Broadway Butterfly

by Sara DiVello

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

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.

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

Westbrook, more than anyone, would understand. Which was one of the many reasons she considered herself the luckiest girl in the world.

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.

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.

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.

He took my statement, but they haven’t done anything about it. So that’s why I called you. I figured a woman would actually get something done.”