“Wanted to Save Her Honor”

This chapter shows how, in 1895-96, women’s rights activists attempted to use sensationalism to critique the double standard in domestic violence prosecution. Lacking illustrated newspapers of their own, veteran activists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell, used the pages of the New York Recorder, World, and Journal to apply the “crime of passion” defense to the case of Maria Barbella (or Barberi), a woman tried twice for killing a man who had seduced and dishonored her. Their efforts to introduce into the daily papers a complex debate about women’s rights and the double standard in legal protection helped win the campaign for Barbella’s acquittal. It had the unintended cost of undermining women’s standing to critique honor killings by men.