#*i prefer not to use the term 'sex worker' for any historical personage

[lizbethborden]

I finished my first book of 2023 which was The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen. I think I'd like to read more by her, even just small publications, because she's thorough and fairly academic without being jargon-laden and impenetrable. Again, I draw a comparison (probably because of the similarity of the subject matter) to The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, which swings to the other end of the spectrum in terms of being "poppy" and more political in interpretation. That doesn't mean I even disagree with Rubenhold, just that you can tell the intended audience.

Cohen avoids making any sweeping interpretations. She does talk where appropriate about class, sex, and race privileges but she's not really concerned with either tying the murder into a narrative about the history of women, or into a narrative about the history of news media, or etc. She focuses much more on talking about the actual details of the murder itself, drilling down through layers of obfuscation and using primary sources to document what actually (or "actually," if you prefer) happened. She gives biographical sketches of multiple figures involved in the events, including Jewett, but the information is necessarily thin and filled in with cultural/historical context because so little is actually known.

Since she doesn't want to tie into any big narratives, I'll do it for her: it's interesting how our language around men and their culpability for male violence really hasn't changed since the 1830s. The fundamental argument around Robinson, who was unequivocally guilty of the crime and yet was acquitted, was "he's just a little boyyyyyyy he's just a little birthday boyyyy y :(". One argument that Cohen does make is that what was so disturbing about the trial was that it pulled back the veil on male privilege and showed its inner workings: a newspaper of the time joked that Robinson had 6 lawyers, his 3 actual lawyers and then the DA, the assistant DA, and the judge presiding on the case, who almost verbatim told the jury to disregard the testimony against Robinson (from prostitutes*) and focus on that given by reputable people, i.e. the men who closed ranks to protect him.

In so many ways, these cultural mechanisms are still in action; they're just buried under various layers of apparent reform or, on a social level, fake-wokeness.

#*i prefer not to use the term 'sex worker' for any historical personage #i don't think it accurately reflects the life circumstance of the majority of women engaged in prostitution throughout history #that's not intended as a knock on these women or to imply that they were not agents #but 'sex worker' implies a specific political framework that i don't think is accurate for analysis most historical circumstances #*analyzing #anyway