Looking for Dates at the Free Lizzy Borden Protest

Or, the 19th century Eileen Wournos as a Social Occasion



I am taking a sick day, which is good news for my blog and bad news for my landlord, on whom I now have time to concentrate my wrath about the lack of hot water in my apartment. But meanwhile, The Legend of Lizzy Borden (1975) is on Oxygen, and I'm enjoying seeing how - apparently - Lizzy's case brought out a lot of proto-feminists in the creaky old year of 1893, when suffrage was a distant pipe dream, and the first women's college - my alma mater Vassar - was just being established. Just like how the Lesbian Avengers would have parties to rally support for the lesbian "serial killer" Eileen Wournos, on death row in Florida, on the grounds that she was a mentally retarded prostitute and therefore could easily be telling the truth that all those men she killed in fact were trying to rape her... Never mind that Eileen truly is - how shall we say it - unbalanced - and was converted to Christianity and disavows her lesbian identity (it was her lesbian lover who turned her in)... It still makes for a good case to talk about prostitutes' rights, what constitutes consent, and how the media will convict someone before a court sees the legal process through. However, Eileen was convicted of all of her murders (12, I think), and she even confessed to them on the bad advice of her lesbian lover. Lizzy was acquitted, despite all the evidence.



So why doesn't the "she's just a nice good-natured innocent victim of the partriarchy" argument work anymore? I'll think about it and let you know. Meanwhile, I'll just stay with my imagined scene of big-hatted cameo-throated lesbians cruising eachother outside the Lizzy Borden trial.



Here is a link to a virtual tour of the Borden house and other Lizzy resources, including a newsletter with all the latest theories of her case.