Rather than reporting from the famous front lines of Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, Martha Gellhorn instead covered war-torn China and the Caribbean.

Gellhorn was in the journalistic trenches of these two lesser-known areas of combat. She had previously reported on the Spanish Civil War and would go on to cover the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, and unfortunately unnamed conflicts in Central America.

She was the real deal, and her coverage of China and the Caribbean remind us that war happens beyond what the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the front page of Google report. Gellhorn acts as a personal witness to the devastation caused by the Japanese and the Germans in her memoir, Travels with Myself and Another (Putnam, 1978).

Even among poverty and disease, Gellhorn writes with the wit of Dorothy Parker and the detachment of Albert Camus. In 1941, while traveling through war-torn but stubbornly beautiful China, she remembers the paper arches that were constructed to welcome her as a member of the press: “We passed through slatternly villages, each adorned with a triumphal arch for us and a duck pond with malaria for them” (32). Malaria was no joke in China: “The mosquitoes were competing with the flies and losing” (35).

Although Hunter S. Thompson would be later credited with spawning Gonzo journalism, Gellhorn was going Gonzo when Thompson was learning to read. She writes unabashedly about elements of war zones that personally annoy her. With a decisive lack of multi-cultural training she refers to the Chinese language as a “nasal, harsh sing-song” (28). Disease, sing-song, and pernicious smells that inevitably accompany war-resulting poverty were bearable; it was only the “hawking up phlegm” that made her retch (28). But she literally sucked it up, made her retching look like swallowing, and got down to business of war reporting.

She affectionately refers to her war travels as “horror journeys” and lovingly refers to her traveling-partner husband, also a well-known writer, as U.C. (Unwilling Companion). When Gellhorn is acting the part of shrew – complaining about the food, the cold, and the damp – U.C. is busy advising and cheering her through whisky-riddled speech. He also served as her main apologist and explained her departure from large gatherings with these words: “Martha loves humanity but can’t stand people” (48).

This humanism would compel Gellhorn to visit the Caribbean in August and September of 1942, when German U-boats were busy doing what they did best. Caribbean natives were less concerned about Nazis than they were about hurricanes, although they did advise her, as a white woman looking to travel by boat, “to wait until after the war and hire a yacht like everyone else” (62). The rough seas resembled “churned cement,” but Gellhorn met more cockroaches and tarantulas than Nazis on her sloop-cruise through the dangerous Anegada Passage between Virgin Gorda and Anguilla, a “hunting ground for submarines” (63, 67). She seemed disappointed to find little beyond nuclear-resistant insects and furry, carnivorous arachnids.

Gellhorn leaves behind an impressive list of both fictional and non-fiction works. But again, she may be best known for U.C. dedicating his iconic For Whom the Bell Tolls to her.

Unfortunately her five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway made her more famous than her fifty-plus years of writing: the war reporting, the numerous novels and short stories, and even the O. Henry prize in 1958.

Well, she was a leggy blond with a lot of sass.

Earhart had a dream to fly around the world, and the Purdue Research Foundation helped her pursue that dream. In order to accomplish this feat, she had to have a “flying laboratory.” On the board were trustees whose names still live in Hoosier history – J. K. Lilly, grandson of the founder of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical giant, who personally offered to pay $20,000 of the $80,000 price tag. David E. Ross of the Rostone Corporation, another familiar name to Indiana residents, matched Lilly’s sum. The total amount raised for Earhart’s flight into the history books totaled $100,000, a tidy sum for that time period.

Earhart left for her airborne trek around the world in a Lockheed Electra 10. It was the first all-metal design by Lockheed and was sleek beauty powered by two Pratt & Whitney air-cooled radial engines with nine cylinders with three to four hundred horsepower each. The plane, manufactured in California, was delivered to Earhart at Purdue where she wrapped the gas and oil lines to prevent leaks. Extra fuel tanks took up most of the space in the fuselage. Fred Noonan, a top-notch navigator, sat behind the tanks in the tail of the aircraft. He had no way to walk to the front to discuss information with Earhart, so he used a long stick to pass notes to her. Not an efficient method of communication and, one could guess, useless in an emergency when radio transmission could be inadequate.

