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Motherhood on Trial Motherhood On Trial: The American Media's Reception of the Filicide Cases of Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and Casey Anthony Mereth Pauline von Salomon 3737454 Utrecht University Master's Thesis American Studies Motherhood on Trial: The American Media's Reception of the Filicide Cases of Susan Smith, Andrea Yates, and Casey Anthony Mereth Pauline von Salomon 3737454 MA Thesis, American Studies, Utrecht University June 13th 2012 Table Of Contents 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................1 2. The Personal is Political : Motherhood in America, 1945- 1989.....................11 2.1 1945- 1963: Suburban Victorianism and Republican Motherhood..................16 2.2 1963- 1973 The Problem with no Name...........................................................22 2.3. 1973- 1990: Divorce, Abortion and Ronald Reagan........................................29 2.4 Conclusion.........................................................................................................34 3. Explaining the Inexplicable: The causes of maternal filicide...........................38 3.1 Crucial distinctions: Neonaticide, Infanticide and Filicide.................................39 3.2 The most common causes of filicide ................................................................42 3.3 Small, big differences: Paternal Filicide and maternal filicide...........................46 3.4 An attempt at explanation..................................................................................48 4. Case Studies: The Media's Reception of Susan Smith, Andrea Yates and Casey Anthony....................................................................................................51 4.1 Susan Smith: “Southern Gothic on Trial”......................................................51 4.1.1 The Case........................................................................................................51 4.1.2 The Coverage.................................................................................................54 4.1.3 Conclusion: Monstrous Mother......................................................................72 4.2 Andrea Yates - “He destroys, and then he leaves.”......................................76 4.2.1 The Case........................................................................................................76 4.2.2 The Coverage.................................................................................................78 4.2.3 Conclusion: Suburban Soccer Mom..............................................................96 4.3. Casey Anthony - “This is Better than 'Jersey Shore'”..............................99 4.3.1 The Case........................................................................................................99 4.3.2 The Coverage...............................................................................................102 5. Motherhood on Trial..................................................................................131 Works Cited 1 1. Introduction In 2008, two year old Caylee Anthony was reported missing, and a frantic search for the toddler began. In December 2008, the child's body was found in a wooded area close to her mother Casey's parent's house. Casey Anthony was then charged with murder of her daughter. In 2011, Ms. Anthony was found not guilty of killing her daughter. But most Americans – until this day - are convinced that Casey Anthony had gotten rid of her child because she had wanted to continue living her party-life and date men, accusations lined with a loathing of promiscuity and women's sexuality, even though the evidence brought forward against her was not enough to prove the charges pressed against her. I cannot – and neither do I want to – pass judgment about whether or not Anthony's acquittal was justified. What this study aims to do, however, is to lay out how cases of maternal filicide in the United States are reacted to in the American media, an idea that I had shortly after the Anthony trial ended. Even though I had not followed the Anthony trial in its entirety, it became inescapable for me on the Internet. My Facebook Newsfeed blew up on July 5th 2011, the day when Casey Anthony was found not guilty. Many of my friends posted angry statuses about the verdict, several of them calling the outcome of this trial a “crime” in itself. One friend wrote that if Dexter (the homicidal main character of popular TV Show Dexter who brutally kills murderers who had gone unpunished) was real, he would pay Anthony a friendly visit. Ever since then, the Anthony case has been on my mind. I was surprised, flabbergasted even, about what had happened here. I wondered what outraged my friends and millions of people in America about this 2 trial. Were they really just concerned with Caylee (and the justice she arguably had not gotten)? Why did they hate Anthony so much, and what freedom to voice their opinions did the Internet give them? Was Anthony such a target because she was a beautiful young woman who seemed to hide her real face from the world? Or was her single motherhood the real problem at hand - did Americans loathe Anthony so much because she was not what people thought a mother should be? And if that would be the case, what do Americans expect from mothers? These questions form the foundation for this study. In order to answer them, next to the case of Casey Anthony, the media's reception of the cases of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates will be covered. Newspaper and magazine articles will be taken as mirrors and catalysts of public opinion, with the Internet also taking up some room in this study's discussion of the Anthony case. A quick recap of the two other cases is useful at this point. In 1994, Susan Smith drove to a lake in her hometown, Union, South Carolina, and let her car roll into the water. Inside the vehicle, her two sons, Michael and Alex, were sleeping. For nine days, she told everyone that a black man had stolen her car, with the two children still inside the vehicle. When she confessed to having killed her children herself, outrage about her lies, her alleged motifs and her trial kept the entire nation on its feet with fascination and anger. Seven years later, in 2001, Texas housewife Andrea Yates, after having struggled with postpartum depression and psychosis for two years, filled the bathtub in her house. One after one, she drowned her five children, the youngest child six months old. She called the police and immediately confessed, and was found not guilty on Reason of Insanity. 3 All three cases occupied Americans and went down in history as some of the most tragic, shocking and complex cases of maternal filicide in the United States. They were all ”special“ in their own right, and each had distinct key features. To elaborate: Andrea Yates confessed immediately and her actions had disturbing religious connotations, Susan Smith lied and even employed racism in her case, and Casey Anthony's case stand out as it is the only one of the three in which no final answers about the child's death were found. Beyond this, the backgrounds of the three women are distinct: single motherhood and alleged promiscuity in Anthony's case, postpartum depression in Yates' case, extra-marital sexual relations in Smith's case. Since the three cases all have such distinct key features they thus represent several important issues in America. Therefore, the reactions to them can give a broad insight into American family values, gender roles and expectations in mothers and women. Simultaneously, all three cases have extensive media coverage in common, and are therefore some of the most prominent cases of maternal filicide in the United States. Hence, the tones and ideas of the articles written about them can be compared. The media's reception of all three of these cases will therefore be analyzed and examined to find out how American society reacts when mothers challenge “normalcy” most drastically. These findings then allow to answer the big question that arches over all of the case studies: What do these media reactions to the three cases tell us about expectations in motherhood and gender roles in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s? These questions essentially revolve around women's deviations from expected behavior in its most tragic form, asking what conclusions can be drawn about the 4 importance, presence, presentation and possible iconization of motherhood from the way these cases were dealt with. Academic Discussion As far as the academic discussion of family life and values goes, this topic has been one of the most heatedly discussed ones in America for a long time. Consequently, academics have always asked the question what was and is happening to the American family, but especially so in the 1970s and 1980s, times of an alleged destruction of the nuclear family as well as neo-conservative politics' focus on traditional “American values“ (cf. Keniston's All Our Children – The American Family under Pressure [1977], Levitar and Belous What's Happening to the American Family? [1981]; Hayden's Redesigning the American Dream [1984]). These discussions also always entail thoughts about motherhood in America, and how women should and should not behave as females and as mothers. In these demarcations and discussions of motherhood, it seems that the female in America is placed in a highly moralized position. Consequently, a rather basic but nonetheless crucial ideological underpinning of American society
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