Marybeth Tinning, the Schenectady, N.Y., housewife who, over the course of 14 years, just kept ferrying her kids to the hospital, and collecting flowers at their funerals, until she was eventually found to have killed nine of them. Had she been a man, she might have been a particularly ruthless entrepreneur, an organized criminal, a serial rapist. But she was a woman, and she located her well-spring of power in maternity. It helped that they were accomplished liars. But above all, argues Pearson, these women got away with their crimes for years because so few of us are willing to acknowledge that women are as capable of cool and calculating brutality as men are.
Violence is masculine.
Men are the cause of it, and women and children are the ones who suffer. Either way, they manage to keep some saving drapery of innocence and haplessness, even of victimhood. Pearson's is in many ways an original book, but it did not emerge in a vacuum. Over the last few years, criminologists have been locked in an escalating debate about women's capacity for violence. In fact, that's just the trouble.