In an eerie prelude to the end of Earhart’s flight, the beginning was tragic. As Earhart had decided, she flew east to west in the first attempt at a world flight. At Luke Field in Hawaii, a tire blew on landing. In order to prevent a fire on her flying gasoline tank, Earhart switched off the engines. She hit the runway hard enough to break the struts, and the sleek $80,000 Elektra bellied in. Imagine the shudder of the yoke, the vibrations of the rudders, and the fight to control the uncontrollable. Imagine the sound of metal ripped from the frame while sparks marked the end of a dream. From the pictures in the Purdue University archives, it looks like the gear splayed on landing.

A less determined pilot might have given up, but not Earhart. She had the plane repaired and set off again – this time from east to west. Twenty-two thousand miles of the twenty-seven thousand mile trip were completed. The last words from Earhart were at full strength, which meant she was only a few miles away. “KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you. Gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at a 1,000 feet.”

This is the final installment in a three-part series. Read parts one and two.

Although the images of Saddam emblazoned on the American mind come in the form of a fallen statue and a dusty rabbit hole, the former leader of Iraq actually did much in the way of encouraging women’s rights in the 1980s. Under Saddam, “women were allowed to own property, join the police force, drive cars, and have bank accounts” (pp. 9-10).

Now I’m not saying we should bestow a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize on the guy. In fact, these luxuries, aka women’s rights, disappeared by the 1990s. And it only got worse from there.

Christina Asquith’s Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq (Random House, 2009) is a compelling account of the struggle for women’s rights in Iraq after the invasion in 2003. The story is told through the eyes of both American and Iraqi women: two well-educated Iraqi sisters, an American reservist who served as a translator, and an American-born Muslim aid worker. Through each of their stories we are reminded that war, because it threatens “security and stability,” is always bad for women (p.22).

At the center of the struggle in these women’s stories is the Islamic headscarf, or hijab.

Manal, the Muslim aid worker, had donned the Islamic headscarf at age 16, much to the consternation of her secular Muslim parents. Manal was looking to make a typical teenager statement when she decided to wear the hijab: She was Arab, Muslim, and a feminist. She did not need to attract men with her body, as she saw so many American girls doing. She attended only all-girl parties that forbade alcohol. She proudly wore the hijab and pants under her high school basketball uniform. When Manal arrives in Iraq in 2003 wearing the hijab, she is ready to help Iraqi women by empowering them and challenging interpretations of Islamic customs and teachings that apply to women.

Lieutenant Heather Coyne, working for the Coalition Provisional Authority (the temporary lawful government of Iraq), was charged with building a series of women’s centers in Baghdad. Lt. Coyne enlisted Manal to help her determine what the women of Baghdad needed and wanted. In the ensuing weekly meetings with these women, the line of demarcation between conservatives and progressives was evinced by the symbolic headscarf: veiled in one corner, unveiled in another. Picture Sarah Palin and Gloria Steinem trying to agree on the issue of abortion. Then, drop them into a war zone.

The Iraqi sisters, Zia and Nunu, grew up in what Westerners would consider a relatively progressive household: they wore jeans but expected their marriages to be arranged. They did not wear headscarves, and as the book progresses, you begin to understand that there’s a certain amount of security in wearing the hajib.

As each of these four women’s story unfolds in Asquith’s Sisters of War, you begin to realize that although Saddam’s regime was dictatorial and murderous, women could at least leave the house. The threat of Westernization and a loosening of clothing or morals sent many men into a panic that drove them to kidnapping, murder, and rape. Asquith tells one story of a cab driver who killed a couple of Iraqi women simply because they were acting as translators for the Americans.

As a result, Iraqi women remained confined to their homes. American women dared not leave the Green Zone. Not exactly a formula for collaboration on the important issue of women’s rights.

Yet another tragedy of war.

Don’t behave as high as a mountain. Though a mountain is high, it will be climbed by animals.

