Alice Mitchell Murders Freda Ward in Memphis, 1892

On January 25, 1892, on a riverfront railroad track, in Memphis, Tennessee, Alice Mitchell slit the throat of Freda Ward. Mitchell explained: "I killed Freda because I loved her, and she refused to marry me." The murder and subsequent trial brought new, national attention to intense, passionate, romantic and sometimes sexual (and soured) intimacies between women. This feature includes reprints of two major scholarly analyses of Mitchell and Ward's intimacy, the murder, and its aftermath. It also reprints reports about an African American woman, Emma Williams, murdering another African American woman, Eleanor Richardson, in Mobile, Alabama. The papers compared this to Alice Mitchell's murder of Freda Ward.

Lisa Duggan: "The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Summer 1993

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Citation: Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Signs, Vol. 18, No. 4, Theorizing Lesbian Experience, Summer 1993, pp. 791-814.

Republished with the permission of the author and The University of Chicago Press. Copryright University of Chicago Press. This document may not be republished without the permission of The University of Chicago Press.

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