Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2017 She Shot Him Dead: The Criminalization of Women and the Struggle over Social Order in Chicago, 1871-1919 Rachel A. Boyle Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Boyle, Rachel A., "She Shot Him Dead: The Criminalization of Women and the Struggle over Social Order in Chicago, 1871-1919" (2017). Dissertations. 2582. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2582 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2017 Rachel A. Boyle LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO SHE SHOT HIM DEAD: THE CRIMINALIZATION OF WOMEN AND THE STRUGGLE OVER SOCIAL ORDER IN CHICAGO, 1871-1919 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN HISTORY BY RACHEL BOYLE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2017 Copyright by Rachel Boyle, 2017 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I am profoundly grateful for the honor of participating in the lively academic community in the History Department at Loyola University Chicago. I am especially grateful to my dissertation advisor, Timothy Gilfoyle, for his prompt and thorough feedback that consistently pushed me to be a better writer and scholar. I am also indebted to Elliott Gorn, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, and Michelle Nickerson who not only served on my committee but also provided paradigm-shifting insight from the earliest stages of the project. Many other faculty members at Loyola University Chicago also generously offered professional guidance for my research, teaching, and public history work. Additionally, my remarkable colleagues at Loyola University Chicago over the years have proved constant sources of personal and professional support. Their loyal friendship has sustained me and their intellectual dynamism has made my work better. Like all historians, I relied on archival collections and therefore on the custodians of historical materials and resources. Thank you to the kind and helpful staff at the Chicago History Museum, Illinois State Archives, Loyola University Women and Leadership Archives, and the University of Chicago Library and Special Collections. I especially want to acknowledge the fantastic staff of the Cook County Circuit Court Archives for the extra effort of bringing in successive boxes of offsite court records every week for several months. Thank you to Alice Thompson who helped me process those court records and their significance as part of the Loyola University Chicago Research Mentorship Program. iii My visits to several critical archives was made possible with the help of the King V. Hostick Scholarship from the Illinois State Historical Society and the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. The Loyola University Chicago Arthur J. Schmitt Dissertation Fellowship proved critical in providing the necessary support to finish the final stages of the dissertation, as did the space and access to collections afforded to me at the Newberry Library as a Graduate Scholar-In-Residence. The constructive feedback provided by fellow scholars at the Newberry as well as the broader academic community at multiple conferences pushed me to refine my arguments and think about my work in new and exciting ways. I can only begin to express my gratitude for the support of my immediate and extended family. My big brothers and their families provided endless encouragement and connection throughout my time in Chicago. The Sartore family also welcomed me and nourished me with food and love. My sister stayed close to my heart as I studied women who survive. I am especially thankful for the indefatigable love and support of my parents. Their model commitment to truth, justice, and perseverance is my inspiration and my guide. Finally, I am grateful to Benton Sartore, who has not known me without this project, and without whom I could not have finished this journey intact. Thank you for keeping me anchored with your humor, serenity, and kindness. