Femicide is the killing of women qua women, often condoned by, if not sponsored, by the state and/or by religious institutions.

      "More generally, it serves as a means of controlling women as a sex class, and as such it is central to the maintenance of the patriarchal status quo. Femicide, as reenacted in courtroom trials and as represented in the media, is surrounded by the mythology of woman blaming. It is women's behavior that is scrutinized and found wanting when measured against men's idealized constructions of femininity and standards of female behavior. For women, it reads, "Step out of line and it may cost you your life": for men, "You can kill her and get away with it."

      These messages can be read in the advice police and others often offer to protect these women from violent crime. Women are routinely advised not to live alone; not to go out at night unaccompanied (meaning without a man); not to go to certain areas of the city. . . . Such advice seeks to control women by placing limits on where they may go and how they may behave in public, a reminder that public space is men's space and women's presence in it is conditional on male approval. Women's place, according to patriarchal ideologies, is in the home. But even there women are not safe- a fact that is rarely mentioned. The home is the most lethal place for women living in nuclear families." pages 6-7

Femicide: Sexist Terrorism against Women by Jane Caputi and Diana E.H. Russell

      1) "Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women. He replied: "They are afraid women will laugh at them." She then asked a group of women why they felt threatened by men. They answered: "We're afraid of being killed." "page 13

      2) "Whether such a killer is "demented" is beside the point. Fixation on the pathology of perpetrators of violence against women only obscures the social control function of these acts. In a racist and sexist society, psychotic as well as supposedly normal men frequently act out the ubiquitous racist, misogynist, and homophobic attitudes with which they are raised and which they repeatedly see legitimized.

      Lepine's murders were hate crimes targeting victims by gender, not race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. In cases of lynchings and pogroms, no one wastes time wondering about the mental health of the perpetrators or about their previous personal experiences with African-Americans or Jews. Most people today understand that lynchings and pogroms are forms of politically motivated violence, the objectives of which are to preserve white and gentile supremacy. Similarly, the goal of violence against women - whether conscious or not - is to preserve male supremacy.

      Early feminist analysts of another form of sexist violence - rape - asserted that it is not, as common mythology insists, a crime of frustrated attraction, victim provocation, or uncontrollable biological urges. Nor is rape perpetrated only by an aberrant fringe. Rather, rape is a direct expression of sexual politics, an act of conformity to masculinist sexual norms (as "humorist" Ogden Nash put it, "Seduction is for sissies. A he-man wants his rape"), and a form of terrorism that serves to preserve the gender status quo.

      Like rape, most murders of women by husbands, lovers, fathers, acquaintances, and strangers are not the products of some inexplicable deviance. They are femicides, the most extreme form of sexist terrorism, motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership of women." pages 14-15

      3) "Femicide is on the extreme end of a continuum of antifemale terror that includes a wide variety of verbal and physical abuse, such as rape, torture, sexual slavery (particularly in prostitution), incestuous and extrafamilial child sexual abuse, physical and emotional battery, sexual harassment (on the phone, in the streets, at the office, and in the classroom), genital mutilation (clitoridectomies, excision, infibulations), unnecessary gynecological operations (gratuitous hysterectomies), forced heterosexuality, forced motherhood (by criminalizing contraception and abortion), psychosurgery, denial of food to women in some cultures, cosmetic surgery, and other mutilations in the name of beautifications. Whenever these forms of terrorism result in death, they become femicides." page 15

      4) "A sense of entitlement is another cause of sexual terrorism. Many males believe they have a right to get what they want from females. If girls or women thwart them, some become violent, sometimes to the extent of committing femicide." page 18

      5) "To see where these students get such gruesome ideas, we need only look to pornography and mass media "gorenography" (movies and magazines featuring scenes of sensationalized and eroticized violence). Like many feminists, we believe pornography is a form of antifemale propaganda, peddling a view of women as objects, commodities, "things" to be owned, used, and consumed while also promoting the logical correlates "all women are whores" and therefore to be hurt, raped, or even killed. Research indicates that objectifying, degrading, and violent images of women in pornography and gorenography predispose certain males to be turned on by rape and other violence against women and and/or undermine their inhibitions against acting out sexualized violence.