–From the Great Yasa, the laws and guidelines of the Mongolian Empire

In the year 1170, eight-year old Temujin met nine-year old Borte. In 1177 they marry according to local custom and their parents’ agreement. Within five years of their betrothal, Borte is kidnapped by the Merkit tribe, and Temujin, borrowing from the Trojan War playbook, launches a successful military strike to get his woman back. By 1206 Temujin has conquered enough of Asia to be named Universal Ruler, better known as Genghis Khan.

Although Genghis Khan would bring back wives and concubines from each of his conquests, only his children with Borte were considered as possible future Khans of the Mongolian Empire. Very little is known of her, but she was rumored to have said of her husband after becoming empress: “He’s afraid of me – and of dogs, too.”

I believe her. Mongolian women, as the Genghis Khan exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science illustrates, were pretty bad ass. Apart from caring for children, cooking, and milking the animals for butter, cheese, and yogurt, Mongolian women were trained in warfare and would, after battle, collect the arrows and finish off the enemies when necessary. Now that’s thorough.

For all their arrow-collecting and clean-up killing, the women of the Mongolian empire still liked to dress up. The skeleton of a Mongolian noblewoman in the exhibit reminds us that women have, throughout history, known the importance of looking good. On display in the exhibit is traditional female garb, which included three layers of dress – two silk and one leather – and a fez-inspired hat made of birch bark and cotton, called a bogtag. She would have worn gold and jade earrings, shined her locks with a fine-toothed comb whittled out of a single piece of wood, and admired herself in a bronze mirror.

Jewelry in other parts of the exhibit included more earrings, usually in the shape of a snowman, with alternating balls of gold, jade, and pearls. Thick gold bracelets with intricate patterns would have peeked out of the silk and leather sleeves of a Mongolian noblewoman.

Lies, theft, treachery, and adultery are forbidden, and one ought to love of one’s neighbor as one’s self.

Adultery is apparently in the eye of the beholder, and although not much is known about how Borte felt about her husband’s extensive collection of wives and mistresses, we do know Genghis highly regarded her counsel and that even after his death she was consulted on affairs of the empire. She would die a very powerful woman both in her own right and as the grandmother of the great Kubla Khan.

One can just imagine Borte, adorned in silks, leather, jade, gold, and pearls, sitting in the royal house at Karakorum, the capital of the Mongolian empire, listening to the haunting music of the Mongolian two-stringed cello/violion/guitar, and waiting for news of her husband and his campaigns via the Mongolian version of the pony express.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Thy shall conquer the whole world and shall live in peace with no people which has not freely submitted to them.

We can learn much from the Mongols, and not just what the women wore.

For more laws and guidelines from the Great Yasa, follow Genghis Khan on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Genghis_K

Learn more about the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Genghis Khan exhibit.

Carrie Bradshaw and her gaggle will be glad to know that “Want to go shopping?” was one of the lucky remaining 269 phrases.

Now, as someone who majored in math in college and who, coincidentally, graduated in 1992, I can honestly say that the Teen Talk manifestation of Barbie was actually onto something. Math is tough. It’s abstract thinking squeezed into formulas. I always had trouble understanding why we could manipulate numbers in the eleventh dimension even though dimensions pretty much cease to exist after four or five (and that’s being generous). My linear algebra professor was nonplussed by this. And things didn’t get any better for me in number theory or abstract algebra.

I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Barbie, but, hey, “Wanna have a pizza party?”

Girls Can’t Do Math is stereotype that unfortunately continues to thrive. In 2005, Larry Summers, then-president of Harvard, got in a parabola of trouble when he suggested that the fairer sex didn’t have the natural ability to deal with polynomials.

To paraphrase 80s pop star Bonnie Tyler, “We need a hero.”

Enter Danica McKellar, who is most famous for her role as Winnie Cooper on the 80s television show The Wonder Years. As an undergraduate at UCLA, Winnie proved so good at squeezing the abstract into formulas that she’s actually got a theorem named after her, the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem. The theorem says something important about magnetic fields lining up in a certain direction. That’s about all I understand about the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem. I would tell you more, but math’s not really my thing.

McKellar has also written two books for girls on math: Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail and Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss. Go get ‘em, Winnie.

