When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold
Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
Coffee House Press, 2022, 256 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Henri Bensussen

Alia Trabucco Zerán grew up in Chile and decided at a young age to be a lawyer. She graduated from law school in spite of the barriers against women. She also knew she wanted to write. With a Fulbright scholarship, she earned a master’s at NYU in creative writing in Spanish. Her first book, a novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019 and was translated into seven languages. In When Women Kill, she searches for facts but, along the way, explores alternative forms of fiction.

Delving into the lives of four Chilean women who committed murder, she researches old files and any other sources that provide the clues she’s looking for. She discovers how these women were portrayed by the press, quotes their statements, considers their motivations, shows how their cases were presented to the court, and the scope of their verdicts and sentencing. Trabucco Zerán acts as a detective, uncovering clues and evidence long buried. She presents her findings to the reader as a story written from a feminist viewpoint. She brings in her own thoughts and experiences to link these stories, not only to their own time but to ours as well. It was as entertaining and informative as reading a literary, engaging mystery. Like a good mystery, each woman’s story ends with a surprise.

Trabucco Zerán began this project wanting to know how these women were “treated, viewed, construed, depicted.” Were their trials fair? What happened after being found guilty? She wants to retell their lives to a modern audience and try to make sense of their history. Murder is a common problem in Latin America, she says, so she was surprised that when she talked to people about her project, she was often misunderstood. It was “easier for people to imagine a dead woman, than a woman prepared to kill.”

Women killing doesn’t happen. “For a man. . . violence even helps confirm his masculinity.” To remember women who dare to be bad is a “task of feminism.” She wants to “expand accepted ideas to include men who don’t base their masculinity on violence and women who express rage without having themselves portrayed as somehow less human.”

She selects four women of the twentieth century whose acts incited the most extreme reactions in Chilean society and draws parallels between them and feminist history. None of these women were executed; they served relatively short times in jail or prison. Why? As Trabucco Zerán realizes, if a woman is less than human, then she is incapable of the kind of violent acts that are done by men. Each of the women described in this book was sentenced to death or long prison terms by lower courts but pardoned or given shorter sentences at top-level ones.

In 1916, aligned with the first wave of feminism, Corina Rojas hired a man to murder her husband. Accused of adultery as well as murder, a “double transgression against both the law and her gender,” the newspapers turn it into an act of love and passion. Small chapbooks are published that change Rojas from a criminal into “any old woman who now laments her crime.” A movie is made based on these stories, but censors do not allow its showing; a movie about a woman transgressor—it would not reflect well on Chile. Her lawyer appeals to the President of Chile to spare her life. And so, it is spared; she is freed after six years in jail.

In 1923, news vendor Rosa Faúndez Cavieres slaughtered her lover, which raised fears about women who worked, especially in a man’s job. Faúndez Cavieres was defended as a “defective woman and in no way comparable to. . . docile, feminine wives.” Discovering her husband had given her week’s wages to his mistress, she literally wrings his neck as he lies in a drunken stupor. She cuts up his body and drops pieces along a river. The court judged it a case of jealousy and sent her to a women’s prison staffed by nuns for twelve years. While there, she incites a riot when denied a cup of coffee. Seven decades later, she “reappears as The Lady Ripper” in a play, The History of Blood, that echoes the killings that happened under the military regime that overthrew Salvador Allende. “Lady Ripper is no longer the feared masculine killer of 1923. . . but instead the equally terrifying femme fatale.”

In 1955, when women won the right to vote, the writer María Carolina Geel shot the man who wanted to marry her after they ordered tea and cake at a popular hotel. She had not planned it, she says, she herself felt unhappy. She admits to the murder but refuses to provide a motive, she refuses to answer the question posed by the court: “Who are you?” Doctors and psychiatrists can’t agree on a motive. Her lawyer presents it as hysteria, a momentary madness. About to be freed, she publishes a story about jailed women-loving women. She wants to control her story, writes Trabucco Zerán, and not be described as “mad.” Amid the response to the story, the Court of Appeals sentences her to three years in prison. A letter from Gabriela Mistral, Chile’s Nobel prize winner, asks that Geel be pardoned, and she is. Geel spends only one year in jail.

