Women and the Law in the Crucible, the Scarlet Letter, and to Kill a Mockingbird

By Paul Thomson
Elena Kagan's recent confirmation to the US Supreme Court is a powerful reminder of just how far women have come in the American legal system; from being disenfranchised until 1920 to being unable to serve as jurors nationwide until 1975, women have a long history of being either unfairly sentenced or largely ignored by the law.

In an interesting twist, however, underprivileged women have managed to manipulate the legal system throughout history to their own, often desperate ends. Here to demonstrate the mutually-abusive relationship between women and the law are three classic literary tales of American injustice.

Story One: Arthur Miller's The Crucible. What do you get when you mix young girls, dancing, and the woods at night? About two dozen executions, Puritan-style. It may not sound all that risqué to our modern ears, but for seventeenth-century Massachusetts, all that hop scotching in the forest may as well have been a rave. And we all know how colonial New Englanders felt about those.

Since the only thing worse than dancing in the woods at night in the 1600's is doing so while being female, the guilty parties bite the bullet in court and confess to being involved in witchcraft. For good measure, they then pay the accusation forward to whoever happens to spring to mind. After all, admitting to the crime means automatic immunity, denying it means an untimely death, and incriminating others means mega bonus points. Knowing that the law fully expects their sex to be susceptible to heathenism, the girls play the system for all its worth in order to escape a much crueler fate.

Story Two: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Just down the road of Salem is Boston harbor, which isn't a much friendlier stopping place if you're a woman with a secret in the 1600's. Take Hester Prynne, for example: a Puritan woman who gets pregnant while her husband is MIA, Hester is jailed, publicly humiliated, and forced to wear a huge scarlet "A" (for "adulterer") on her dress by order of the court. She must then raise her bastard daughter while being a socially outcast single mother in seventeenth-century Boston.

So how does Hester cope? By wearing the hell out of that dress. She embroiders the A to look beautiful, holds her head high, and absolutely refuses to betray the identity of the deadbeat dad. Over time, people forget that the A is intended to be shameful and come to venerate Hester. Like so many marginalized people, Hester transcends her predicament by owning it. That's right: she totally reclaims the A-word. Of course, bearing the yoke of injustice with a smile isn't our preferred method of getting ahead in life, but then again, this is the 1600's; when beating them is out of the question, joining them suddenly has certain perks.Story Three: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Imagine you're the 19-year-old daughter of an abusive, white-trash drunk in 1930's Alabama. Now, imagine you've fallen for a married man. Oh yeah, and he happens to be black. If you then have the great misfortune of getting caught while making advances on him, it might just be the end of the world as you know it. Unless you play it right.

Such is the case with 19-year-old Mayella Ewell, who attempts to salvage her reputation by accusing her crush of rape. Because her jury will be all-male, Mayella can count on the Southern ideal of male chivalry to guarantee her a conviction against her so-called attacker. Moreover, although she is legally underrepresented as a woman, the fact that she is white makes her the default winner over any African-American she might bring to court. By taking advantage of the social prejudices tainting the local justice system, Mayella uses that whole vulnerable-Southern-belle myth to clear her name - if not her conscience.