History's Deadliest Women: The Evil Stepmother

In 1909, the third and final woman hanged in Western Australia was executed. She had murdered three of her step children. What drove Martha Rendall to kill these children? Why did others in their neighbourhood stand by and not raise the alarm sooner? And how do our understandings of women who kill factor into the evil stepmother figure factor? This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:38Speaker 01

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• 1:40Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Batwixers. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Batwix the Sheets. How fabulous to see you. You are so welcome here. And because we care about you deeply, we have to make sure that you are okay throughout this programme. And we do that by giving you the fair days warning. And here it is. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty ways of coming around adult subjects and used to be an adult too. And are you an adult? Are you actually an adult? Because today we are talking about child murder and abuse, so you better be an adult. Do you want to go ahead? Do you? Do you really? All right, then, let's crack on.

• 2:14Kate Lister?

  It's an autumn day in Perth, Australia, and the fierce heat has just begun to ease. A 14-year-old boy leaves his father's home before he hopes it's the last time. He speeds down the dusty roads between the single-story houses with corrugated iron roofs and verandas, but his tangled overhead wires strung between wooden telegraph poles. As he's running, he checks behind him, but he's determined to reach his mum's house. He can't go back. He's afraid that he'd lose his life if he did. It's become all too clear that his stepmother is a dangerous woman to live with.

• 3:06Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Batwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Cinderella, Snow White, the twins in Parent Trap, what do they all have in common? An evil stepmother, of course. But today's evil stepmother is not the stuff of fairy tales or even dark comedies. She was a real-life child killer. Today, I'm joined by Professor Joanna Bok to head back to early 20th century Western Australia and meet serial killer Martha Rendall. How does the idea of the evil stepmother feed into this story? Where did it come from in the first place? And what exactly did Martha Rendall do? I'm ready to find out if you are.

• 3:51Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Batwix the Sheets. It's only Professor Joanna Bok. How are you doing?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  I am really fine. I'm really happy to be here. It's great seeing you again, Kate.

• 4:02Kate Lister?

  Lovely to see you again. And thank you for coming back to tell us about a case I didn't know anything about at all. And you're the perfect person to do this because you are Professor Emerita at the University of Berkbeck and at Grisham College, but you're also the author of Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence and Five Evil Women: Hinley West Warnus, Homolka, Tucker. So if anybody knows evil women, it's you, Joanna.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Unfortunately.

• 4:34Kate Lister?

  This isn't a case that I know very much about at all. Martha Rendall, the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia. Hello. Okay. Who is Martha Rendall?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Well, Martha Rendall is probably one of the most famous Australian women who has been labelled evil.

• 4:56Kate Lister?

  Uh-huh.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  You know, my book actually looks at British and American and Canadian women, but I wanted to look at this Australian woman because she's really, really interesting and she is very evil. Martha Rendall, what she did, 1909, we're talking about, we're talking about Perth. And what happens is that she hooks up with this man who has a lot of children. They then move in together with four of the children. And then systematically, she kills them. She kills three of them.

• 5:28Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  What she does is she pretends that she's helping them through colds and she paints their throats with what they called at the time, spirits of salts, which is hydrochloric acid.

• 5:43Kate Lister?

  That doesn't sound good.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  So they're, I mean, it's a terrible way to die. Their screaming is great agony involved in this. And the case became a real sensation for a huge number of reasons. Firstly, of course, and I hope we can talk about this, it's the evil stepmother thing that, you know, goes back to ancient times and goes back to fairy tales and all of that. But also, at the time she committed these crimes, there were real panics about baby farming. In other words, women who had babies and gave them to other women to look after, basically mistreated them or killed them. There's also concerns about the abuse of children more generally.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And the way she killed these children was particularly horrific. Incidentally, one of the things I find really interesting is that the neighbours knew all about what was happening. They could hear the children screaming.

• 6:37Kate Lister?

  No.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  But because they believed that she was their birth mother, they didn't intervene. So there's this idea that somehow, you know, the house is sacred, you can't intervene, and parents, particularly men, mothers have not only a right, but a duty to punish and to discipline children. So it caused a real...

• 7:00Kate Lister?

  Oh, my God.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  So, I mean, even quarter of a century after she was executed, she was still being called the vilest woman on the planet. So it was a real sensational case at the time.

• 7:12Kate Lister?

