Murder: A New Feminist View of Motherhood

**Feckless** · 2nd-September-2008

Andrea Pia Yates — the Houston woman who drowned her five children — has prompted stunned and public discussion of how a mother could possibly kill her own offspring. It has also inspired a particularly vicious new feminist line of reasoning.
It has been well documented for years that mothers are responsible for much, if not most, fatal child abuse in North America. A Bureau of Justice report entitled Murder in Families (NCJ 143498) surveyed murder cases tried in 1988 and discovered 55 percent of defendants charged with killing their own children were women. The Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3, 1996) from the Department of Health and Human Services reported that mothers perpetrate 78 percent of fatal child abuse.
Even granting that women are usually the primary caregivers, these figures are high. So high that alarm bells should be ringing.
Instead, there is silence or worse. The "worse" is political correctness, which views women as victims, never as victimizers.
The mainstream media has accepted this feminist myth so completely it is scrambling to somehow soften the unmitigated evil of a mother murdering her five young children. Evil is not too strong a word.

Yates' videotaped confession to the police described drowning Mary, the 6-month-old, in the bathtub. As Yates was doing so, Noah, the eldest child at 7 years old, wandered into the bathroom and asked, "What's wrong with Mary?" Yates ran after the fleeing boy and drowned him next.
Yet, in newsprint and on airwaves, there are compassionate discussions of Yates' mental state. Blame is already shifting onto the shoulders of her husband and society for not recognizing the depth of her psychosis.
There are calls for greater funding of women's health issues. Yates is fast becoming a poster woman for post-partum depression.
Consider how a popular feminist news site, Women's Enews, is handling the story. On June 27, the site featured an article by Cheryl Meyer, co-author of the upcoming book, Mothers Who Kill Their Children: Understanding the Acts of Mothers From Susan Smith to the Prom Mom (August 2001, New York University Press).
Meyer begins by inferring that society is responsible for the murders. "People ... didn't pay attention when Andrea repeatedly voiced her symptoms of depression," Meyer writes. She concludes that, if Yates were in England instead of "relatively barbaric" America, she would be in a hospital receiving medical treatment instead of in jail.
In what seems to be the "moral message" section, Meyer discusses having researched several thousand cases of mothers killing their children in '90s, with approximately 10 percent of the cases involving the death of more than one child. She has made a startling discovery. These murderous moms are a sort of Every Woman because many mothers "almost snap."
Meyer appeals to us not to distance ourselves from Yates. "It frightens us that Andrea Yates could be any mother," she explains, so we focus on "making her different from us or ... on the legal technicalities of her case."
Instead, we should be focusing on the culpability of the medical community for not sufficiently recognizing post-partum syndromes. "Like many women's health issues and particularly women's mental health issues, they are discounted."
So goes the new PC feminist line. Even a woman who viciously murders babies is the true victim, a casualty of white male culture's indifference to the plight of women. Yates deserves our understanding, not distance.
The new feminist wrinkle, in part, is the myth that women are somehow superior to men and yet, strangely, not responsible for their own actions. Instead, Meyer asks us to consider "the responsibility we have toward our fellow human beings." A responsibility not to kill the weak and innocent doesn't seem to rank high.
There is one sense in which the Yates case is a step in the right direction. At least, PC feminists are acknowledging that women in the home are as violent as men.
They are being forced to admit what studies and governmental statistics have made obvious for years. But a unique spin is being applied to the information: Women's violence is the fault of men and male culture; the Amercian Medical Association doesn't listen; motherhood is conducted in a social isolation that makes women snap; the average mother empathizes with infanticide.
Yates must not be used to construct a psychological model of American motherhood. Statements such as Meyer's must be challenged. She writes, "Most mothers just seem to understand how a woman could kill her child." She concludes, "When we target certain cases and try to ascertain how this particular mother could have killed her child, we mask the more important question, why don't more mothers do this?"
Feminist sites are fond of reprinting a famous speech by the ex-slave Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman." There, Sojourner cried from a mother's heart, "I have borne 13 children and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"
Where is the voice within PC feminism that cries out, "Wasn't baby Mary a female?" Where are the non-political tears over Noah, John, Paul, and Luke?
McElroy is the editor of www.ifeminists.com. She also edited Freedom, Feminism, and the State (Independent Institute, 1999) and Sexual Correctness: The Gender Feminist Attack on Women (McFarland, 1996). She lives with her husband in Canada.