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES vii LIST OF TABLES viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: PUBLIC WOMEN AND CHICAGO’S INTIMATE ECONOMY 14 Heyday of the Intimate Economy 19 Streets 24 Saloons 33 Houses of Prostitution 42 Dance Halls and Chicago's Political Economy 52 CHAPTER TWO: CRIMINALIZING PUBLIC WOMEN AND DISMANTLING OF THE INTIMATE ECONOMY 59 Municipal Reformers 62 Ministers 65 Women Reformers 67 Controlling Transgressive Femininity 72 Surveilling and Exposing the Intimate Economy 78 Closing Brothels and Prosecuting Public Women 82 The Demise of the Intimate Economy 90 CHAPTER THREE: MOTHERHOOD AND DOMESTIC HOMICIDE 94 Abortion v. Infanticide 100 Midwives, Women Physicians, and Nurses 108 Child Boarding Houses 113 Infanticide as Reproductive Control 123 Twentieth Century: Institutionalization and Infanticidal Insanity 127 Family Homicides 133 CHAPTER FOUR: HUSBAND SLAYING AS DOMESTIC HOMICIDE 140 She Shot Him Dead 144 Fallen Woman to Victimized Wife 148 Defending Husband Slaying 155 Racial and Sexual Boundaries of the Husband-Slaying Defense 160 CHAPTER FIVE: HUSBAND-SLAYING HYSTERIA, 1910-1919 171 Chicago Courts 177 Women Reformers and Suffragists 181 Lucille McLeod and the Power of the Unwritten Law 185 v Lena Bernstein and "Furore Transitoria" 186 Emma Simpson and the Limits of the Unwritten Law 191 Hilda Exlund and the End of an Era 199 CONCLUSION 205 APPENDIX A: QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY 209 APPENDIX B: HUSBAND SLAYING OUTCOME QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS 211 BIBLIOGRAPHY 213 VITA 228 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Location of Homicides Where Police Arrested Women, 1870-1899 20 Figure 2. Feminine Homicides Associated with Saloons and Prostitution, 1870-1899 21 Figure 3. Feminine Homicides Associated with Saloons and Prostitution, 1900-1919 23 Figure 4. Location of Homicides where Police Arrested Women, 1900-1919 24 Figure 5. “Saloon and Brothel. Showing Intimate Relation of Liquor and Vice.” 43 Figure 6. The Intimate Economy within Chicago’s Broader Political Economy 57 Figure 7. Prostitution Indictments against Women in Cook County, 1873-1899 84 Figure 8. Husband Slaying and Domestic Homicides by Decade, 1870-1919 142 Figure 9. Numbers of Weapons Used in Husband Slaying Cases 147 Figure 10. Black Husband Slayers Sentenced to the Penitentiary 162 Figure 11. Black Feminine Homicides in Chicago, 1900-1919 163 Figure 12. Husband Slaying in Chicago, 1871-1919 173 Figure 13. Husband Slaying Acquittal Rates in Chicago, 1871-1919 174 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Domestic Feminine Homicides by Decade 96 viii INTRODUCTION For the first time in Cook County and the second time in Illinois history, a jury sentenced a woman to death on March 25, 1895.1 The defendant, Maggie Tiller, arrived in Chicago in 1893 with fellow actress and romantic partner, Frieda Hunnington. A year later, Hunnington started a relationship with Charles Miller and moved in with him. A jilted Tiller confronted the couple in their new residence located at the intersection of the bourgeoning South Side Levee and nascent Black Belt.2 Tiller and Miller engaged in a physical altercation that ended when Tiller shot Miller dead. As a black woman who loved another woman and killed a man, Tiller bore the brunt of a bureaucratizing state intent on enforcing racial, gender, and sexual order. Although a retrial resulted in the reduction of Tiller’s sentence from death to 20 years in the penitentiary, her case reveals the complex processes of criminalization in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chicago that resulted in the consistently disproportionate incarceration of black women as well as the expanding power of the criminal justice system to prosecute, convict, and institutionalize women.3 1 “Execution of Elizabeth Reed,” The Subterranean, June 28, 1845; “A Woman to be Hanged in Chicago,” The Atchison Daily Globe, March 26, 1895. 2 2115 S State Street. 3 “Eight Men to be Tried for Murder,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 11, 1895; “The Hanging of a Woman,” Atchison Daily Globe, April 26, 1895; “Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930,” Northwestern University, Case 1460; Illinois State Archives, Secretary of State (Index Division): Executive Section, Convict Register, Box 8, Number 4266; “Maggie Tiller Found Guilty,” Daily Inter Ocean, March 31, 1895; The People of the State of Illinois v. Maggie Tiller, 38319 (Crim Crt Cook Cnty 1894), Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County Archives, Criminal Felony Records, Box 183; “Phi Delta Phi Elects Officers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 19, 1895; “Preparing for Yachting in 1895,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 14, 1895; “Takes 100 Grains of Morphine,” Chicago Daily 1 2 Before committing homicide, Tiller earned money as an entertainer on the bourgeoning vaudeville circuit and contributed to a flourishing intimate economy in late nineteenth-century Chicago. Historians have richly documented the homosocial worlds and informal economies of industrializing cities, from bachelor subcultures to women’s prostitution.4 The intimate economy, while intersecting with men’s leisure culture and working-class women’s labor, constitutes a specific network of mixed-gender