Lindsay Clancy and the Perennial Innocence of Killer-Mothers

Western criminal law has been soft on violent mothers for at least the past 250 years

Hundreds of pink-toned supporters gather to cry, make speeches, and show their love for confessed child-murderer Lindsay Clancy

The headlines are standard: “Women in pink rally in support of Lindsay Clancy who is on trial for killing 3 children,’” “America’s saddest murder trial: mental health in focus in Lindsay Clancy case,” “Lindsay Clancy’s trial shows how badly the system fails mothers,” and “Everyone Failed Lindsay Clancy.”

The headlines look away from the actual victims in the case: the three helpless children who were strangled to death in early 2023. All the sympathetic emphasis is on their mother, portrayed as a tragic figure allegedly “failed” by others and not morally responsible for her horrific act.

As in many cases of mothers who murder their children (I discuss other recent cases here), Lindsay Clancy has defenders aplenty eager to cry for her and proclaim their solidarity (for one compilation, see here). Some are even willing to say that they have felt as she allegedly felt—eager to dispatch their children. Her grisly act has provoked masses of donations to a GoFundMe account (reportedly at one million dollars) as well as enthusiastic rallies of (mostly) women proclaiming her innocence.

Many pink-themed supporters insist on asserting, without logical or evidentiary foundation, that it was Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s then-husband, who deserves the lion’s share of the blame, whether for failing to support his wife adequately during her post-partum depression or even, as some allege, for killing the children himself and then convincing his mentally fragile wife to take the blame.

The same supporters who rally for Lindsay would almost certainly call for the death penalty if it were Patrick on trial.

Do any of these advocates care about the principles of justice? Do they believe in equality before the law? Are they concerned with the possibility that a not guilty verdict in Clancy’s trial will encourage other unhappy mothers to kill their children? (Mother are already, according to U.S. government data, the most frequent perpetrators of child homicide, see p. 65).

It seems not. The primary impulse is to see Lindsay Clancy and, by extension, all unhappy mothers as the true victims now and forever, never to be held responsible for any bad act, deserving of boundless sympathy.

Perhaps there has never been a case that illustrated women’s incoherent morality so clearly.

But it is not, alas, a new thing, and men in the west have tolerated and furthered it for centuries. In his 1913 book The Fraud of Feminism, British barrister Ernest Belfort Bax described, with his characteristic wit, how the female criminal is “surrounded by a halo of injured innocence,” “convinced of the maliciousness of her accusers” and of her own lack of responsibility (89-90).

Bax showed that nineteenth-century criminal law had great difficulty conceiving of and punishing female violence. Where there was any doubt as to a woman’s guilt, juries were reluctant to convict; and even where there was no reasonable doubt, they were eager to find mitigating circumstances such as temporary insanity, victimhood, or male coercion to justify leniency.

A now-famous Philadelphia case involved a mother, Harriet Vaughn (variously spelled Vaughan), who had murdered her newborn baby within hours of its birth in 1868, and was championed by her feminist supporters as a wronged innocent. The severely beaten dead baby, which Vaughn had attempted to conceal under her bed after crushing its skull with a blunt instrument, was hardly mourned at all (for a full account, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Law and Everyday Death: Infanticide and the Backlash against Woman’s Rights after the Civil War” in Lives in the Law).

Although Vaughn was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging—a highly unusual sentence in that no woman had been hanged in Philadelphia since 1737—her plight almost immediately became a cause célèbre, with advocates rallying to her defence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, leader of the American feminist movement, spent months agitating on Vaughn’s behalf. In the pages of The Revolution, the feminist newspaper she ran with her associate Susan B. Anthony, Stanton portrayed Vaughn as a sexually-abused maiden, and a loving but desperate mother forced to kill her child because she had no other options. She described her as “a poor, ignorant, friendless and forlorn girl who had killed her new-born child because she knew not what else to do with it” (Stanton, “Infanticide,” The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, p. 158).

None of this was founded in fact—Vaughn herself did not claim she had been raped and there were many institutions for foundlings in Philadelphia where she might have left her baby—but it was a familiar sentimental narrative guaranteed to stir indignation against the sentence.

