The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

The WCTU supported Lizzie. Women reformers demanded a female jury, a jury of her peers. An ex-governor of Massachusetts served as her attorney. The trial turned on womanhood and femininity. The prosecution portrayed the accused as unfeminine, not a true woman and thus a potential murderer; the defense emphasized her dependence, her submissiveness, her true womanhood, and her Christianity. Her attorneys invoked all the tropes of female disability to rescue her. They got statements she made after her arrest excluded as mere hysteria; they explained away her odd behavior and flecks of blood on her clothes by citing menstruation. She did not conform to contemporary ideas of criminal types, most of which were male and none of which included members of the WCTU.