  Wow. All right. Okay. So there's a lot going on there and we're going to get into it. But first of all, do we know much about Martha's background? Because often with these historic cases, is all we know about them is the actual case itself? Or are the records quite good here?

• 7:28Speaker 02

  The records are quite good. I mean, she came from a very impoverished background, but respectable. She worked as a servant. It was a fairly typical working class life. She really kind of not went up in life, but she at least got security when she moved in with her partner. Because he was a carpenter, he had a fairly decent wage, fairly decent, you know, money coming in. So for her, she got a little bit of security and stability in her life. But she also got the respect of being a mother and a housewife. And, you know, despite the way she was demonised in the trial, you know, all the evidence suggests

• 8:09Speaker 02

  that prior to this, she was regarded as just an ordinary, very tidy, very clean housewife.

• 8:16Kate Lister?

  So no history of violence, nothing in her past that would make you think that this, that she was somebody that could have done this? It's just, just a quiet, tidy person?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  A quiet, tidy, ordinary-looking, ordinary-type person. Now, that said, of course, very, very quickly, that image of her was dismantled totally. You know, she became this kind of degenerate woman. She became like a throwback from the Stone Age. She was called really horrific names. She was fiendish, she was devilish. And the fact, of course, that she was the mother was particularly horrendous. The fact that she was a woman and then the stepmother was particularly horrendous for people at the time.

• 9:02Kate Lister?

  Oh, my God. Do you know how old she is when she gets married? Is she a young girl or is she sort of what we're talking?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Well, when she hooks up with Thomas Morris, there's different reports about her age in the newspapers. So in the newspapers, they are saying that some say that she's in her 30s, one newspaper says that she's elderly. So there's really contradictory views about how old she actually is.

• 9:30Kate Lister?

  How interesting.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Remember, at the time, age is very uncertain for a lot of people about how old they actually are. I mean, you do have registration of births, of course, at this time. But of course, when she was born, they wouldn't have been, you know, registrar of births. So age is a very flexible thing for people in this period.

• 9:48Kate Lister?

  It's interesting that some of the reports would say that she was in her 30s and others would say that she's elderly. Because like, we're going into that, the old stepmother, witch, crone type of characterization already, aren't we?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And that's exactly what they go to. I mean, you know, she probably did look quite old for whatever age she was because she probably, she had a hard life. I mean, she was a hard worker, she had a hard life, you know, life of deprivation. Women aged a lot then. That said, she definitely was, by emphasizing that she was an old crone, you're really, you're really drawing a direct line to that whole witch, you know, she's a witch, she's a evil woman, evil stepmother. That's, that whole line of thinking comes into play at that stage. And that was definitely the case for Martha Rendall.

• 10:39Kate Lister?

  So we don't know how old she is. It could be middle-aged, it could be very, very old. She may have been cohabiting before she got married, but she gets married... What happens? How do you go from I've got married, I've got a bit of respectability now, he's a carpenter, to murdering children? What on earth?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Well, at the time, it wasn't at all unusual to have stepparents, and especially, especially stepmothers. There's a very high maternity death rate. So a lot of women died in childbirth. A lot of women, a lot of people died very, very early. So in fact, stepmothers would have been quite common in this period. The, the statistics are not great, I have to admit. You know, some statistics say that one fifth of fathers remarried within a year of their wife dying. Some other statistics say it's as high as ninety percent. So in other words, stepmotherhood is not actually particularly unusual here.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  What happens though, is that of course, women don't have many options for employment, for, they can't, you know, living independently, having a job. Anything like that is really not likely, unless you're highly, unless you're educated. So not for working women. So stepmothers often did find themselves in competition with the children of the previous relationship. And of course, the husband is often using that, manipulating that in order to get better favors, better harder work out of, out of his new wife and things like that. So you do get, you know, in context of unequal distribution of finances by

• 12:28Speaker 02

  the husband stroke father, women, actually children can be seen as a threat to the incoming mother and wife. So I mean, that, that is a really important part, I think, of this story, that, you know, she wanted to firstly, get rid of the competition for limited resources. Secondly, she wanted to, if the children, the first murder actually happened because the young daughter, young, young girl talked back to her and actually told the neighbours that she wasn't her real mum, which infuriated Martha Rendall. So, you know, these are things that were happening at the time.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And so, you know, getting rid of these two threats was very important, I suspect, for Martha, in order to secure her security, her live, her living standards.

• 13:20Kate Lister?

