly on the “degraded social setting, the mysterious circumstances, the grisly mutilations, the ominous figure of Jack the Ripper, and the ‘deviant’ lives of the victims.” (p. 201) The responses to the Ripper murders were varied, with many revealing “significant class divisions and class-based fantasies.” (p. 218) However, the murders offered many men the chance to blame “women of evil life” for the murders. Again, as in Anna Clark’s work, we see the victim being blamed for the violence perpetrated by men against her. It was her fault; she was walking late at night in an area she wasn’t “supposed” to be.
Whereas Vigarello, Clark, and Walkowitz deal both with rape and with the issue of violence committed against women in the public sphere, the other two articles surveyed in this paper deal with a different crime—spousal murder—committed almost exclusively in the private sphere. Nevertheless because murder, unlike rape, was considered to be a serious crime, there is no lack of sources. As a result these studies can show several things that scholars of rape have more difficulty doing. The first article examines one court case to examine cultural and social attitudes about proper manliness whereas the other article examines the reasons why spousal murder increased dramatically in Vermont and New Hampshire in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Ed Hatton, in his “He Murdered Her Because He Loved Her,” examines through looking at the 1833 New Jersey murder trial of Joel Clough various nineteenth century cultural attitudes toward passion, self-constraint, and masculinity. Joel Clough twice asked Mary Hamilton, the daughter of his landlord, to marry him, the second time saying that he would commit suicide if she refused. She twice refused, after which he murdered her so that “no one else could have her.” (pp. 111-2) During his murder trial, the defense counsel attempted to argue that Clough was temporarily insane as a result of his over-burning passion for this woman, whereas the prosecution attempted to show that Clough deliberately murdered the woman.
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