FOXNews.com - Murder: A New Feminist View of Motherhood - Opinion

**Percy** · 2nd-September-2008

Meyer discusses having researched several thousand cases of mothers killing their children in '90s,

several thousand cases.

And yet it still doesn't sink in?

And Myers has the confounded NERVE to say that women are ignored.

**Feckless** · 4th-September-2008

Some more on the yates case....
Inner demons in both sexes

By Cathy Young,
Boston Globe WHEN A MOTHER deliberately kills her five children, perhaps the only proper reaction is mute horror. Instead, the news that Andrea Yates, a former nurse in Houston, had drowned her five children in a bathtub - the youngest 6 months old, the oldest 7 years old - has inspired a lot of wordy punditry. In the hands of Newsweek's Anna Quindlen, Yates becomes a symbol of the ordeal of the modern mother - overworked and stressed by impossible demands, ''caught up in a conspiracy in which we are both the conspirators and the victims of the plot.''

Quindlen asserts that she is ''not making excuses for Yates.'' Well, she could have fooled me. ''Yap, yap, yap, the world says. How could anyone do that to her children?'' she mocks. She also states that, deep down, virtually every mother ''understands.'' (Feck: Now tell that a mother

)

Quindlen is not alone in this bizarre notion. At the Women's Enews Web site, author Cheryl Meyer writes that ''most mothers just seem to understand how a woman could kill her child'' (really? did she take a poll?), that ''Andrea Yates could be any mother,'' and that, if anything, we should be surprised that mothers don't do such things more often.

To others, the sympathy extended to Yates symbolizes the excesses of an insidious brand of so-called feminism that absolves women of all responsibility for their actions and always blames men for the evil that women do. At the Fox News Web site, libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy assails the notion that even a woman who viciously murders babies is the true victim, a casualty of white male culture's indifference to the plight of women.

In fact, it seems likely that Yates is neither a vicious murderer nor a victimized Everymom but a very sick woman. After the birth of each child, she had suffered severe depression; she had tried to kill herself by taking pills and another time by cutting her throat. While antidepressants had helped, things took a dramatic downturn after the birth of the youngest child, followed by the death of Yates's father. Her doctor had put her on an antipsychotic medication, which he had discontinued a week before the killings. Her statement to the police suggests that she had delusions about her children being somehow ''damaged.''

We're not just talking about your ordinary postpartum doldrums or baby blues but about full-fledged psychosis - which, psychiatrist Sally Satel reports in the online magazine Slate, affects about one in 1,000 women after giving birth. However, if Yates in no way typifies ''every mother's struggle,'' as Newsweek billed Quindlen's column on its cover, some of the response to her unspeakable act does typify the double standards in our culture's response to violence by women and by men. Killing one's children is the one category of homicide where female offenders predominate: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 55 percent of parents who kill are mothers. (Women are also responsible for about two-thirds of nonfatal child abuse cases; the perpetrators are disproportionately single mothers, while men and women in two-parent families are equally likely to be the abusers.)

Yet media coverage of family violence typically focuses on abusive men. Moreover, the well-documented prevalence of mental illness among male batterers and family murderers usually gets short shrift. Instead, such men are often depicted as malevolent tyrants who treat women and children as property. Killer moms, on the other hand, are likely to be viewed as pitiable creatures driven by desperation or dominated and abused by men.

Even Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons in a lake apparently because they interfered with her love life - and who, unlike Yates, went to great length to conceal her crime - was eventually able to garner some sympathy.

Interestingly, the claim that any mother could find herself in Yates's shoes is echoed by feminist arguments that men who kill women or children should be seen as monstrous aberrations but instead in some ways representative of manhood in a patriarchal society.

The implications, however, are very different. When the killer mom is treated as Everywoman, the message is that she shouldn't be judged too harshly; when the killer male is treated as Everyman, the message is that his guilt should be projected onto all men.

Yes, people who are driven by mental illness to commit terrible deeds deserve a measure of compassion. But neither sex has a monopoly on inner demons. And to plumb acts of madness for social and political messages is taking the dogma that the personal is political to a particularly insane extreme.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

http://www.fact.on.ca/news/news0107/bg010711.htm

The Houston Mom:
Medea or Madonna?

by Ilana Mercer

When her lover decides to ditch her in favor of a more blue-blooded match, Medea, a character in Greek Mythology, takes her revenge by killing their adored sons. A rapacious killer and schemer to rival any villain of the opposite sex, Medea has, however, undergone a literary transformation in recent decades. Even at their most ferocious, our society now insists that women are no more than passive victims, capable of few free choices. Medea has now found a place in the annals of women’s studies courses as a symbol of a woman in revolt against the patriarchy.