  So that would be the daughter Annie, who was nine when she died. Um, tell us what happened, because the details are quite grisly. Like, what does she do?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Well, firstly, she beats Annie severely for telling the neighbour that she was not the real mother. And then basically, for all the three children, she gives them this corrosive substance to, to drink.

• 13:43Kate Lister?

  That's hideous.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  And she sits, she sits by their bedside as they are suffering. And the newspapers love reporting this about how, you know, she watched them die, this terrible, terrible death. One of the children, there were four children, one of the children realised what was happening and escaped. And that's how it all came to light, because one of the boys actually went back to his birth mother and the whole story broke about that, you know, she was actually killing. And the boy said, you know, I had to leave because I was going to be next. Um, you know, he was literally fleeing for his life. And that's how the story broke in the press.

• 14:23Kate Lister?

  So there's Annie, nine, Olive, seven, and Arthur, who died aged fifteen.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:30Kate Lister?

  The method of her murdering them here seems extraordinary, because no one's going to look at that and view it as a natural death, are they? This just seems wide. I mean, I know that, that I'm sort of stripping the humanity and the horror out of this, but just from a purely pragmatic point of view, what on earth? This isn't a sensible method to kill someone if you, if you're wanting to avoid detection.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but remember, I think, I think it's highly likely that she simply didn't expect anyone to inquire into the deaths. I mean, these are working class, useless, worthless children as far as the whole society is concerned. They're working class children, they are of little value to anyone, um, except of course, the immediate family. I don't think she expected, and wrongly obviously, that anyone would pay any attention to the disappearance of another three little working class children.

• 15:26Kate Lister?

  As you said, child mortality rates are extraordinary at this point in history, before antibiotics, before vaccinations. I think it's as high as fifty percent. So I, I hadn't even thought about that.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, who would notice? I mean, the same thing with baby farming at the time. I mean, baby farming was a situation where women, often unmarried women, would need to get rid of their babies. Um, if you're unmarried in this society, you have to work very menial, you know, low paid jobs, huge, you know, number of hours, you can't have a child. So an unmarried woman, and even some married women, who had a child that they either couldn't keep or didn't have the resources to keep because of various reasons, would give away their baby to a baby farmer. Who would promise to, I mean, there's different ways of baby farming,

• 16:21Speaker 02

  but one of the major ways is the baby farmer would promise to look after the child or to put it in the countryside with a farming family that was, you know, a story they used to tell. Whereas in fact, what they would do would starve them to death. Or they would just keep them in a room, you know, dozens of babies in one room. They would just feed them full of morphine, so the babies would sleep all the time and eventually the babies would die. Okay, now these babies also went missing and no one cared. You know, it wasn't until the, you know, really quite late in the century that people noticed that, you know, all these babies were actually not being abducted out, but were actually just dying.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  And there were a number of really big scandals. Again, this is all at this particular period of time. Scandals where, you know, you find babies, you know, a number of babies floating in rivers and lakes and stuff, and in, in gutters, you know, where they're just being discarded. So I think, you know, Martha was quite, um, I don't think she was being delusional when she thought no one would ever miss these children.

• 17:26Kate Lister?

  The biggest case of baby farmers in the UK was Amelia Dyer, I think, was that she got caught doing exactly what it is that you're saying, and she was in the nineteenth century, was that she'd been taking in babies, she's paid to take care of the babies, but then the babies die or they're neglected, or in some cases, she, she just outright killed them because then she's made more room for more babies.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, Amelia Dyer is the most famous case. I mean, she probably is the worst mass murderer in history outside of wartime, because she probably killed hundreds of babies. And she was also, of course, executed in the end for her crimes. And she's, Amelia Dyer is a very, very important case because the horror about her crimes actually caused the law to change. So registration of these, these baby farms and inspections and, and stuff like that took place partly, not solely, but partly due to the huge scandal of Amelia Dyer.

• 18:24Kate Lister?

  See, I thought it was an isolated case though. I hadn't realised that this was more widespread than that.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very, very widespread. No, no one, you know, Amelia Dyer is one huge extreme, don't get me wrong here. But, you know, baby farming was, was very common. And also, I am talking about the extremes here. You know, there were baby farmers who were more responsible, who did at least give a minimum amount of care to keep the children alive. And actually, quite a few baby farmers legitimately argued in, you know, court proceedings and in the commissions of inquiry, that actually they were doing a service, a, a social service, because unmarried, you know, women, you know, couldn't survive and look after their, their children.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  So they, they were arguing and, you know, there is, it's not wholly imaginary that they were doing a social service. Now, of course, a good proportion weren't. They were actually abusing and killing these young, young children.