In 1963, the “decade of women’s sexual liberation,” María Teresa Alfaro, a servant and nursemaid to three children, poisons them and their grandmother because she herself was not allowed to marry and had been forced to endure abortions. She was angry. The judge would not accept that a servant could be angry at her employer and sentenced her to death for the act of jealousy. The Court of Appeals reduced that to nineteen years in prison; she was released for good behavior after ten.

Trabucco Zerán points out that newspapers and photographs supported the courts in their attempt to “chasten. . . the insubordinate woman.” Judges didn’t want to turn women killers into martyrs or saints by putting them in front of a firing squad. She calls us to “incorporate the disobedient woman into our history.” Female violence requires that we question gender norms, the “invisible gender laws that equate femininity with weakness and submission.”

Henri Bensussen writes on themes of inter-personal/inter-species relationships, aging, and the comic aspects of the human condition from the viewpoint of a birder, biologist, and gardener. Currently, a book-length memoir is her focus, and she continues to publish poetry and creative non-fiction.

Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s
Bettina Aptheker
Routledge, 2022, 270 pages
$49.99

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

In an elegant, seamless fusion of memoir, oral history, and archival research, Bettina Aptheker offers us and future generations the gift of our history. Perhaps we recognize the names of Lorraine Hansberry, Eleanor Flexner, or Harry Hay. But how much do we know of the multidimensionality of their lives? And why have we probably never heard of the accomplishments of Betty Millard, Maud Russell, David Graham DuBois, or Victoria Mercado?

As she narrates these lives, Aptheker extols all that they achieved through their devotion to anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and feminist projects through the Communist Left—Lorraine Hansberry’s plays that contain echoes of her studies with W.E.B. DuBois at the Communist Party-supported Jefferson School; Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle that grew from the syllabus that she constructed for the same school; Harry Hay’s courageous founding of the first gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, based on the Communist theory of a “historically oppressed cultural minority.” She also reveals and celebrates the partnerships that sustained these remarkable women and men.

At the same time, she mourns the damage done and the losses caused by the mid-century insistence on silence, a silence that was embraced and enforced by the Communist Party as well as by almost all legal and medical authorities. In some cases, the closets are so deep and the closet doors so tightly closed that she can only speculate on the pain contained therein. In other cases, she quotes from letters and diaries attesting to the range of injuries. She puzzles over the party’s unusually long failure to understand and include a range of emotional and sexual expressions among members. Beginning in 1938, some members were deliberately expelled on the basis of homosexuality; others chose to leave for a variety of reasons, some unable to continue living “under deep cover.” Aptheker shares her own years-long struggle to maintain both her fidelity to the social justice work of the Communist Party and her awareness of her attraction to women, a struggle that finally ended when she left the party—though not her work for social justice—and began to build her life with her partner Kate.

Communists in Closets bears reading more than once to absorb all that it has to offer. That said, Routledge has apparently decided to jettison their copy editors, a disrespectful move that has made the reading experience unnecessarily difficult. Future researchers will have to be aware, for example, that if they want more information on the McCarran Act, they will not find it under “McCarren Act.” They may also wish, as I did, that the book included a bibliography and a separate listing of archives consulted.

Such wishes notwithstanding, Communists in Closets is a mind and heart-opening gift from a brilliant scholar, providing a solid foundation for future research with which we can continue to build a more inclusive history.

Julia M. Allen is Professor Emerita, English, Sonoma State University. She is the author of Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, SUNY Press, 2013 and co-author with Jocelyn H. Cohen of Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, Lever Press, 2023.