      An FBI study of 36 sex killers found that pornography was ranked highest in a list of many sexual interests by an astonishing 81 percent." pages 18-19

      6) "If all femicides were recognized as such and accurately counted, if the massive incidence of nonlethal sexual assaults against women and girls were taken into account, if incestuous abuse and battery were recognized as torture (frequently prolonged over years), if the patriarchal home were seen as the inescapable prison it so frequently becomes, if pornography and gorenography were recognized as hate literature, then we in the United States might have to acknowledge that we live in the midst of a reign of sexist terror comparable in magnitude, intensity, and intent to the persecution, torture, and annihilation of European women as witches from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries." page 20

      7) "A femicidal culture is one in which the male is worshipped. This worship is obtained through tyranny, subtle and overt, over our bruised minds, our battered and dead bodies, and our co-optation into supporting even batters, rapists, and killers." page 21

Introduction to Femicide is as Old as Patriarchy

      "This evidence lends support to the argument that all patriarchal societies have used- and continue to use- femicide as a form of punishment or social control of women by men." page 26

The Witch-craze in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England as Social Control of Women by Marianne Hester

      1) "More than 90 percent of the accused in England were women, and the few men who were also accused tended to be married to an accused witch or to appear jointly with a woman . . . ." page 27

      2) "The time during and before the witch-craze was very complex, mainly because it was a period of great change and restructuring of society" page 28

      3) "First, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries important changes were taking place in the religious, economic, and political dimensions of society. Very briefly, the Catholic, tenant-farming, and monarch-ruled social structure changed to Protestantism, greater reliance on wage labor, and greater influence by Parliament. The population was increasing at a rapid rate. The law was being transferred from ecclesiastical to secular administration, that is, from enforcement by the Church to enforcement by the State, although the Church (Protestant) continued to form the basis of the State. These changes led to tensions and conflicts and made society appear unstable." page 29

      "Secondly, the demographic features of the population were changing. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women outnumbered men, and for the lower classes specifically, marriage occurred very late. . . . Among small property owners and laborers, the median age of first marriage was very high in the sixteenth century and went even higher in the 17th . . . rising from 27 to 28 for men and from 25 to 27 for women." The effect was the evolution of a population with large numbers of unmarried people, especially women, and women living outside the direct control of men. Within this context women were actively, if individually, competing with men for their livelihoods in spite of scarce resources and an increasing population." page 30

      "Third, by the mid-sixteenth century, when the witch-craze was emerging in England, women were visibly encroaching upon some formerly "male" domains." page 30

      "Lastly, it should be noted that the threat posed by women to the male supremacist status quo, and men's reaction to it, was a specific concern of the literate upper strata of society throughout the period of the witch-craze. This is important - it was only by the upper classes sanctioning social control of women that the legal apparatus could be used against women as witches. The resultant debate about women's position vis-à-vis men is known as the "popular Controversy." " page 30

      4) "By inducing fear of violent interrogation, imprisoning in barbaric conditions, and sentencing to death, the ongoing witch-craze imposed social control of women in a way similar to the control arising out of both the threat of and actual sexual violence against women today." page 31, My note: social interactions must have been extremely constrained, as they were under Hilter and Stalin, for fear of being "turned into the authorities" by "friends," neighbors, acquaintances, and family.

      5) "Unlike crimes such as theft or robbery, witchcraft was not merely a crime against an individual person - although that is often how it appeared in the English trials - it was a crime against God, and perhaps by inference, a crime against mankind. Furthermore, it was a crime almost impossible to deny once accused of it. Even if a woman accused of witchcraft was acquitted, the label of "witch" tended to linger; some such women were accused of another crime of witchcraft at a later date." page 32

      6) "Violence against women by men (and the threat of such violence) relies on and reinforces the sexual constructs outlined above." page 34

      7) "Male dominance and control is asserted, then, by some men using violence against some women, while all women at the same time live with the threat of violence from potentially any man.

      While the perspective outlined so far may give the impression that women tend to be passive victims in the male supremacist context, this is by no means the case. The social and ideological structures and institutions of male supremacy act to constrain women's behavior. But women are not passive. On the contrary, many women resist or fight back against their oppression and oppressors by using a number of strategies. Indeed, it may be argued that, without such activity by women, complex mechanisms of male control over women would be superfluous." page 35

      8) "Women's lives were profoundly controlled through the threat of witchcraft accusations, as are women's lives today through the threat of violence." page 36

Legal Lesbicide by Ruthann Robson

      1) "In addition to legal texts mandating the punishment of lesbianism, there are references in European history to executions and other punishments of women for lesbian sexual acts and cross-dressing." page 41

      2) "One of the most famous trials was that of Joan d'Arc, charged with heresy and witchcraft. At 16, Joan d'Arc refused to marry despite her father's wishes. Her betrothed sued her for breach of contract based upon her father's promise. She defended herself against this charge and won. During her successful career as a soldier, Joan d'Arc's wearing of male attire, including armor, served to protect her. After her capture, the Inquisition focused on her male attire as proof of criminality. The judges also inquired into her relationship with other women, including the woman whom she lived with after she left her parents and another woman with whom she admitted sleeping with for two nights. Whether or not Joan d'Arc engaged in lesbianism, her refusal to succumb to heterosexualism resulted in her being burned at the stake." page 42