• 19:26Kate Lister?

  Had there been cases in Australia like this as well?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, baby farming was here in Australia. On Australia, there's also, baby farming was was here, definitely. But there was also homes where you could drop off babies here and in Australia. And that was also important. And of course, religious organisations also had facilities or provided facilities for looking after, you know, orphans, basically, even if their parents were still alive or their mother was still alive.

• 19:55Kate Lister?

  So how does the figure of the stepmother, which is what Martha was, feed into this sort of growing concern at the time that people are hurting children?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, when women commit these terrible, terrible crimes, it's sort of, you know, what Lombrozzo, the famous 19th century Italian criminologist called double deviants. So they are deviant not only as killers, criminals, but they're also deviant because they're women doing these crimes. And the horrors, all the more great, because of course, they are committing crimes in ways that mimic feminine nurturing and maternal ways of being in the world, maternal labour. So they, you know, they, it's no coincidence that poison

• 20:46Speaker 02

  is the biggest way that women use to kill in this period.

• 20:51Kate Lister?

  Is that true?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  It is actually true. Poison is the most common way. Women kill using things around their house. And in 19th century, in early 20th century homes, you know, these kinds of poisons were ubiquitous. They were important for cleaning. They were part of everyday house whiffery. You could buy them at the local store. You got guys with their trolleys coming around, you know, every week, selling you them from at your doorway. So everyone had these sorts of chemicals, these poisons, in their home. So they were a very easy thing for women to sort of pick up with and to give. And they could, as I say, they could mimic nurturing, house whiffery type thing.

• 21:34Kate Lister?

  It's still extraordinary that three children, I mean, how quickly was she doing this in in in rapid succession that that that nobody noticed or questioned this?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Well, the neighbours did notice. They heard screaming.

• 21:45Kate Lister?

  Oh, yeah, they did. Yeah, yes, you said.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Um, in fact, one of the neighbours actually could see into the bedroom of one of the the the victims and actually saw the victim struggling and, you know, dying, basically, and in agony. But, you know, the idea that the the home is a sanctuary and that, you know, mothers have a right to do what they want with their own flesh was such a big thing in the period. Remember also, working class communities, you know, you don't necessarily want to draw attention of the police to your your neighbourhood, because everyone has got something to hide. So there's also that aspect to it, you know, that, you know, keep mum.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  The police, not necessarily, you know, your your saviours aren't necessarily someone you want poking around your place.

• 22:36Kate Lister?

  Apparently, there was a Dr Cuthbert, who was the family doctor, who was suspicious after the 15 year old Arthur died. But what came of that? Anything? Apparently not.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  No, nothing came of that. I mean, he was suspicious, um, you know, because it's a 15 year old. Younger kids, you know, um, is pretty normal. A 15 year old who was actually working at the time, which is normal for a 15 year old in that period, you know, so he suspected, but, you know, what, he didn't feel that there was anything really he could do about it. And so he kind of let it slide. And that that's what that's what happened.

• 23:17Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Joanna after this short break.

• 23:27Kate Lister?

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• 24:11Kate Lister?

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• 24:56Kate Lister?

  against your budget.

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• 26:00Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 26:42Kate Lister?

  How does the case break then? You said there was an older child who went and told somebody. Pick up the story from there.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Older child went and told his his mother, his birth mother. And the birth mother then goes really very upset, obviously. And then there's just this whole policing sort of kicks in to kind of so find out where the other children are. The son is very, very frightened, obviously. And but then they tell the police. And this is when the authorities try to do something about or try to work out where basically the other children, other children are. And then, of course, neighbours and other people come to give evidence. They come forward and start telling stories and start telling about how, well, actually,

• 27:31Speaker 02

  she wasn't a good mother after all. And so all of that, the gossip mill, if you like, kind of explodes and the court case takes place. And every single newspaper reports it. I mean, it is such a huge, huge event at the time. So everyone is talking about it. The newspapers are reporting the court case verbatim. As I say, the gossip mill is really running high at this period. What one thing is very interesting, I think, is that the the husband and father, he also was in deep trouble, obviously.

• 28:07Kate Lister?