Águila: The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains
María Cristina Moroles and Lauri Umansky
The University of Arkansas Press, 2024, 208 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Rose Norman

“Always remember that you are proud. You are proud first because you are an Indian; second because you are a Mexican; and last, because you are an American.” With these words, María Cristina Moroles’ father sent her off to first grade in Dallas, Texas, adding this warning: “They are going to say things to you. Do not ever believe them.” Having crossed the border undocumented twenty-seven times, José Moroles knew hardship but did not anticipate just how hard those Dallas schools would be on his oldest daughter, who quickly learned how to fight and not back down.

Raped at twelve, giving birth at thirteen, in foster care and on the Dallas streets thereafter, María Cristina Moroles overcame many obstacles before dying and being reborn as SunHawk in the Ozark mountains. Along the way, she had a conventional marriage to a man and a daughter Jenny whom she kept with her through subsequent adventures (having given up the rapist’s baby for adoption).

Her life took a turn for the better when she left her husband after following a vision from Texas to Fayetteville, Arkansas. There, she worked as a truck driver for an all-woman food co-op near a women’s land collective called Sassafras. Then, a local hepatitis epidemic brought her sick and dying to Sassafras, against her explicit wishes. Sassafras is where she died and was reborn as SunHawk.

SunHawk and another woman of color, Leona Garcia, were only twenty-three when the Sassafras women voted to give them the rugged land on the mountain next to them, 120 rocky acres accessed by an overgrown and deeply rutted logging road. This property would become Arco Iris, Rainbow Land, later Rancho Arco Iris, and finally Santuario Arco Iris, a sanctuary for women and children. Over time, many things changed. Leona left, other women and children came and went, some of them partners, but SunHawk remained. Always living gently and in sympathy with that rugged earth, SunHawk was not in good relation with the Sassafras women or her straight neighbors. She writes, “these mountains have harbored some women’s drama” (75). But she stuck it out, eventually making peace with her “archenemy,” Diana Rivers, who owned the neighboring Sassafras land and wound up giving those 450 acres to the nonprofit land trust that SunHawk had set up for the purpose of sustainability. After that, through another spiritual journey, SunHawk became Águila, or eagle, her shaman name and highest rank as a shamanic healer.

This memoir tells a special story, an important one to be told in these days when the earth and humanity are in great need of healing. It is a complicated story, full of earth magic and visions and healing energy. When I interviewed SunHawk in 2014 for Landykes of the South (Sinister Wisdom 98), our transcribed two-hour phone interview took many drafts to produce a short essay about the Arco Iris story. Lauri Umansky, Águila’s co-author for this book, transcribed fifty hours of interviews followed by years of back-and-forth revision. In an Afterword, Umansky describes the process and does not attempt to name the genre of this first-person memoir. This is not an “as told to” story, and Umansky is no ghostwriter; her name is on the title page, along with Águila’s birth name.

It is an artfully crafted story combining narrative, poetry, and prayers, and including a photo essay about the death and green burial of an old friend who came to Arco Iris hoping to be healed, and ultimately to die.

Above all, it is a story of resilience and healing on women’s land. We have few books about women’s land communities. This is an important one.

Rose Norman is a retired professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she co-founded the Women’s Studies program and was its first director. She later chaired the English Department. After retiring, she co-founded the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project and is its general editor.

Jewcy: Jewish Queer Lesbian Feminisms for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Marla Brettschneider
SUNY Press, 2024, 173 pages
Hardcover $99; Paperback $31.95

Reviewed by Emily L. Quint Freeman
©May 2024

I always try to read books with an open heart so I can gain new insights, as well as admire the writer’s craft. Just this year, a non-fiction collection of scholarly essays, personal stories, and poetry was released, edited by Marla Brettschneider. This book explores the diverse backgrounds and experiences of being a Jew, queer, and, for some, having a non-traditional gender identity. As a Jewish lesbian, I was particularly interested in this book.

