gender roles has produced "an increase in male-like criminality." 6 Charting a "rising tide of female assertiveness," one criminologist has described a "'masculinization' of female behavior," specifically with regard to criminality. 7 As gender roles have changed, this argument posits, differences in men's and women's criminal behavior have narrowed. Cultural and social conventions about women's "proper" roles were in flux during Maclay Hoyne's lifetime. 8 As Chicago became a major urban and industrial center, economic opportunities for women burgeoned: hundreds of thousands of women entered the city's factories and shops, tens of thousands entered the growing clerical sector of the local economy, and a small but enormously influential group of Chicago women entered the professions. 9 Both locally and nationally, women enjoyed unprecedented social, economic, and cultural influence, helping to challenge long-standing assumptions about patriarchy and "natural" spheres. For example, women gained greater property rights, greater power to dissolve marriages, and greater claims to maintain custody of their children during this period.
For more than two decades William Chambliss's analysis of vagrancy law has provided criminologists with historical evidence to support class‐based explanations for the development of criminal law. Chambliss's use of the historical record, however, is suggestive more than it is conclusive, and recent studies of vagrancy law have exposed important shortcomings in his model. In fact, a systematic examination of the history of vagrancy law reveals that Chambliss's analysis is flawed. Thus. Criminologists should not continue to cite Chambliss's article as an authoritative source on the historical development of criminal law.
Shortly after midnight on September 3, 1899, Henry Emde, a fifty-nineyear-old German carpenter, shot and killed his wife of twelve years, Emma, and his five-year-old daughter, Hilda. 1 Emde then slashed the "blood vessels" in his wrists and on his forehead and hanged himself from the hinge at the top of the kitchen door in his home. The news of the homicide-suicide surprised few who knew the Emde family. Henry Emde had repeatedly threatened his wife, and she had recently "applied" for a divorce.2 Moreover, Henry Emde had prepared for the deed. Two days before he murdered his wife and daughter and committed suicide, he had transferred the ownership of his property to a friend.3 Emde also composed a detailed suicide note, in which he revealed that he had chosen to kill young Hilda, rather than his other two children, because she was his favorite. In addition, Emde wrote, the child "has always said, 'Papa, I will stay will you.'Well, then," Emde concluded, "she may as well stay with me." Finally, he explained that his wife had driven him to the act. "She is a wretch, who vilifies her husband all over, as I could please her no longer." 4 Homicide-suicides, like Henry Emde's deed, were remarkably common in turn-of-the-century Chicago. More than 8 percent of Chicago homicides between 1875 and 1910 were immediately followed by a suicide, and in an additional 1.5 percent of homicides, the killer attempted suicide. 5 In all, a suicide attempt immediately followed 9.6 percent (257 cases) of the homicides in the city during this period. 6 More Chicagoans died at their own hands after committing murders than were killed in labor disputes in the city of the Haymarket bombing and the Pullman strike. The death toll from homicide-suicide also far exceeded that produced by interracial violence in the metropolis renowned for its racial turmoil, and more than five times as many killers committed suicide as were legally executed between 1875 and 1910. The Chicago Tribune "cheerfully acknowledge[d]" this trend, reporting that "it is thoughtful, comparatively speaking, for a man who has killed his sweetheart or wife to 3
This essay examines domestic homicide in early twentieth-century New Orleans. African-American residents killed their domestic partners at eight times the rate of white New Orleanians, and these homicides were most often committed by women, who killed their partners at fifteen times the rate of white women. Common-law marriages proved to be especially violent among African-American residents. Based on nearly two hundred cases identified in police records and other sources as partner killings between 1925 and 1945, this analysis compares lethal violence in legal marriages and in common-law unions. It also explores the social and institutional forces that buffeted common-law marriages, making this the most violent domestic arrangement and contributing to the remarkably high rate of spousal homicide by African-American women in early twentieth-century New Orleans.
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