      3) Referring to the English Parliament: ". . . they feared lesbianism could cause the decline of "our race" and the sexual unavailability of women to men ("any woman who engages in this vice will have nothing whatsoever to do with the other sex.") " page 44

Wife Torture in England by Frances Power Cobbe

      "Frances Power Cobbe wrote this article as part of the successful campaign for the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878, which enabled abused wives to obtain separation orders to keep their husbands away from them. The laws of England and their interpretation by the courts encouraged physical punishment of wives as deriving from a husband's responsibility for his wife's actions. In common law a man had the right "to give his wife moderate correction. . . by domestic chastisement" just as he could his children or apprentices. Common law also recognized his rights to restrain his wife physically "to prevent her going into society of which he disapproves, or otherwise disobeying his rightful authority." " page 46 (my emphasis)

      1) "The notion that a man's wife is his PROPERTY. . . is the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery. Every brutal-minded man, and many a man who in other relations of life is not brutal, entertains more or less vaguely the notion that his wife is his thing, and is ready to ask with indignation (as we read again and again in the police reports,) of any one who interferes with his treatment of her, "May I not do what I will with my own?" It is even sometimes pleaded on behalf of poor men, that they possess nothing else but their wives, and that, consequently, it seems doubly hard to meddle with the exercise of their power in that sphere!

      [N]ot only is an offence against a wife condoned as of inferior guilt, but any offence of the wife against her husband is regarded as a sort of Petty Treason. . .Should she be guilty of "nagging" or scolding, or of being a slattern, or of getting intoxicated, she finds usually a short shrift and no favour- and even humane persons talk of her offence as constituting if not a justification for her murder, yet an explanation of it. She is, in short, liable to capital punishment without judge or jury for transgressions which in the case of a man would never be punished at all, or be expiated by a fine of five shillings. . ." page 47

Female Genocide by Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit

      "The killing or exposure of the newborn is a question of the survival of the group and a compensation for inadequate techniques of contraception." page 68

Introduction to The Patriarchal Home: The Most Lethal Place for Women

      "Also ironic is the fact that it is those men whom women are encouraged to trust and look to for love and protection who pose the greatest risk, be they husbands, lovers, or former husbands or lovers." page 77

Till Death Us Do Part by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly

      1) Reasons men give to justify femicide include adultery, desertion, and refusal of sex. (page 91)

      2) "What we are suggesting is that most spousal homicides are the relatively rare and extreme manifestations of the same basic conflicts that inspire sublethal marital violence on a much larger scale. As in homicide, so too in wife-beating: the predominant issues are adultery, jealousy, and male proprietariness." page 93

      3) "Although wife beating is often inspired by a suspicion of infidelity, it can be the product of a more generalized proprietariness. Battered women commonly report that their husbands object violently to the continuation of old friendships, even with other women, and indeed to the wives' having any social life whatever. In a study of 60 battered wives who sought help at a clinic in rural North Carolina, Hilberman and Munson reported that the husbands exhibited "morbid jealousy," such that "leaving the house for any reason invariably resulted in accusations of infidelity which culminated in assault" in an astonishing 57 percent of the cases." page 94

"If I Can't Have You, No One Can": Power and Control in Homicide of Female Partners by Jacquelyn C. Campbell

      1) ". . . woman battering routinely precedes femicide not only in Dayton but everywhere in the world." page 102

      2) "For 19 of the male perpetrators a history of physical brutality beyond that documented in the intimate relationship with their victims was provided by arrest records involving violent crime or by credible witnesses who described the perpetrators as violent toward other persons. One of these men belonged to a motorcycle gang, locally notorious for fighting. In another case, police noted that the homicidal husband had killed a former wife in another state as well but was convicted only of involuntary manslaughter for which he was given probation. These cases contradict the notion of wife abusers as violent only toward their wives. Other research supports the conclusion that the particularly vicious batterer usually has a violent history." page 102

"Intimate Femicide": Effects of Legislation and Social Services by Karen D. Stout

      1) ". . . estimates of the proportion of married women in the United States who are beaten at least once in their marriages have ranged from 20-30 percent to two-thirds, and Strauss, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) suggest that 25 percent of married women will be severely beaten at least once in their lifetime." page 133

      2) On pages 180-183, the author uses the case of a race car driver named Kenny to examine the role the media (specifically newspapers) plays in, at a minimum, condoning wife abuse and femicide- the media made a hero out of the wife-killer who committed suicide shortly after her murder so that "at least they are together again in the grave."

