She Kills Me: The True Stories of History’s Deadliest Women by Jennifer Wright

 

Reviewed by Jeanne

In case you haven’t gathered it from the title, this is relatively light hearted look at women who kill.  Note that I didn’t say murder, because a number of these women were warriors, from the Celtic Queen Boudica who rose up against Rome to Nadeahda Vasiyevna Popva who was a member of the famed WWII Russian air squadron the “Night Witches” to Freddie Oversteegen who joined the Resistance at fourteen. Some choices I found understandable but unexpected:  Mary I of England, for example.

Some of the women are well known, including Elizabeth Bathory or Lizzie Borden, while others have been relegated to footnotes in history.  The stories are brief, mostly less than four pages, and the author has a notation about topics at the beginning of each (Torture; Child Abuse; etc.) in case a reader is sensitive. 

The author doesn’t dwell on gruesome details, thankfully, but gives a quick overview and does put the story in historical context. Some of the most horrific stories for me were the ones involving slaves, especially the section on Delphine LaLaurie.  Even her New Orleans neighbors complained about her cruelty to her slaves, to no avail.  Finally, her starving cook set fire to house, revealing the horrors within.

Locusta of Gaul was one I found particularly intriguing.  The author comments, “It’s good to have work that you’re respected for” as this section opens, before adding, “You should not become a professional poisoner.”  Locusta’s skills with poisons made her quite popular in some circles in Rome—even in the Emperor’s household. 

 It may sound strange but one thing I loved about the book was its sense of humor. Let me quickly note that the humor is not at the expense of individual victims.  Mostly, it’s situational as the comments made under the section “Poisoning Husbands”:

“Truly, it was a scary time for men in England.  Not only were women pushing for better workplace conditions, and beginning to suggest they’d like to vote, now men feared their wives were going to poison them, largely for being awful.” The paragraph goes on to point out that in the 1850s, women were considered more or less the property of their husband.  He had control of property, money, and any children.  In the words of the old folksong:

Hard is the fortune of all womankind

She’s always controlled, she’s always confined.

Controlled by her parents, until she’s a wife—

A slave to her husband for the rest of her life.

Widowhood was one of the few ways a woman could become independent.

This isn’t to say that the author condones the practice of poisoning husbands, she merely puts it in context as to why it became so much a political issue that the House of Lords accepted an amendment to make the sale of arsenic to women illegal.

Cult leaders, pirate queens, saloon owners, warriors, and vigilantes roam these pages, and I enjoyed reading about them all.