  Yeah, where's he?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Where is he? That is a really good question. And in the end, he was not convicted of the crime, because what they did was they painted him as a rather passive man, as a not very bright, as passive. She kind of wore the pants. She was, in fact, the dominant person in the relationship that he simply acquiesced and didn't really know what was happening at all, in fact. So, again, this thing about women and and extreme violence, there is this kind of need for people to invert the gender roles. So, you know, the

• 28:48Speaker 02

  husband father becomes the feminine passive person in the relationship. She becomes the dominant one who he cannot say no to, he cannot control. And she becomes the man of the household. And it's by making her into this masculine figure that kind of enables us to say, well, okay, it was a woman who committed these crimes, but really, she was a man in the relationship.

• 29:14Kate Lister?

  It's also a warning about what happens when women don't play their their correct domestic feminine roles, isn't it? Of like, look what happens if they try and if if people try and move out of their gender sphere is look how terrible it goes.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is absolutely the case. And in, you know, in the case of Martha Rendall, the whole thing is, is that she went against, you know, God's ordained role for women, not only by killing, but killing her own stepchildren. And this is particularly horrendous for people at the time. You know, how can a woman do this? Everyone can understand why a man could do this. And incidentally, it's not all killing of children that's wrong in this thing. Infanticide is a really, really interesting thing. So the killing of very young children, your own very young, usually newly born, in fact, the newly born is very important here, was actually treated quite leniently in the society at this period.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  You know, women who are immediately after birth, killed their children, they were seen as suffering from a form of post-birth mania. So they quite often weren't sent to prison or executed. They were quite often sent to a mental institution. They, there was a sympathy, particularly if there were economic reasons, for women acting as they did, i.e. they'd been deserted by their husbands, for example. And those who were convicted and sent to prison actually got out very early. They didn't usually spend more than a couple of years in prison.

• 30:47Kate Lister?

  That's wild, isn't it?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  So you know, the thing about Martha Rendall is that she was killing her stepchildren. They were slightly older and one was, you know, working, employed indeed. And you and that was what made it so awful. And also that she pretended to be a mother.

• 31:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  It was really interesting. It's really interesting that the neighbours were particularly angry that they had been fooled. That, you know, she wasn't really a mother, she was pretending to be a mother. And this was seen as a, almost a personal insult to, to the neighbouring women.

• 31:27Kate Lister?

  That's just nuts, that line of reasoning of like, but you saw what was happening, you heard what was happening and you didn't do anything. But the, the fault at work is that, that she was the stepmother, not the actual mother. That's just a wild line of reasoning.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a wild line of reasoning.

• 31:44Kate Lister?

  I don't believe the husband. What, what's your take on him? Like this kind of like, oh, I'm just so passive and just so feminine that I didn't notice that three of my children had had their throats burnt out, one after the other.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think it's stretching it a bit, a bit too far. But again, it, it comes down from the need to paint the woman as the man. You know, that somehow it's masculinity, it's men who are aggressive and who do these things. So if a woman does it, it must be that she is, you know, acting like a man and that he is this, is the feminine person of the relationship. I mean, one of the things I actually find really, really interesting about this case is the way understandings of Martha Rendall change over time. And this is one of the things I find interesting because during the trial, there's a fairly um

• 32:39Speaker 02

  small number of explanations for why she did what she did. And they're mainly religious explanations. She was overcome by a devil or a demon. She was a degenerate. So in other words, you know, closer to the animal world as opposed to human. She was not really a woman. All these sorts of things are the dominant explanations at the time. But you know, you skip forward thirty years. And by the way, Martha Rendall is still being talked about, you know, a century later. But the reasons or the explanations for her violence have changed beyond understanding.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  So we get a shift from this sort of degeneracy of Kraft Ebbing, this nineteenth century psychologist who is sort of the father of degeneration theory. I mean, there were others before him, but he's the big, big name in this. So you go from that to the sort of sexualisation of her actions, which was not there at all in nineteen oh nine. You know, in nineteen oh nine, there's nothing sexual in recounting what happened, let alone in providing explanations for it. But by the nineteen thirties, when they are expressing great horror for the crimes of that Martha Rendall committed,

• 34:01Speaker 02

  suddenly we get the sexualisation of those crimes and we get them being seen in terms of sadism. And that's a really, really interesting shift, I think. So, you know, there's these lurid accounts where you read that, and you know, Martha Rendall sat by their beds as they were screaming and torching in pain and she rocked in her rocking chair to orgasm.

• 34:28Kate Lister?

  What? What? Where did that come from?