What the White Man Won't Tell Us: Report from the Berkeley Clearinghouse on Femicide by Chris Domingo

      1) "If pornography is "technologically sophisticated traffic in women" (MacKinnon. 1989), then snuff by extension is a kind of high-tech lynching. We face the nightmarish possibility that male viewing of films and videos of actual sexist murders could become a "normalized" cultural institution in the United States.

      The government is directly implicated in complicity with serial murders for as long as "entertainment" materials indistinguishable from actual murder footage are protected by the First Amendment." page 198

Advertising Femicide: Lethal Violence against Women in Pornography and Gorenography by Jane Caputi

      1) Relationship between pornography and sexual violence:

      " 1. In many cases, pornography actually is sexual violence, a document of actual degradation, rape, torture, and even murder (as in snuff film).

      2. Pornography is used manipulatively to undermine women and children's capacity to avoid or resist abuse.

      3. Pornography causes sexual violence through its capacities to normalize that violence, give ideas to receptive male viewers, and break down some men's personal and social inhibitions against behaving in a violent manner." page 203

      We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its system of socialization, so complete the general assent to its values, so long and so universally has it prevailed in human society, that it scarcely seems to require violent implementation. Customarily, we view its brutalities in the past as exotic or "primitive" custom. Those of the present are regarded as the product of individual deviance, confined to pathological or exceptional behavior, and without general import. And yet. . . control in patriarchal society would be imperfect, even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon, both in emergencies and as an ever-present instrument of intimidation. (59-60)

      Femicide, like that perpetrated by Ted Bundy, is not some inexplicable phenomenon or the domain only of the mysterious deviant. On the contrary, femicide is an extreme expression of patriarchal "force." It, like that other form of sexual violence, rape . . . , is a social expression of sexual politics, an institutionalization and ritual enactment of male domination, and a form of terror that functions to maintain the power of the patriarchal order. Femicide, moreover, is not only a socially necessary act; it also is experienced as pleasurable and erotic- by those men who enact it as well as by those who variously represent it and contemplate it.

      Recognizing femicide to be a fundamental need of the masculinist state, we can survey its various forms across time and place as well as the different methods through which it was legitimated and propagated. For example, the torture and killing of women as witches for three centuries was institutionalized by both church and state and was incited through sacred writings - papal bulls and church-backed torture texts, such as Malleus Maleficarum (1486) - as well as through elite and popular art depicting naked women engaged in sex with each other and "the devil" . . . and "graphic etchings and woodcuts showing varieties of tortures, drownings, and burnings of women". . . . "

      3) "Because femicide is a need, not an option, in the maintenance of patriarchal dominance, the state, albeit covertly, must endorse femicide and recruit agents to enforce its rule." page 206

      4) From Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (1987): "Nowhere has sex been so debased- and pornography so profitable- as in the realms of Christendom" (291).

      5) "Indeed, pornographic and gorenographic images work much the way that advertisements do, inviting the viewer to imagine herself or himself in that magical tableau, to perhaps even try in real life what is depicted." page 213

      6) "Feminists have long claimed that pornography is a form of propaganda, that it peddles a view of women as objects, commodities, things to be owned, used, and consumed, and pushes companion beliefs, including: all women are whores and it is acceptable to do anything you want to whores; sexual violence is normal and acceptable; women deserve and want to be raped; women deserve and want to be killed, etc." page 213

      7) "Not only does pornography, like consumer advertising, effectively promote dominant worldviews, but of critical concern is its ability to create desires and/or stimulate previously unarticulated desires." page 214

      8) "Russell (1989) pointedly writes: "There is no good scientific reason to assume that people cannot develop new ideas or desires from the media. Would billions of dollars be spent on advertising or propaganda if it had no effect?" " page 215

      9) "In sum, much of what malestream thought takes for granted about the powers of advertising - that it can create and inflame desires, construct world views, insinuate itself into personal fantasies, and significantly influence behaviors - should be applied to an understanding of the ways that pornography affects violence against women." page 217

The Case of the Yorkshire Ripper: Mad, Bad, Beast, or Male? by Lucy Bland

      1) "As a part of this misogyny, women are blamed for male violence towards them thereby absolving men of the responsibility. It is time that men's role in perpetuating that violence was faced head-on. Women have been scapegoated for too long as victims of male violence, as the supposed precipitators of their violence, and as the cause- the persistent image of "Eve the temptress." " page 252

Books of note:

Janssen-Jurreit, Marielouise, _Sexism: The Male Monopoly on History and Thought_, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982

Thorne, Barrie and Marilyn Yalom eds., _Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions_, Orient Longman, 1982

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