Summary of Excerpt from "Women Who Kill"

Leslie A. Heyer

September 5, 2007

In this excerpt of Women Who Kill, Ann Jones illustrates some of the trials and tribulations that women faced in colonial America. She sets the stage with the causes and effects of woman’s appalling situation in this era. But ultimately, she tactfully reveals the evolution of women from strong, independent females who took responsibility for their actions, to weak, submissive beings that hid behind her male relatives.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the number of women was limited. With so much more men than women, it was only natural for a man to lust for a woman that wasn’t legally his. From this problem arose fornication and bastardy- two dreadful sins both of which were highly punishable. Many of these sinners bore illegitimate children. Ann Jones perfectly states that “the law, which severely punished bastardy on one hand, encouraged it on another”. Indentured servants and slaves were forbidden to be married and, yet, if the woman had a child she was bound to a longer time of service. The infant, who was a child of slave, was bound to service also. This was profitable to their masters since they were gaining more free labor. Some terrible men took advantage of this law and raped their servants but the law was changed, but to no ones actual benefit.

Women who birthed bastard children were horribly punished. They were “publicly whipped twenty or thirty lashes” while the men were only fined. Some women and their bastards were sold into slavery if they were not, indeed, already slaves. This public humiliation and the potential suffering of the child forced these desperate women to do the unthinkable.

Religious leaders believed that this “was the greater sin: not to birth bastards, but to destroy them”. Kill “an unbaptized infant, they taught, and you murder its soul, for the unbaptized have no place in heaven”. But, in the execution sermons, this point was seldom mentioned. As Ann Jones put...