Download The Trials of Laura Fair: Sex, Murder, and Insanity in the Victorian West AudioBook Free
On November 3, 1870, on a SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA ferry, Laura Fair taken a bullet in to the heart and soul of her married lover, A. P. Crittenden. Throughout her two murder studies, Fair's lawyers, recognized by expert testimony from medical doctors, stated that the taking was the result of temporary insanity caused by a severely painful menstrual cycle. The first jury disregarded such testimony, choosing instead to focus on Fair's disreputable personality. In the next trial, however, an effective security built on contemporary medical beliefs and gendered stereotypes resulted in a verdict that surprised Americans in the united states. In such a rousing record, Carole Haber probes changing ideas about morality and immorality, masculinity and femininity, love and relationship, health and disease, and mental disorder to show that all these principles were reinvented in the Victorian Western world. Haber's booklet examines the era's most questionable issues, including suffrage, the gendered courts, women's physiology, and free love. This notorious history enriches our knowledge of Victorian society, opening the entranceway to a conversation about the ways that reputation, especially female reputation, is formed.
