Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [128]
Why did the second wives marry the men in these cases—often men who were almost total strangers to them, who told wild stories about their businesses, their fortunes, their families? Certainly, some of these women were extremely naive or rash or gullible. Rena Mead, the second wife of John Wilgen, “had fallen in love with his picture, which he had caused to be published by a matrimonial agency.”25 But this is not the whole story. The key is the social role of nineteenth-century women. Women were not free to roam; or hardly ever. Their mobility was the mobility of their men: fathers, husbands.
Bigamy, as a crime, illustrates the primacy of choice in personal relationships: the unraveling of ascriptive, traditional ties. Mobility and choice, however, meant one thing to men, another to women. Men could be and often were rolling stones; women never had the privilege. Nineteenth-century women did choose their husbands; or had veto power, at least. But a woman’s place was still very much in the home. If the male ideal was ambition and hard work, the female ideal was service and obedience. Her function was marriage and childcare. A woman’s world was the sphere of domesticity.26
For women, there were only two respectable patterns of life: marriage and chastity. Chastity had its drawbacks, to say the least. It was a virtue for young women, but it lost its luster over the years. Nobody wanted to be an “old maid,” or a spinster. These were pathetic and useless creatures, in men’s estimation at least. Into this void, stepped the handsome, mysterious stranger. Sometimes he promised money and success. Women could hardly achieve these on their own; at the very least, the stranger promised a way out of a lonely, useless life. Some women leaped to the bait. Some of these women got what they bargained for, or a reasonable approximation. Some did not. Among these were the unfortunate victims of bigamy.
For women, then, victimization by bigamists was part of a system of truncated mobility, and a reflex of their limited social role. But bigamy was also a sign of emancipation. It is a crime of exogamy. As we said, the age of arranged marriages was over. There is no bigamy where parents choose mates for their children; or where marriages only take place inside tight groups, clans, villages, family groups. The women who married bigamists were “modern” in the sense that they chose their own husbands. To be sure, they “fell for a line”; they agreed to share their life with a man with no authenticated past. They said “I do” without getting a real picture of their husband’s family, or his background, without immersing themselves in their husband’s world, his circle of friends.
Bigamy tells us a lot about American society, as well as about gender roles. The handsome stranger, the rich stranger, was not an object of suspicion—not necessarily. The whole country was awash with strangers. It was no crime to be a rolling stone. It was also a period in which missing people were hard to trace. A husband who walked out, a wife who disappeared—who was to say they were still alive? People died all the time—of accidents, disease. After years of silence, perhaps we can assume they were dead. Some men and women who committed bigamy must have honestly believed their spouse had passed on. Or wanted to believe. am
A few women turned the tables on men and committed bigamy themselves. Catherine and Rocco Fennelle were married in Italy in 1875; the marriage disintegrated some time after they emigrated to the United