• 34:32Speaker 02

  So in other words, you get a shift, even though there was nothing, you know, remotely sexual about her crimes to, as far as we know. But suddenly in the thirties through to the sixties and seventies, you get it that she's a sadist who gets sexual pleasure from watching people, in this case, her stepchildren, suffer extreme torment. Um, and she rocks in, the most famous account is this rocking in the rocking chair to orgasm.

• 35:01Kate Lister?

  Was there anything at the time about that?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Well, at the time, you have a look, Alice, another sexologist and Kraft Ebbing. You know, they had, they were writing in the eighteen nineties. And so his book Psychopathia Sexulas, that famous book, was out, had been translated into English by the time of Rendall's crimes, but it wasn't, wasn't discussed in the trial. However, what Kraft Ebbing's book does is he's the one who kind of invents the term sadism and the sadist from the Maki de Sade. He invents this term. But of course, for him, this, you know, sadism is a male crime.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  In the, you know, the famous book, he devotes fifty pages to male sadists. And I think it's only two to female sadists because he thinks that sadism is simply normal male sexuality ramped up quite a lot.

• 36:01Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Okay, so he has this terrible passage where, uh, I'm, I'm just paraphrasing here, where he says something like, you know, the normal man bites his wife and loves to conquer the woman in sex. And the sadist just takes that to another extreme.

• 36:16Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Okay, but for him, it's very masculine. But by the nineteen thirties, people are looking at his work from the eighteen nineties and they are translating this into, well, actually, there are some women who are sexual sadists as well. So that's the shift that we're seeing.

• 36:33Kate Lister?

  What defence was put up, if any, or did she just plead guilty to this? I mean, did she say, I was rocking in a chair to orgasm?

• 36:41Speaker 02

  No, no, no. No, there was nothing sexual in the nineteen oh nine. Um, she denied everything. You know, there was, it was not.

• 36:48Kate Lister?

  Wasn't me, didn't do it.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't me, didn't do it. That was just her line and she tried to get, to get away with it.

• 36:54Kate Lister?

  What was the main evidence against, presumably testimony from the one surviving child? But they, did they exhume the bodies by this point?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  They exhumed bodies, they had testimonies from the neighbours. Obviously, the most important was the, the kid who came across as a very reliable witness in court. They also hauled up the birth mother in court and she gave evidence. And it was, it's really interesting to see that they portrayed her as the pure, true mother. Um, you know, couldn't do anything wrong and passive but hardworking and, you know, the good. So you had the kind of good mother and the bad stepmother pitted in this, in the same room. And that, that, her testimony was very, very affecting for the, the jurors in particular.

• 37:46Kate Lister?

  So she's sentenced to death and in Australia at this point, how were they carrying that sentence out?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  She was hanged.

• 37:53Kate Lister?

  Was hanging, right.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  And then she was buried in an unnamed grave.

• 37:58Kate Lister?

  What was the reaction to it at the time?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  I mean, people didn't doubt that she did it, but yet there were people who thought it was simply wrong to execute a woman. That this was something that no civilised society, in their words, uh, would ever do. So there were quite a lot of people who made the argument that she must have been insane and she should be sent to an insane lunatic asylum, that she, or life imprisonment, that she shouldn't be executed because this was simply beyond the pale of a respectable civilised society. And of course, Western Australia in this period is trying to portray themselves as an enlightened state,

• 38:41Speaker 02

  as a, you know, enlightened society, not the frontier society of the past. But, you know, can hold their heads high in Britain. And that's how they were trying to portray themselves. So, but even some politicians came out in her defence, not saying she didn't do it, but saying that she shouldn't be, she shouldn't be executed. It was the execution thing that was the concern for these people.

• 39:12Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Joanna after this short break.

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• 41:33Kate Lister?

  Why do you think that this case caught the public's imagination in the way that it did? Because very, very tragically is children are being hurt a lot and they're still being hurt a lot. And there are women with bigger body counts than this one. And it's just, what do you think it is about this particular case that we're still talking about it over 100 years later?

