Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History's Deadliest Women: The Evil Stepmother

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

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 survey here.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 for more information.

Hello, everybody. This is just a quick word ahead of the episode, because we need to ask you to vote for us, once again, in the Listeners Choice Awards at this year's British Podcast Awards. And thank you to everyone who's voted so far. You've managed to get us into the top 20. However, we've now had a lot of messages and a lot of emails from people say that they're trying to vote, but they can't. And we didn't understand why. But now we do. They've only gotten flipping changed the way that you can vote. I know. Nobody told us that was going to happen. We didn't sign on for this. Now, only people in the UK and Ireland can vote. So if you're not in the UK and Ireland, you are out. And you can only vote in the Spotify app, insanity.

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But it's all on you now, guys. You're the only ones that can do this. The whole Betwixt the Sheets family is counting on you. Godspeed, soldiers, you can do it. Hello, my lovely Betwixtis. It's me, Cadellister. Welcome back once again to Betwixt 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 program. And we do that by giving you the fair news warning. And here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things and adult you wake from an arranged old, subjects and you're 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. It's an autumn day in Perth, Australia, and the fierce heat has just begun to ease. year old boy leaves his father's home for what he hopes is the last time. He speeds down the dusty

roads between the single-story houses with corrugated iron roofs and verandas, but he's 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. Hello and welcome back to Betwix O'Sheets, history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. Cinderella, Snow White, the twins in parent trap, what are 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 Bork to head back to early 20th century Western Australia and meet serial killer Martha Rendell. How does the idea of the evil stepmother feel? into this story. Where did it come from in the first place? And what exactly did Martha Rendell do? I'm ready to find out if you are. Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Joanna Bocke. How are you doing?

I am really fine. I'm really happy to be here. It's great seeing you again, Kate. 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 Birkbeck and at Grisham College, but you're also the author of Disgrace, Global Reflections on Sexual Violence and Five Evil Women, Hinley West Warnous, Hamulka, Tucker.

So if anybody knows evil women, it's you, Joanna. Unfortunately. This isn't a case that. I know very much about at all. Martha Rendell, the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia. Hello. Okay. Who is Martha Rendell? Well, Martha Rendell is probably one of the most famous Australian women who has been labelled evil. You know, my book actually looks at British and American and Canadian woman, but I wanted to look at this Australian woman because she's really, really interesting. and she is very evil.

Mother Wendell, 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. What she does is she pretends that she's helping them through cold. and she paints their throats with what they called at the time spirits of salts,

which is hydrochloric acid. That doesn't sound good. So, I mean, it's a terrible way to die. They're screaming as 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 goes back to ancient times and goes back. 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 who basically mistreated them or killed them. There's also concerns about the abuse of children more generally. 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. 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 story. I mean, even quarter of a

century after she was executed, she was still being called the vilest women on the planet. So it was a real sensational case at the time. 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? 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 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. You know, despite the way she was demonized in the trial, you know, all the evidence suggests that prior to this, she was regarded as just an ordinary, very tidy, very clean housewife.

So no history of violence, nothing in her past that would make you think that she was somebody that could have done this, is just a quiet, tidy person. 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. horrendous for people at the time. 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? 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 he actually is. 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 register of birth. So age is a very flexible thing for people in this period. 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 we're going into that, the old stepmother, witch-crone type of character. Right. 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 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 Rendell. 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?

Well, at the time, it wasn't at all unusual to have stepparents and especially, especially stepmothers. There was a very high maternity death rate. So a lot of women died in childbirth. A lot of people died very, very early. So, in fact, stepmothers would have been quite common in this period. The statistics are not great, I have to admit. 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 90%. So in other words, step motherhood is not actually particularly unusual here. What happens, though, is that, of course, women don't have many options for employment, for living independently, having a job, anything like that is really not likely, 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 how to work out of his new wife and things like that.

So you do get, you know, in context of unequal distribution of finances by, the husband stroke father, women, actually children can be seen as a threat to the incoming mother and wife. So, I mean, 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 girl, talked back to her and actually told the neighbours that she wasn't her real mum, which infuriated Martha Rendell. So, you know, these are things that were happening at the time. And so, you know, getting rid of these two threats was very important, I suspect, for Martha in order to secure

her security, her living standards. So that would be the daughter, Annie, who was nine when she died. Tell us what happened because the details are quite grisly. Like, what does she do? 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 drink. That's hideous. And 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 realized 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. You know, he was literally fleeing for his life. And that's how the story broke in the press. So there's Annie 9, Olive 7, and Arthur who died aged 15. Yes. 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. This just seems wide. I mean, I know 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're wanting to avoid detection. 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 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. As you said, child mortality rates are extraordinary at this point in history before antibiotics, before vaccinations. I think it's as high as 50%.

