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“The Notorious Mrs. Clem”: Gender, Class, and Criminality in Gilded Age America1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2012
Abstract
This essay explores the story of Nancy Clem, an outwardly respectable Indianapolis confidence woman and alleged murderess, in the context of changing constructions of class, gender, and criminality. It examines various ways in which lawyers, newspaper reporters, and ordinary citizens struggled to understand a woman who did not fit preexisting conceptions of gender and crime. A series of high-profile cases involving bourgeois criminals and (more than likely) Clem's own social aspirations allowed cultural commentators to portray her as a “genteel murderess.” Upon her release from prison after an abortive fifth trial, Clem could not sustain her newly acquired social identity, in part because her erstwhile refinement was a journalistic creation and in part because the changing nature of class, gender, and space in Gilded Age Indianapolis provided her with fewer opportunities for self-fashioning. Clem's social odyssey from half-literate “Butternut” to genteel murderess to uncultured “capitalist” reflects slippery, yet significant, transitions between social fluidity and relative rigidity, antebellum respectability and Gilded Age gentility.
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- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2012
Footnotes
1
I wish to thank Will Cooley, Pamela Walker Laird, Scott Sandage, Michael Ayers Trotti, Jocelyn Wills, the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for their generous comments on previous versions of this essay, and JGAPE intern Seth Isaacson for his careful editing. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.
References
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32 Hanna, closing argument, Journal, Dec. 21, 1868. Hanna's paean to “the working classes,” it should be noted, was carefully circumscribed by race. It did not extend to at least one woman who “stood before the wash tub,” Clem's servant Jane Sizemore, who had offered damaging testimony. Hanna described her as “that accursed nigger.”
33 Cold Spring Tragedy, 82; Hanna, opening statement, Sentinel, Feb. 12, 1869; William Wallace Leathers, closing argument, Journal, Dec. 19, 1868.
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58 “A Tale of Gambling and Murder,” New York World, quoted in San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 8, 1877.
59 Ibid.
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