Now there aren’t that many famous female mathematicians out there, but one woman is credited with being the first.

Her name was Hypatia and she lived in Alexandria, a port city in Egypt that secretly always wanted to be Greek. Like most events that happened 1600 years ago, the information on Hypatia is scarce.

Here’s what we do know about Hypatia: She was born in the fourth century AD, daughter of the brilliant astronomer and mathematician Theon. Theon was in charge of the Alexandrian Museum, the center of higher learning in the port city.

Hypatia was a charismatic and popular teacher of algebra. (Let’s face it; that’s an accomplishment itself.) She also taught astronomy, astrology, and philosophy. We know for sure she wrote commentaries on other mathematicians’ works, and she contributed to the invention of the astrolabe.

Michael Deakin, writing in the March 1994 edition of The American Mathematical Monthly, posits that at the time of her death, she was the greatest mathematician in Greco-Roman territory and possibly the world.

Her death. It was awful. She died at the hands of a mob of angry Christians. Accounts range from dismemberment to being burned alive. We’re also not sure if she was targeted because she was a woman, a pagan, a brilliant mathematician, or d)All of the above.

Hypatia and McKellar provide us with hope that the female mind can bend toward mathematics. And a 2008 University of Wisconsin study of seven million schoolchildren across ten different states also indicates that the gender gap in mathematics has essentially closed.

Extrapolate that.

Upward and onward was Earhart’s motto, so in May 1932, three years before her Purdue faculty appointment, she was at the controls of a gorgeous shiny red Lockheed Vega 5B, a single engine plane on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. That craft seems too small to have flown across the Atlantic. The plane had a spruce veneer fuselage and the single cantilever wing (the braces were internal) was also spruce, making the plane light to compensate for extra fuel tanks. Most planes in 1927 (when the Vega was manufactured) had bi-wing constructions. It was the first design from Lockheed. Earhart seemed to prefer this manufacturer to others.

Earhart’s nonstop flight across the Atlantic was a tribute to Charles Lindbergh. She left Harbor Grace, Newfoundland on May 20, 1932, for Northern Ireland, exactly five years after the famous Lucky Lindy flight. Not only did she suffer the same problems with fatigue that Lindbergh had on his flight, but she had her own problems from the start. Bad weather, the bane of pilots, iced the Vega’s pretty red wings until white hid the red. The Vega didn’t have boots like later aircraft to break the ice from the wings, so Earhart’s nightmare came true. Ice added so much weight to her Vega that the plane refused to fly. It dropped 3,000 heart stopping feet before enough ice broke away on its own, and Earhart leveled off. It was enough to wake up an exhausted lady for awhile. Fatigue occurs easily when there is nothing but sky that merges with a like-colored ocean below. Earhart’s nearly fifteen hour flight covered 2,026 miles, but must have seemed like a flight to the moon and back. She landed in a field near Culmore, Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

According to material found in the Purdue University Libraries Archives, Earhart became the first person to cross the Atlantic twice without stopping, set the record for the fastest flight across the Atlantic, and set the record of the longest distance ever flown by a woman. For this Earhart was awarded the Army Air Corps Distinguished Flying Cross by the United States Congress. Many of her medals are from foreign countries. She was not only the darling of America, but of the world. It was the perfect life for a lady who loved to fly.

This is part two of the Purdue-Earhart series. Read part one.

Chaucer delights us with his tales of corrupt clergy, noble knights, and possibly promiscuous women. Keats asks us to ponder art on an ancient Grecian urn to find truth and beauty. Frost asks us to take the road less traveled. Eliot sees fog as cats and asks us to do the same.

But what of the female poets? What do they ask us to do?

Emily Dickinson asks us to embrace death. Not in a morbid, it’s-coming-anyway-might-as-well kind of way, but as an inevitability replete with images of bridal fashion and chariots, as only a mid-19th century Puritan New England recluse with pagan sensibilities could.

The persona of Emily Dickinson has been handed down to us as the crazy lady in the attic, pencil in hand, scribbling away nonsensical, non-titled, non-punctuated, obsessive thoughts about death and solitude, quite possibly her only friends.

