| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. By Lisa Duggan. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. xii, 310 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8223-2609-4. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8223-2617-5.)

In Sapphic Slashers, Lisa Duggan offers a cultural study of the lesbian love murder narrative as a product that depoliticized and trivialized the struggle of women for political equality, economic autonomy, and alternative domesticities. The focus is the murder of Freda Ward by her "girl lover," Alice Mitchell, on January 25, 1892, in Memphis, Tennessee. Juxtaposed to the murder is the lynching in Memphis less than two months later of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart. The African American men were operators of the People's Grocery Company, which had drawn the wrath of a competing white grocer. The lynching narrative is used as a secondary site for exploration of the argument that sex and violence are uniquely suited for the production of stories that stifle public debate by substituting moral sloganeering. In particular, Duggan argues that the mass press, courts, and science combined to produce a modern American story of a nation centered in the "white home" that needed to be protected from the homicidal lesbian and the black beast rapist. . . .

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