People respond to a book differently based on their background and point of view. So, here is a two-paragraph capsule of me, the reviewer:
My grandparents and great-great grandparents were immigrants on crowded, smelly steamers to New York during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from central and eastern European countries (known as “Ashkenazi” Jews). If they had not emigrated to America, it is highly likely that I never would have been born, as during the Holocaust, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews – and roughly 200,000 queers.

I am a Reform Jew, which is one of the branches of Judaism that has adapted traditional Jewish laws and practices to respond to the social/cultural conditions of the modern world. As a lesbian, I would call myself an intellectual butch, attracted over a lifetime only to women. I guess in today’s lingo, I am some shade of non-binary. I had plenty of challenging times when my birth family pulled the financial rug after I would not abandon my “choice” of a lover. Thankfully, within Judaism, I did not have to leave a fundamental part of my identity behind.

The most accessible parts of this book for the non-Jewish reader (and many Jews) would be the personal essays and poetry. I particularly liked a story called “ID Please” by Vinny Calvo Prell about her personal angst about claiming her complex family heritage. Her mother hailed from the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and her father was Ashkenazi Jewish. She grew up with a deep connection with the Jewish community and came out as queer. Only as an adult did she begin to explore her mother’s indigenous heritage. As she became more open with her Jewish friends about her Pacific Islander roots, she started to feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Prell must have been raised in either the Orthodox or Conservative branches of Judaism, which follow Jewish law, deeming people to be Jewish only if their mother was Jewish or if they underwent a conversion. She would have been fully welcome in my synagogue as a Reform Jew. The pain of trying to embrace various aspects of herself was well described, and the story was worth several reads.

Another personal story called “Life on the Borderlands” by A.S. Hakkari discusses her heritage as a trans woman and Mizrahi Jew – meaning her ancestors either lived in the land of Israel or Muslim North Africa/Middle East. Her essay explores the marginalization of her gender and religious identity in a very moving way. Hakkari vividly described how trans women are a target for abuses of many sorts.

Hakkari’s story informs the reader that Jews are not monolithic but have diverse cultures and practices. This fact is due to the “Diaspora,” that is, the expulsion and/or dispersal of Jews by conquerors of the ancient Jewish states of Israel and Judea. An interesting fact to note – forty percent of Israelis are Mizrahi Jews, who were expelled from Muslim Africa or the Middle East after the birth of the Jewish state in 1948. They form a vibrant part of the multi-cultural framework of Israel.

The book contains a memoir segment from a Black Jewish lesbian, Carol Conaway. I wanted to read more of her memoir so I could better understand her experience and path to Judaism. The segment centers on her attraction to urbane white women, particularly “The One,” who would later become her life partner.

The essays in this book tackle ancient Jewish religious texts, seeking to explore different interpretations of what is acceptable. The traditional answer was only cisgender, heterosexual sex. However, “Deconstructing the Binary, or Not” by Sarra Lev provides a learned analysis of early rabbinic literature to postulate an openness for an intersex personal life.

Another entitled “Remembering Sinai” by Sabrina Sojourner is a reconsideration of the book of Exodus, which analyzes ancient Hebrew and the traditional patriarchal image of G-d. The essay “Postmodern Concepts of Sex, Gender and Sexuality in the Framework of the Jewish Lesbian” by Rona B. Matlow seeks to deconstruct the assumption that only cisgender males and cisgender females are acceptable in Judaism. She does this by offering different interpretations of religious texts and commentaries.

These academic essays may prove daunting for non-Jews or Jews who are not familiar with fundamental Jewish texts or the Hebrew language. Another essay entitled “Leslie Feinberg’s Complex Jewish Lesbian Feminism” by the book’s editor did challenge me as the reader due to its language walls based upon leftist dichotomies. As a result, this essay did not accurately portray the complex story of Ashkenazi Jews in America and their acceptance or non-acceptance in non-Jewish society. This is especially important during the present time, given the trauma and pain of the whole Jewish community after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023, and the taking of innocent hostages.

