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How Idealized Womanhood Saved Annie Bradley from the Gallows
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On December 8, 1906, the sixty-three-year-old lawyer and former United States senator from Utah, Arthur Brown, was shot by his thirty-fouryear-old mistress, Annie Bradley, in his Washington, D.C. hotel room.1 Bradley had followed Brown to D.C., where he was to argue a case before the Supreme Court; she planned to confront Brown and demand that he marry her, as he had promised throughout their nearly seven-year-long affair. Even though Bradley was divorced and Brown was a widower, he still refused to marry her and legitimize their two sons. The wound she inflicted led to Brown’s death several days later. Subsequently, Bradley was indicted and tried for first-degree murder in Washington, D.C. Her defense was that she was not of a sound mind when she shot Brown, and she ultimately was acquitted on the grounds of insanity.2 However, the events leading up to, during, and after the trial suggest Bradley’s mental state was not what led to the jury’s decision to acquit her. Because the trial of Annie Bradley occurred during the early Progressive Era, when issues surrounding gender roles dominated much public discussion, an analysis of it must consider that the defendant was a woman. Before and during the trial, newspapers across the country, as well as Bradley’s lawyers, frequently described her as a weak, emotional, and innocent woman who was ruined by the lustful and cruel Brown. They also emphasized that she was a single mother of four children, two of whom were allegedly Brown’s sons. Bradley’s lawyers portrayed her as an exemplary mother who would do anything for her children, such as traveling from Utah to D.C. to beg Brown to marry her so she could “give a name to [her] babies.”3 Contemporary attitudes about gender, in combination with the portrayal of Bradley by the media and her attorneys, make it evident that the jury acquitted her because she was a woman. Annie Bradley’s trial for the murder of Arthur Brown thoroughly illustrates the gender norms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, historians use the phrase cult of domesticity to describe
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