Assisted along by this view is Medea’s latter-day sister, Andrea Pia Yates. Last month, Yates, whom the media persist in calling "a Houston mom," (technically incorrect and morally reprehensible) methodically drowned her children aged 6 months to 7 years.

One reporter wondered why the police had offered no explanation for how Yates drowned five children without any escaping. Let’s see: How difficult is it to corral your unsuspecting, completely trusting and likely adoring charges for bath time? A promise of ice cream after ear scrubbing used to do wonders with my no-longer tiny tot.

The reporter’s assumption about the woman’s daintiness forms part of the "vocabulary of motive" now being established by the experts and the media. Accordingly, a woman will engage in violence only when provoked, or brought to the brink of desperation. Premeditated brutality is simply not part of her biology. If a woman is driven to kill, it is for good reason. Conversely, When men kill or abuse, it is because they are hardwired to do so.

If she kills her newborn, and, in the case of Yates, throws in the rest of the brood, the woman is said to have likely suffered from Postpartum Depression. Deployed as a legal defense, PPD may see her exonerated. Canadian killer and sex offender, Karla Homolka, who combined with feral gusto an active social life with the dedicated activity of abduction, murder and rape, was able to avail herself of the Battered Woman defense.

Homolka is immortalized on video raping and killing three women, including her sister. Because of her gender, the experts that are now pontificating about Yates don’t consider Homolka a sadist or sexual deviant. The consensus in psychological circles is that sexual deviance in women is practically non-existent and hence recidivism unlikely. Consequently, Homolka did not receive the mandated treatment our state-run prisons administer to sex offenders. What she got was a jailhouse protocol called "Improving Your Inner Self." This New Age fatuity has helped her, in her words, to "get rid of mistrust, self-doubt, and misplaced-guilt." While this monster was growing her dangerously gargantuan ego on the taxpayer’s dime, research had already begun to unveil sexual deviance in women, indicating that it was far more prevalent than previously thought. The public, however, would continue to be shielded from the realities of women’s crimes.

The rhetoric intended to exculpate Yates continues relentlessly. "Yates," we are told, "had spent her adult life catering to the deepest needs and visions of others." When she did commit acts of aggression, these were only ever turned on herself in the form of a failed suicide, leading one mental health maven to proffer that this murder is a form of suicide by proxy. Yates, he says, lost touch with reality to such a degree that she thought of killing her children as killing herself. He doesn’t explain why, with all the confusion about her psychic boundaries, Yates herself emerged unscathed, which is more than we can say about the children.

No less repugnant are the collectivist explanations for this crime. "There’s blood on everybody’s hands," fluted one infanticide expert. The premise here is that children belong to "Rotten Rodham’s" Village, and that somehow, because raising kids ought to be a tribal affair, the blame for killing them must also repair to members of the clan. The same casuistry was offered up in defense of the marauding Hutus for killing almost a million Tutsis in Rwanda. Progressives deflected from the deeds of the machete wielding mobs, by blaming the genocide on the amorphous forces of Western Imperialism.

Anyone, who has been at the receiving end of abuse from a mother, a wife or a female lover, knows that these explanations simplify and infantalize women. We persist in draining the crimes women commit of moral or rational content, writes Patricia Pearson in her 1997 book entitled When She Was Bad. Pearson combines "chilling real life examples with scholarly research" to show that violence committed by women is every bit as ferocious, albeit different, as violence perpetrated by men.

Stripped of the clinical vernacular that attenuates their deeds, women hold their own in the country’s crime statistics. "Women," writes Pearson, "commit the majority of child homicides in the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killing of newborn, and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults." The African-American man living in Chicago, for instance, is at the greatest risk of being killed by an intimate partner. Eighteen percent of black men killed in Chicago between 1966-1996 died at the hands of their mates; 65 percent of these men had no record of violence, abuse or other. "Ten to 20 percent of the six to eight thousand Sudden Infant Deaths reported each year in the US conceal accidental or deliberate suffocation," usually by mothers. How many deadly assaults by mothers are finessed as the "condition" termed Munchausen syndrome by proxy is hard to tell.