The umbrella of self can be difficult to navigate. This book offers ideas and stories of Jewish lesbians seeking acceptance rather than marginalization. It points to a more inclusive world for writers with different family backgrounds and gender identities.

Emily L. Quint Freeman is the author of the memoir, Failure to Appear, Resistance, Identity and Loss (Blue Beacon Books) and numerous creative non-fiction articles appearing in digital magazines including Salon, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Syncopation Literary Review, Open Democracy, The Mindful Word, and Narratively.

My Withered Legs and Other Essays
Sandra Gail Lambert
University of Georgia Press, 2024, 152 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Kali Herbst Minino and Gabe Tejada

My Withered Legs is Sandra Gail Lambert’s new memoir essay collection observing shifting relations between the different facets of her life–including writing, disability, aging, and autonomy.

Throughout, Lambert conceives of and interrogates power through a spectrum of in/dependence. Due to the societal and familial context of her upbringing—pre-Rehabilitation Act America in a military family—Lambert, particularly in her youth, equates power with a masculinist idea of strength.

Even in its mere recounting, the machismo attitude Lambert displays—one that values strength and abhors vulnerability—is off-putting, a testament to her evocative writing and presence on the page. Yet the moments when she feels most powerful because she exerts an inordinate amount of physical, mental, and emotional strength become especially poignant when contextualised within the dominant capitalist culture.

A careful reader will recognise that Lambert’s attitude in insisting to navigate, without help, a society that does not consider—and therefore was not built—for her needs is a symptom of living in a culture where (perceived) ability is currency. In a hyper-individualist America where humanity is reduced to a tokenistic autonomy, isolating independence is valued above community.

Lambert’s narrative triumphs in subtly challenging her own entrenched ideas of power. Illustrated by the shifting dynamics of her relationship with her mother and with her partner Pam, readers experience Lambert’s hard-won self-acceptance of being cared for. Her depiction of care work is nuanced, riddled with guilt and triumph, fear and freedom, and caring for is irrevocably intertwined with taking care of. Throughout this process we see how Lambert comes to understand that, just as “Disability was different from illness,” so too is vulnerability different from weakness.

Despite the specificity of Lambert’s perspective and experience, her writing is bound to resonate with readers of all kinds. Artfully covering topics of independence, the writing process, aging, and familial and romantic relationships, the collection of essays is about much more than the title suggests—her legs.

It is surprising that the collection is titled My Withered Legs. In the essay of the same name (though with the addition of “what is lost” in parenthesis), Lambert details a public obsession with her legs, with editors demanding to hear more details about them. Following this advice would erase the original point of her writing.

Choosing My Withered Legs as the collection’s title serves a dual purpose. It satiates the editor’s and the public’s obsession with her legs, which then drives the point of the titular essay home. I imagine an able-bodied reader—picking up the book because they are infatuated with the idea of reading about Lambert’s legs and struggles with disability—having a rude awakening when they realize they’ve played into the exact issue the author is critiquing.

The challenges Lambert faces in publishing her writing leave questions about what didn’t make it through the editorial filter, i.e. “My Withered Legs (what is lost),” and whether or not her wide appeal is something to be celebrated. In “Crip Humor,” Lambert explains that people using wheelchairs and their community would find the story funny. Explaining the joke makes the essay understandable to a large audience, but it became Lambert’s role to make that kind of understanding possible. If Lambert hadn’t had to cater to an able-bodied audience, how would the essay differ?

Readers can only speculate the answer to that question, and can only imagine exactly what was lost. In the meantime, Lambert’s collection is a perfect read for anyone pondering power—inside or outside the pages.

Kali Herbst Minino is a freelance journalist based in Seattle who works primarily for Seattle Gay News. They use a restaurant job to help fund their freelance journalism habit and love reading about labor movements, feminism, and media studies.