• 41:52Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of things about this case that it talked to lots of moral panics at the time. I think that's definitely an issue. It talked to fears about family breakdown and the role of of women in society that, you know, women didn't have options to live without the support of a man, a protector of some sort. So it tied into those arguments. It tied into fears about women as somehow more cruel, more dangerous and more cunning. And the word cunning came up so many times in these discussions, more cunning than men

• 42:37Speaker 02

  that and that women were somehow so much worse, were capable of doing so much worse things than than men were capable of doing. So there's all those fears. But, you know, I also think it ties in to broader questions about stepparents and fairy tales and story tellings. So, you know, the whole idea of Cinderella, for example, the evil stepmother in Cinderella, you know, and this, I think it's something like 260 different versions of Cinderella throughout the globe. So this is a sort of a widespread story that we all

• 43:19Speaker 02

  know about. Snow White, again, the evil stepmother in Snow White, who of course, after the huntsman doesn't kill Snow White, the evil queen uses three feminine maternal ways to attempt to kill Snow White with stelaces, with a hair comb, enchanted hair comb, and of course, the ubiquitous apple, the poisoned apple, you know, like Eve. So these are stories that are also circulating at the time and so many more. I mean, since ancient times, we've had evil stepmothers. So it also fits into this, it's really underlying stories

• 44:04Speaker 02

  that we tell, that humans tell each other through the centuries. And that was an important aspect of it, I think.

• 44:12Kate Lister?

  Is that a similar narrative that you see going through other cases involving women murderers that you've looked at? This cruel and cunning narrative?

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the cruel and cunning is really, a really big thing. I mean, the book that you mentioned, Five Evil Women, the, you know, one of the things that really struck me when I was writing that book is that there was absolutely nothing these women could do to convince people that they weren't totally heartless. So if they cried, it was, you know, just crocodile tears. If they didn't cry, then they were definitely hard hearted B I T C Hs. You know, so there was nothing they could do. And indeed, one of the women I talk about in the book, Homolka, Carla Homolka, you know, the fact that she was intelligent was actually used against her. You know, well, then she must be manipulative.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  She must be particularly cruel. So these, you know, this is a very, you know, commentary. I mean, Myra Hindley, to this day, I don't think I know of any account that doesn't say that she was regarded as totally heartless and she never cried. But she cried constantly, you know, right from the police station, her first interview, she kept saying, I'm sorry, I did wrong. I can't believe I did it. I'm sorry. So, you know, this whole idea that somehow women are the deadliest of the human creatures.

• 45:41Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it's playing into wider narratives.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Is, you know, so dominant that it's very, very difficult to sort of get around that even today.

• 45:49Kate Lister?

  So the final question, how did the case of Martha Rendall change how women were perceived in Australia? Did it have a lasting impact?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  I think it did have a lasting impact. It's certainly, if you look at public commentary about her, and as I say, it went on for centuries, she was a big case, you get a real increase of extreme misogynistic writings about women. People saying, you know, women are the most deadly of all creatures, reciting Longfellow's famous poem, when she was good, she was very, very good. When she was bad, she was horrid, saying, you know, really that women somehow can be easily corrupted and they don't need a man to do that to them. In other words, they don't need to have an accomplice or or man telling them what to do to be particularly

• 46:41Speaker 02

  vile. Now feminists, Australian feminists, though, did tentatively sometimes, but they did use this to kind of push a very, very different narrative. And that is that how can you expect women to act with propriety and to act morally if we can't vote, if we're simply prostitutes to our husbands?

• 47:04Kate Lister?

  That's an interesting spin.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, and they did try that line, that, you know, this is one reasons why we need the vote. This is why that suffrage will make us respectable, because suffrage will enable us to have a stake, if you like, in the society in which we live. They also used it to to make arguments about female employment, the really terrible lives of so many working class women who, you know, had very, very, very few options. You know, the best option they had in a place like West Australia, factory work's not much, is farmwork and it's domestic service. Farmwork extremely difficult and hard, hard on the body. And

• 47:49Speaker 02

  of course, domestic service, which was rife with sexual violence and, you know, lack of freedom was, you know, these women are in many homes are virtually imprisoned. They have a couple of hours off, maybe on Sunday, and they're expected to use those couple of hours to go to church. So they use these sorts of arguments, these sorts of cases, I should say, to make arguments about the status of women. And those were the important things. But, you know, they came up against this really hardcore misogyny, which said, well, you know, we can't give women the vote because look what they do.

• 48:23Kate Lister?

  Joanna, you have been fascinating to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming by to tell us about this frankly horrific but very important case. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 48:36Speaker 02

  My website is joannaburke.com. Very simple.

• 48:40Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You've been horrifying, but marvelous.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Always lovely talking to you.

• 48:44Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Joanna for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like the view and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again on Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.