| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lisa Duggan. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 310. Cloth $49.95, paper $17.95.

Lisa Duggan faces a challenge: how to build a significant historical argument on the basis of a long-forgotten murder that took place in Memphis in 1892. In that place and time, nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of seventeen-year-old Freda Ward after the younger woman apparently broke her promise to elope with her partner in passion and begin a new life in which Mitchell would pass as a man. Although some might be tempted to dismiss this episode as an isolated incident that reveals more about the psychopathologies of Mitchell than about important developments in the late nineteenth century, Duggan succeeds admirably in moving between the microhistorical and the macrohistorical. Her book convincingly demonstrates that narratives of "lesbian love murder" (p. 2) at the turn of the twentieth century both reflected and helped to produce a racialized and gendered American modernity that imagined middle-class white lesbians as threats to the dominant order.

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