Nowhere are the myths about female pacifism more robust than in spousal violence orthodoxy. There are hundreds of sociological surveys conducted with mathematical randomness that attest to the fact that women assault their partners as often as, or more often than, men do. Gender symmetry in violence between couples is as well documented as it is well concealed by government number crunchers. In the acclaimed, Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising, Prof. John Fekete references the dozens of two-sex surveys conducted in Canada and in the US over the past 30 years. All "show that women in relationships with men commit comparatively as many or more acts of physical violence as men do, at every level of severity." It is a slap for a slap, beating for beating, knifing and shooting for knifing and shooting, on the evidence of women’s own self reports. The fact that women are more likely to be injured in domestic altercations points to differences in physical strength between men and women, not in culpability. Physical weakness is not to be equated with moral innocence. What we have here is indeed one of the most astonishing episodes of dishonest science in our times.

Women’s aggression is different to that of men, which is why it so easy to misconstrue. From an early age, women opt for underhanded and manipulative strategies such as "bullying, name calling, excommunicating and gossiping," to achieve their ends. Consider honor killings, undoubtedly the grisliest of crimes against women. In the Palestinian Authority, fathers and brothers murder 20 to 40 women every year in order to defend family honor. But when studying female aggression in the territory, anthropologist Ilsa Glaser observed that women’s gossip plays a causal role in the events leading up to the butchering. By spreading gossip about the targeted woman, and by putting pressure on the men to act, women were instrumental in instigating the murders. Although preparing the grounds for murder is not tantamount to taking a life – the fact remains that women are in on the act.

Anthropological insight strongly advances our case. In her book Mother Nature: A history of mothers, infants and natural selection, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy shows that the maternal instinct, which supposedly elevates women above men, is not as natural as mother’s milk. In primate species, mothers are known to reward males who kill their young by soliciting copulation with them. And there are many conditions in the wild "under which mothers abandon and cannibalize the young." If, like me, you are not fond of extrapolating from monkeys to men, then Hrdy supplies human parallels of "sex-selective infanticide in several of the world’s cultures." Here, as in the Palestinian Authority, women are willing participants.

Besides irreparably biasing any potential pool of jurors, the Woman-as-Madonna myth making renders the victims of Andrea Yates faceless. Is there any point asking the reader to imagine each child once he grasped that death was about to dawn? The baby girl might have just whimpered briefly and then ceased. Imagine the older children; think of the woman’s deadly grip, the small bodies convulsing, the little limbs flailing until, no more. Think of the resolve necessary to take a life, to say nothing of 5 lives.

All of which suggests that the old stereotypes must be replaced with a nuanced understanding; one which recognizes that if women can match men in almost every way that is good and fine – then so can they harbor the potential to be as sinister as men.

July 17, 2001

http://www.lewrockwell.com/mercer/mercer9.html

**shaazam** · 4th-September-2008

"""The new feminist wrinkle, in part, is the myth that women are somehow superior to men and yet, strangely, not responsible for their own actions""

why should they be responsible if the can project their evils onto some hapless "mere male "

let butthead receive the censure

**Percy** · 4th-September-2008

"The consensus in psychological circles is that sexual deviance in women is practically non-existent"

This is ignorance. Mendacious ignorance.

Louise Kaplan published her brilliant expose "Female Perversions" back in 1991. She shows very clearly in words of six syllables and fewer (occasionally) and paragraphs with fewer than 600 words (sometimes) and often only 17 sub-clauses to the para, the huge range of sexual and social and moral perversions that are common in women.

Not that they were previously unknown. Kaplan uses Flaubert's story of Madame (Emma) Bovary as a unifying theme.

Almost paradoxically, Kaplan was (is ?) a feminist psychoanalyst, wrote her book as a way of showing the effects of gender stereotypes imposed on women.

Hah !

Now, anyone with the slightest education in the psychology field and the attention span of the Humber Bridge must have this book on their shelf, shirley?

(A quick check of my copy shows it is a mere 590 pages. Hah! An afternoon's read).

Bloody idle journalists.

**Kuuenbu** · 4th-September-2008

I can't wait until similar masculist theories justifying the long condemned violence of men finally break the PC barrier and become widespread, holding up a mirror to feminists as an example of just how ridiculous this all is.

But of course they'll never have any obligation to listen, because they will always be able to hang on the thread of any modicum of difference in their existence and lives to men's as their argumentative escape.