Members of the Working Women’s Association of Philadelphia held a mass rally on Vaughn’s behalf, visited Vaughn in prison, and petitioned the Pennsylvania Governor for her pardon, which was granted in May of 1869. Released from prison, Vaughn left Philadelphia for her birthplace of England and was heard from only once more, when she wrote some months later to request the $300 that she had heard feminists had raised for her.

Sympathy for infanticidal, especially unwed, mothers was widespread in nineteenth-century English-speaking countries, where the killing of babies was “an unsavoury but surprisingly common feature of life” (Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice, p. 113). Law Professor Sarah Gordon reports that “In 19^th century Philadelphia, thousands of dead newborns were found in alleys, ash heaps, privies, rivers, and so on.” Professor of History Ann R. Higginbotham gives examples from 19^th century London to show that “juries were extraordinarily reluctant to convict women accused of murdering their illegitimate infants,” often out of sympathy for the women’s difficult circumstances (“Sin of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London,” p. 329).

Infanticide was also a popular subject of sentimental novels, perhaps the most well-known being George Eliot’s 1859 bestseller Adam Bede, in which sympathy is consistently evoked for the child-killer Hetty Sorrel.

The idea that women’s lives were in general much harder than men’s, and that women deserved special accommodations for their mental and emotional fragility, was regularly used to deny maternal culpability. In 1888, the case of three-time murderess Sarah Jane Whiteling excited similar compassion, with one prominent female medical doctor rallying other doctors to the defence of the prolific killer. In this case, the defence was not successful and Whiteling was hanged for her crimes, but the elaborate justification offered for her brutal acts reveals much about American culture’s decidedly lop-sided empathy.

Sarah Whiteling was a 40-year-old American woman who murdered the three members of her family in the spring of 1888. (For an overview of the case, see Kenneth J. Weiss’s “Arsenic, Familicide, and Female Physiology in Nineteenth-Century America,” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, p. 384-92.)

She likely would have escaped detection were it not for the suspicions of the family doctor after the third death. He encouraged the local coroner to exhume the bodies to test them for poison, after which it was discovered that Whiteling had killed her husband, her 9-year-old daughter and her 2-year-old son by dosing them with arsenic-laced rat poison.

Unlike other mother killings, these murders could not be seen as one episode of derangement. Here were three murders spread over a two-month period and involving elaborate preparations, decision-making, concealment, lies, and sustained lack of remorse. The murders were pre-planned, took days to accomplish (each child took four days to die), and involved gruesome suffering that included agonizing pain, frequent vomiting, diarrhea, and death convulsions.

Despite the evidence of premeditation and deception, an influential female doctor, Alice Bennett, PhD, Chief Physician at the Women’s Division of the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, Pennsylvania, was active in Whiteling’s defence, claiming that Whiteling was a “kind and affectionate” woman who was not in her right mind when she killed her family, and proposing a special type of exoneration available only to women.

Women were far more easily unbalanced than men, Bennett argued, due to stress, especially at the time of their menstrual periods. Having acted (unsuccessfully) as a defence witness at Whiteling’s trial, Bennett then presented her analysis to members of the Medico-Legal Society of New York on March 13, 1889 in order to convince the body to approach the Board of Pardons on Whiteling’s behalf.

Her paper, “Periodic Insanity as Illustrated in the Case of Sarah J. Whiteling and Others,” with responses by members of the society, was published in the society’s journal and provides a fascinating window onto the beliefs of psychiatric and legal experts of the time, illustrating their widespread inclination to offer leniency to women who committed atrocious crimes.

A great deal of similar evidence emerges from other nineteenth-century trials. Professor of Social Policy Pauline Prior published a 2005 study of temporary insanity defences used in Ireland between 1850 and 1900, finding that a significant number of women who killed their children were acquitted under that defense. Many infanticidal mothers were sent not to prison but to Dundrum Lunatic Asylum in Ireland, where they often spent only a few years or less before being discharged and returning to their communities.