Emily was different and hence wrote differently. Having little legacy of female poets upon which to draw, she looked to Keats and the Brownings for inspiration. But her poems are snapshots of unbridled, undisciplined passion. Sometimes the passion of these poems makes the reader squirm: the ease with which she accepts death, as a lover or tyrant, is unnerving to the 21st-century reader.

Her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts wasn’t ready for this kind of morbid feminine creativity and neither was the rest of the world. During her lifetime, Emily published only a handful of poems.

The other 1700 poems were published posthumously.

The genius of Emily Dickinson can be experienced in one of her most famous poems, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.”

The eerie ease with which the bridal-veiled narrator of this poem climbs aboard the death carriage and leisurely rides through town at dusk, marveling at the landscape and the schoolchildren at recess, and finally reaching her grave (a house that seemed/A swelling of the ground) makes us think had Emily lived today, she would have been either a Goth princess or a Zen master, or both:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

Yes, she’s weird. She’s wearing wispy, spider-web clothes (gossamer, tippet) and seems to be rather enjoying her ride with and toward Death, which she calls her home. She even tells us she’s going to concentrate on the ride and the ride only, and puts away “My labor, and my leisure, too/For his civility.”

Because putting down your labor and leisure is the polite thing to do when Death shows up to take you on a ride to his house.

But perhaps the coolest thing about Emily Dickinson, the thing your teachers never told you because it’s not academic enough, is that this poem is written in iambic quadrameter.

Which means you can sing it to the theme of Gilligan’s Island.

I say we enjoy the ride and put her in the canon.

At the same time the male pilots were being evaluated, the clinic’s founder, Randy Lovelace, assembled a similar group of female pilots for evaluation. His reasoning was simple: women were lighter and so required less propellant to boost to orbit. They were also less prone to heart attacks, and he suspected that they were less subject to claustrophobia and isolation. Lovelace and Air Force General Donald Flickinger jointly founded the Women In Space Earliest (WSE) program, but before any testing could take place, the Air Force cancelled the project.

Undaunted, Lovelace formed the Women in Space Program (WSP) and began subjecting the female candidates to the same battery of tests as the males. At the completion of the tests, thirteen candidates passed, giving the “Mercury Thirteen,” a higher success rate than the male candidates. The four leading female graduates had scores as high or higher than every male candidate. The results of those tests were published for the first in this September’s issue of Advances in Physiology Education. In some cases the women did much better than the male subjects.

For example, before the female candidates were tested, the longest any subject (all of them male) had undergone sensory deprivation without experiencing hallucinations was six hours. When Jerrie Cobb was tested, she went over nine hours without ill effects, at which time the test controllers terminated the experiment. Later two other female candidates went ten hours without ill effects before the controllers terminated the test.

There is also anecdotal evidence that the testing of the female candidates was more rigorous than that for the male candidates. The sensory deprivation (SD) test for the women was conducted submerged in an enclosed cold water tank. John Glenn’s memoir, however, describes his SD test as lasting only four hours and being conducted in a dimly lit room, in which he sat and was given a pen and paper.

In the end, however, no amount of test data or arguments concerning weight savings could push open that door in 1959 – at least not in the United States. NASA added an additional requirement that the candidates be familiar with military test aircraft – which women could not as they were not at that time accepted as military pilots.

Four years later, the first woman rode into space – cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. It would be another twenty years before Sally Ride joined the crew of the Challenger space shuttle and became the first American woman in space.

It could have been a lot different.

We can’t change history, but we can at least take a moment to remember the forgotten “Mercury 13.”

According to John Norberg’s book, Wings of Their Dreams, then president of Purdue, Dr. Edward C. Elliott, met Earhart in 1934 where they both had given speeches. Fascinated by her ideas that women should be part of the aviation scene and should be involved in the development of aeronautics, he approached her with an idea. Would she be interested in consulting women at Purdue on careers in aviation? Purdue University believed in the future of aeronautics and at that time operated the only university-owned airport. It was also noted for its engineering programs. How could she refuse an opportunity like this?

