Bad Girls

Violence by women has skyrocketed in the latter part of this century. Have they taken "women's liberation" one step too far--or are they just showing their natural killer instinct?

By Barry Yeoman, published on November 01, 1999 - last reviewed on September 28, 2009

Sante Kimes doesn't exactly match the popular image of the career outlaw. A low-rent Elizabeth Taylor look-alike, the 64-year-old widow is partial to gaudy jewelry, thick perfume and towering black wigs, and to rid herself of her wattles, she got lipo-sculpture at a California clinic.

But beneath the big hair is a criminal whose rap sheet dates back almost four decades. In the mid-'80s, Kimes went to prison for enslaving a platoon of teen-age maids from Mexico City. The women were forced to work 18-hour days without weekend breaks, and Kimes kept them in line by beating them with coat hangers and throwing them in searing showers. When one young woman declined to strip for an inspection, according to court records and news reports, Kimes attacked her with a hot iron.

Then came the apparent murders, for which Kimes is a principal suspect. A banker vanished after a dinner appointment with her. A family friend was pulled out of a dumpster, a bullet in his head, after expressing his reservations about a real-estate scam involving Kimes and her husband. And last summer, New Yorkers were shocked by the disappearance of 82-year-old Irene Silverman, a diminutive former ballerina who was the landlady of Kimes' son. The Kimeses were allegedly trying to defraud Silverman out of her $4 million mansion--and then the retired dancer turned up missing. Kimes claims she's innocent.

What makes this gruesome crime spree hard to grasp is that Kimes, a former pinup model, doesn't fit any of our ruffian archetypes: the L.A. gang member, the Mafia hit man, the young street punk. She's now at an age when many women are described as grandmotherly. Most significantly, she's a woman. "Woman is the creator and fosterer of life; man has been the mechanizer and destroyer of life," anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said. "Women love the human race; men are on the whole hostile to it."

But our cultural assumptions may be off the mark. Witness the proliferation of female perpetrators like Kimes making headlines. The tabloids had a field day with Lorena Bobbitt, who amputated the penis of her sleeping husband. She in turn was eclipsed by Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons in a South Carolina lake. More recently came the murder last May of former Saturday Night Live actor Phil Hartman by his wife Brynn, who then turned around and shot herself.

The increase in female violence over the past century has been dramatic. When Auburn University sociologist Penelope Hanke, Ph.D., reviewed records from an Alabama prison from 1929 to 1985, she discovered that 95% of the cases where women murdered strangers occurred after 1970, along with 60% of slayings of friends and relatives. In another study of 460 female murderers, Illinois State University's Ralph Weisheit, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of criminal justice, found that women were becoming more stereotypically male in their reasons for murdering. He revealed that robbery-murders accounted for 42% of the cases in 1983, compared to 18% in 1940. And even though males commit the vast majority of street violence, females seem to be catching up. "In 10 or 20 years, those statistics should be equal," predicts Coramae Ritchey Mann, Ph.D., professor emerita of criminal justice at Indiana University.

The recent surge in crime among women illustrates that in spite of their stereotype as gentle nurturers, women have the natural capacity to be as violent as men, according to a growing number of experts. The difference, behavioral studies suggest, is that women need greater incentives to express that violence. Social changes over the years--especially the movement toward gender equality--have provided several.

Freda Adler, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University, calls this the "liberation hypothesis." As the tightly constructed sex roles of previous years start to weaken, she says, women simply have more and more opportunities to break the law. "Women are more involved in what's going on in the world than they were a generation ago," she says. "You can't embezzle if you're not near funds. You can't get involved in a fight at the bar if you're not allowed in the bar."

Violence at Home

The most revolutionary discoveries about women and aggression involve violence toward loved ones. A preponderance of evidence shows that women can be just as ferocious as men. The most famous of these studies comes from Murray Straus, Ph.D., the founder and co-director of the University of New Hampshire's Family Research Laboratory. His National Family Violence Surveys, conducted in 1975 and 1985 with a total of 8,145 married and cohabiting couples, showed that 12.4% of women have assaulted their spouses, compared to 12.2% of men. When it comes to severe assaults, the numbers were 4.6% for women and 5% for men.

A 1999 study by the British Home Office, a government agency in the United Kingdom, found that 4.2% of men--the exact same figure as for women--had been assaulted by a partner in the previous year.

The patterns go back before marriage. Irene Frieze, Ph.D., remembers seeing studies that showed women to be more prone to violence in dating situations. "I didn't believe it," recalls Frieze, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh. "I said, 'This can't be true. I'm going to do my own study.'" Sure enough, of the college students she surveyed, 58% of women had assaulted their dates, compared to 55% of men.