Gabe Tejada is a writer and reader based in Naarm/Melbourne whose work has been published in Archer Magazine and Kill Your Darlings, among others. His greatest achievement thus far is his 800-day Duolingo streak.

The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America
Katherine Turk
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023, 448 pages
$32.00

Reviewed by Henri Bensussen

A passionate feminist, a supporter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and a teacher of women’s history, Katherine Turk’s purpose in The Women of NOW is to clarify NOW’s founding and accomplishments. Accessible language and dramatic narrative were a plus for this reader. She’s done a lot of research, all of it cited in the last section of the book; readers may easily engage further if desired.

Scholars have taken two ways of writing about NOW, she states, either focusing on the motivations of its founding leadership or pieces of its overall history. Instead, Turk gives an overall picture of NOW’s structure by showing how the points of view of three of the early founders led to the organization’s weaknesses and strengths. Below are the early founders Turk discusses.

Aileen Hernandez (1926-2017), a feminist labor organizer, was aware of the effects of racism and sexism in our culture. She wanted NOW’s leadership to focus on problems specific to women of color and work with men to achieve feminist goals. Hernandez would become NOW’s second president. Her interests were always in the wider political concerns of the labor movement.

Patricia Hill Burnett (1920-2014), mother of four children, and married to a wealthy businessman who supported her feminism, hoped to diversify NOW’s politics and extend its appeal internationally. As a Republican, she supported her party’s support for the individual and wanted to broaden that to incorporate feminist principles.

Mary Jean Collins (1939- ), a generation younger than Hernandez and Burnett, brought a different outlook to NOW. Active in the Democratic party, she lived in Chicago and helped establish many chapters, especially in the Midwest. Collins served as a vice president of NOW in the early 1980s.

Betty Friedan, a labor journalist familiar with politics, became a celebrity upon publishing The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Pauli Murray, a Black organizer and attorney, represented Black women activists who felt Friedan’s influence and leadership could be used to support the civil rights of women of color. Together, they conceived of establishing a new organization to support their ideas. In June of 1966, Friedan and Murray decided to test their idea at the third annual gathering of State Commissions on the Status of Women in Washington, D.C., which many women activists would be attending.

Following the Commission’s last evening, Pauli and Friedan held a late-night party for some of the women attendees. Many more showed up after hearing about it. When their plan was explained to the group, an emotional discussion followed that lasted until two in the morning. Was one more women’s organization needed? It turned out that women did need it and wanted it. A sign-up sheet went around at the Commission’s last session later that morning. Dues were set at $5. Twenty-eight women signed up, becoming known as “the founders.” Not everyone had $5 for the dues, and financing NOW’s issues would become another problem as the organization grew.

NOW rapidly grew into hundreds of chapters and thousands of members. There was direction from the top, but chapters were also independent and could set their own agendas with little oversight from NOW’s board. Turk highlights this freedom and lack of organizational direction as a weakness. Another was a focus on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The elderly women who had marched for women’s right to vote supported the ERA and showed up at NOW’s first convention with demands for it, turning the members’ attention from civil rights to equal rights.

Murray’s hopes for more Black women members did not materialize, though they and/or their daughters went on to organize in different ways. The concept of intersectionality was not understood or acted on by NOW’s leadership of mostly white, middle-class women. For years there was barely a budget, no office staff, and little money. Read this fascinating book to learn about the controversies that NOW became known for, how they were settled, the history of the women who directed it, and how they did it. NOW is still a vibrant organization with 600 chapters and thousands of members. They are still fighting for the ERA and abortion rights, as they were back in the 1970s-80s.

Henri Bensussen (she/her) earned a B.A. in Biology at UC Santa Cruz. Her essays, poems, and short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies. Her mother tagged her as a bookworm and tomboy. She’s a lesbian feminist as defined in Lesbian Connection’s May/June 2024 issue.