Amelia Earhart knew the first time that she went up in an airplane that she had to fly. She casually said to her family that she’d like to take flying lessons. Her father agreed it was a good idea, so Earhart began the journey that brought her fame. In January 1921 Earhart started lessons with Anita Snook, a pilot who deserves to be remembered for her own achievements.

Earhart bought her first plane in July 1921, and by December she had her National Aeronautic Association license. In the summer of 1922, she set an unofficial women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet. It was the first of many records she would set.

For awhile Earhart had to stick to the ground and do ordinary jobs to pay for her love of flying. One day Captain Hilton Riley asked if she would like to be the first woman to hitch a ride across the Atlantic. Earhart couldn’t say no, and she is in the history books as the first woman to cross the Atlantic nonstop, albeit as a passenger. The next time she crossed the Atlantic nonstop, she was at the controls. In 1928 she set the women’s record for the first solo round trip across the United States. The following year she was the first woman to fly an autogiro, an odd-looking craft that looks like part plane, part helicopter. Two years later she set an altitude record for the beast just before she became the first woman officer of the National Aeronautic Association.

This was the beginning of Amelia Earhart’s love affair with speed, records, planes, and the sheer joy of freedom that comes with flying. Stay tuned for more adventure and learn how Purdue University helped propel Earhart’s dream in my next blog.

Haley Elizabeth Garwood has penned four historical novels on women warriors. Learn more at her Web site.

There’s a musical, a bed and breakfast, and even a jump-rope song. See if you can jump and sing along:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her mother forty-one.

There’s only one problem with this gruesome nursery rhyme from Victorian New England. According to court documents, it’s untrue. But according to the court of past and present public opinion, Lizzie Borden was guilty of hacking her stepmother and father to death.

On the morning of August 4, 1892, someone crept upstairs of the Borden house on Second Street in Fall River, MA and struck Abby Borden on the head with an ax over a dozen times. Then, at least over an hour later, presumably that same person slinked down the stairs and hacked away at Mr. Andrew Jackson Borden.

It took only a couple of days for suspicious eyes to fall upon youngest daughter Lizzie Borden. She found her father’s body and rang out the hue and cry to the Borden’s servant, Miss Bridget Sullivan. After summoning the family doctor, they found the ghastly Mrs. Borden upstairs.

Now remember that 1892 is the pre-CSI era. They had forensics, fingerprints not included. They didn’t have that cool liquid that turns light neon blue when it comes into contact with blood, even after it’s been washed off. They didn’t have much. Unless you count Lizzie Borden’s erratic behavior.

Erratic behavior one
A few days before the deaths, Lizzie Borden tried to buy some poison from the local druggist. She claimed it was to be used as a sealant, but was denied purchase anyway. This evidence was not allowed at trial.

Erratic behavior number two
When asked by police if she was well enough to talk about the murders, she answered in what would become known as her self-possessed way: “I can talk about it now as well as any other time.” In fact, at no point in the investigation did Lizzie show any signs of agitation that her parents had been murdered and did not seem interested in the police catching the killer.

Erratic behavior number three
Lizzie was reluctant to allow the police to search her room on the day of the murders.

Erratic behavior number four
Hacking two people to death means blood splatter. Lots of it. As a matter of course, some of that blood is bound to get on the perpetrator’s clothes. None was evident on the dress she was wearing the day of the murders, but a few days later she burned a dress in the oven.

Sure, Lizzie acted a little too calm and collected after the murders. But we can’t have murder without motive. What drives a daughter to kill her parents? Resentment and greed.

By all accounts, the house on Second Street was not a warm, nurturing place. All members of the Borden house locked their bedroom doors. Sisters Emma and Lizzie received visitors in their respective bedrooms.

The sisters also had become resentful of their wealthy father bestowing monetary gifts on his wife and her family. With their parents dead and no evidence of a will, the Borden sisters inherited half a million dollars.

Could an otherwise mild-mannered, Sunday-school-teaching, animal-loving young lady hack her parents to death for money? Without direct evidence – blood spatter and a murder weapon – the late-Victorian, all-male jury concluded no, a woman could not have committed such heinous crimes.

But we know better. We know our history.