These included Margaret Rainey, a nineteen-year-old woman who in 1891 was found not capable to stand trial after she threw her newborn baby out of a window and was discharged into the care of her sister after spending close to three years at the asylum (Prior, p. 2). Hannah Sullivan was a seventeen-year-old girl who in 1895 killed her baby by cutting off the baby’s head, and who, while showing no signs of insanity at Dundrum, was discharged to her mother’s care just one year later (Prior, p. 3). Many other such cases testify to the willingness—even eagerness—of juries to believe in the temporary insanity of mother-murderers.

Comments by mental health authorities made clear that such women, especially if they were unwed mothers, were seen as victims of circumstance—and of male seducers—to be pitied rather than condemned for their crimes: “Great commiseration is, no doubt, due,” wrote one asylum inspector, “for we can fully imagine how shame and anguish must weigh on an unfortunate and betrayed female […] and what strong temptations induce her to evade the censure of the world […] by a crime that outrages her most powerful instinct, maternal love of offspring” (qtd in Prior, p. 3).

Notably, this authority did not hesitate to assert that a woman’s “most powerful instinct” was “maternal love,” even in cases where the alleged instinct had clearly failed to manifest or, if operative, had been brutally overridden. The circular reasoning of the insanity defence held that a mother’s murderousness did not disprove maternal instinct; rather, the non-operative maternal instinct proved insanity.

The aforementioned inspector was also typical in stressing the pain of women “betrayed” by men and shamed by a judgemental society. But what of the substantial number of married women who killed their children?

Prior explains that these were also frequently acquitted with an insanity plea. She describes the case of Sarah McAlister, a 33-year-old married woman who in 1892 murdered with poison the youngest two of her six children, and Catherine Wynn, a 35-year-old married woman who in 1893 drowned her three children in a bath of boiling water (p. 4). Despite or perhaps because of the deliberation involved in these multiple killings, juries chose to view the perpetrators as mentally incompetent rather than cold or cruel.

An insanity defense was not the only route to leniency. Prior reports that of the child-murderers who did not use an insanity plea, the vast majority received lessened sentences for their killings, with time spent in prison ranging between three and fifteen years.

Prior’s research is confirmed by history professor Kathy Callahan, who for a 2013 article “Women Who Kill,” analyzed the records of felony cases at London’s Old Bailey courthouse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, finding that English society during this period had relatively little interest in punishing women for their violence. She notes that “Society did not feel threatened by female transgressions” (p. 1015) and confirms criminal law expert Gregory Durston’s work on female criminals in the 18^th century, which found that “Females were not held to the same standards of indictment and conviction as were males” (qtd in Callahan, p. 1016).

In her conclusion to the study, Callahan cites V.A.C. Gatrell in his study of criminal execution in England (The Hanging Tree), which argued that from 1770-1868, “The weaker sex became a vehicle through which men registered their potency, benevolence, and chivalric selves” (Gatrell, qtd in Callahan, p. 125). The feminist-compliant phrasing implies that women, being subordinate to men, were made a mere “vehicle” through which masculine agency was enacted. When stripped of feminist terminology, the plain truth in Gatrell’s statement is that laws made by men resulted in women being punished less harshly than men, or not at all, for the violence they committed.

**

The double standards we see today, then, have a long history. In The Fraud of Feminism, Ernest Belfort Bax mentioned with disgust that “We hear and read, ad nauseum, of excuses […] for every crime committed by a woman, while a crime of precisely similar a character and under precisely similar circumstances, where a man is the perpetrator, meets with nothing but virulent execration from […] British public opinion” (p. 94).

Bax’s contentions and the findings of modern researchers give the lie to the pendulum swing theory of gendered history, the idea that because women were harshly treated in the past, they are somewhat justified in demanding special privileges today and in treating men badly in their turn. The fact is that, at least for the past 200 years, women have exercised female privilege under law even to the extent of escaping standard punishment for murder.

It is long past time that our society consider the consequences of such leniency on women, including on the thousands of women now expressing their intense emotional solidarity with Lindsay Clancy. What but diminished moral capacity overall—or even a completely warped, psychopathic morality—can result from such sustained excuse-making? If feminists and others truly believe women morally equal to men, perhaps we should at long last be willing to hold them accountable for their violence.