Broadway Butterfly

by Sara DiVello

“I reckon a person oughtta be able to do as she likes without it being everybody’s news.”

If you’d been born

poor, you were cursed to be neat,

The necessity to arrive earlier, stay later, and work twice as hard (and get paid half as much), simply for the privilege to be allowed to be there, trailed her like a constant shadow.

This hasn’t changed much!

Facts were facts. But the storyteller steered the narrative and the narrative steered public perception. It was an invisible power.

Shaping the narrative is great. The goal of a storyteller. But as a journalist the story should show the truth. As much as the truth can be known anyway.

Male jurors—and of course, all jurors were male—didn’t want to believe women were capable of murder. It threatened their sense of safety and world order, where only they were capable of passion, violence, and retribution. A wife and a mistress teaming up against their man struck inordinate fear in men who were as comfortably settled with their ideas about women’s roles as

wives and mothers as they were with their pipes and newspapers after a day of toil.

Every living creature seeks survival first and foremost. A cornered animal will attack. Women, Julia had learned from ten years on the beat, were no different. Women mostly committed homicide out of sheer desperation to protect themselves and their children. Men, on the other hand, were more apt to murder for lust, rage, revenge, greed . . . or simply because they could.

murders generally were committed by people the victims knew—most knew their attackers well.

Everyone, Julia had learned, found a way to paint themselves as the heroes in their own stories.

Leave it to a man to think he should decide a woman’s identity, instead of honoring her as she’d wished to be known.

Women are the moral compass of society. We exert our good influences on our marriages, our children, the circles in which we move, and the communities in which we exist. Without us, the moral structure of society would disintegrate, and with that, society itself. So we forgive, even

when our hearts are broken. We hold our heads up and march on when we feel as though we might die—because we’re women and we’re wives. It’s the bravest and best thing we can do—and our worlds, and the world at large, are far better for it.”

They’d shared Jack’s bed, attention, and gifts—and now they shared the burdensome outcome of his choices.

And yet, she went on. Because she was a newspaperman, because she was a woman, and because the essence of human spirit is resilience.

But why did it matter if women wanted to cut their hair? Why did societies feel the need to govern women down to the length of their hair, while refusing them any rights to govern, including, until three years ago, the right to vote?

The women, as always, would pay the price.

She wasn’t free, but no woman was free.

Women were the guardians of life as they knew it. Her privilege came at a cost.