E-Books →The Trials of Laura Fair Sex, Murder, and Insanity in the Victorian West

Free Download The Trials of Laura Fair: Sex, Murder, and Insanity in the Victorian West by Carole Haber
English | August 1, 2013 | ISBN: 1469607581, 1469626462 | True EPUB | 328 pages | 8.4 MB
On November 3, 1870, on a San Francisco ferry, Laura Fair shot a bullet into the heart of her married lover, A. P. Crittenden. Throughout her two murder trials, Fair's lawyers, supported by expert testimony from physicians, claimed that the shooting 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 character. In the second trial, however, an effective defense built on contemporary medical beliefs and gendered stereotypes led to a verdict that shocked Americans across the country. In this rousing history, Carole Haber probes changing ideas about morality and immorality, masculinity and femininity, love and marriage, health and disease, and mental illness to show that all these concepts were reinvented in the Victorian West.