by Ezra Carper
The Borden axe murders case is fairly well-known in public knowledge even to this day, but what may not be as well-known is its connection to nineteenth century understandings of gender and class, and how those factors relate to the contemporary understanding of criminal justice. Namely, the case shows how Lizzie Borden’s position as a middle-class woman helped her be acquitted, as her membership in both of those demographic groups positioned her as someone society at the time thought to be very unlikely to or even incapable of committing such a crime.
Figure One shows the timeline of significant events leading up to the day of the murder, while Figure Two shows the timeline of the day of the murder itself.
Figure One
Lizzie’s position as a woman in an American nineteenth century society meant that she was thought to be weak, and not the sort of person who could murder in cold blood when compared to men, as the stronger sex. In the nineteenth century, the semi-official line of the criminal justice system was that committing any serious sort of crime was almost unthinkable for women, particularly “respectable” (read: well-to-do) women. The idea of female innocence grew out of larger efforts to establish women as fundamentally different from and weaker than men. Lizzie played into this belief of feminine weakness during her trial, by acting weak and confused throughout, and even fainting when the skulls of her father and stepmother were produced to the court as evidence.
Figure Two
If it was unthinkable that a woman would carry out these bloody murders, it was even more so given she was from a well-established, respected, middle-class family. The Bordens were a prominent old family in the community they lived in, especially when compared to the many immigrant families that came in during the nineteenth century to work on the factories and mills of the town. In the nineteenth century, crime and poverty were thought by those in power to be closely linked, with both of those states being personal failings, and crime being something those in poverty were just naturally predisposed to. Early suspicions in the Borden case rested strongly on members of the immigrant community, and the Irish maid, Bridget, was thought to almost certainly have carried out the murders by some, solely because of her social status.
On the whole, well-to-do women were not considered the sort of people that would carry out crimes as brutal as the Borden murders, a belief that Lizzie materially benefitted from. Women were thought to be naturally weak by virtue of their sex, meaning her physical and mental ability to carry out the crime was much in question during the trial. As well, middle- and upper-class people, as Lizzie was, were not thought to have the inherent criminality that ran rampant among the lower class, particularly immigrants.