So, yeah, I hadn't even thought about that. 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. If you're unmarried in the society, you have to. to work at very menial, you know, low-paid jobs, huge 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, 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 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 adopted out, but were actually just dying. 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 gutters, you know, where they're just being discarded. So I think, you know, Martha was quite, I don't think she was being delusional when she thought no one would ever miss these children. 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 19th 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 just outright killed them because then she's made more room for more babies.

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 a, Amelia Dyer is in 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 stuff like that took place partly, not solely, but partly due to the huge scandal of Amelia Dyer. See, I thought it was an isolated case, though. I hadn't realized that this was more widespread than that.

Yeah, it's very, very widespread. No, no one, you know, Amel Dyer is at one huge extreme. Don't get me wrong here. But, you know, baby farming 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 social service, because unmarried, you know, women, you know, couldn't survive and look after their children. So they were arguing, and, you know, it's not wholly imaginative. that they were doing a social service. Now, of course, a good proportion weren't. They were actually abusing and killing these young children. Had there been cases in Australia like this as well? Yes.

Yeah, baby farming was here in Australia. And Australia, there was also baby farming 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 of represent. facilities for looking after orphans, basically, even if their parents were still alive or their mother were still alive. 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? Yeah. You know, when women commit these terrible, terrible crimes, it's sort of, you know, what Lombroso, 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 labor. So there, you know, there, it's no coincidence that poison.

is the biggest way that women used to kill in this period. Is that true? 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, these kinds of poisons were ubiquitous. They were important for cleaning.

They were part of everyday housewifery. 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 housewifery type thing. It's still extraordinary, though, that three children, I mean, how quickly was she doing

this in rapid succession, but that nobody noticed or questioned this? Well, the neighbours did notice. They heard screaming. Oh, yeah, they did. Yes, she said. In fact, one of the neighbours actually could see into the bedroom of one of the victims and actually saw the victim struggling and, you know, dying basically. That's wild.

But, you know, the idea that 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 community? you know, you don't necessarily want to draw attention of the police to your neighborhood because everyone has got something to hide. So there's also that aspect to it, you know, that keep mum. The police are not necessarily, you know, your saviors, not necessarily someone you want poking around your place.

Apparently there was a doctor Cuthbert, who was the family doctor, who was suspicious after the 15-year-old Arthur died. But what came of that? Anything? Apparently not. No, nothing came of that. He was suspicious, you know, because it's a 15-year-old. The younger kids, you know, is pretty normal. A 15-year-old who was actually working at the time, which is normal for 15-year-old in that period. You know, so he suspected, but, you know, he didn't feel that there was anything really he could do about it. And so he kind of let it slide. And that's what happened. I'll be back with Joanna after this short break.

How does the case break then? You said there was an older child who went and told somebody. Pick up the story from there. Older child went and told 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 kicked. in to kind of so find out where the other children are. The son is very, very frightened, obviously, 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 are. And then, of course, neighbors and other people come to give evidence. They come forward and start telling stories and start telling about how, well, actually 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. One thing is very interesting, I think, is that the husband and father, he also was in deep trouble, obviously. Yeah, where is he? 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 extreme violence, there is this kind of need for people to invert the gender roles. So, you know, the 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. It's also a warning about what happens when women don't play their correct domestic feminine roles, isn't it? of like, look what happens if people try and move out of their gender sphere, is look how terrible it goes. Yeah, that is absolutely the case.

And in the case of Martha Rendell, the whole thing 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. 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. It was actually treated quite leniently in the society at this period. You know, women who immediately after birth killed their children, they were seen as suffering from a form of post-beralienable. birth mania. So they quite often weren't sent to prison or executed. They were quite often sent to a mental institution. There was a sympathy, particularly if they 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. That's wild, isn't it? So, you know, the things. The The thing about Martha Rendell is that she was killing her stepchildren. They were slightly older, and one was working, employed indeed. And that was what made it so awful. And also that she pretended to be a mother. Yeah, that's what's terrifying. Yeah, it's really interesting that the neighbors 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 almost a personal insult to the neighboring women. That's just nuts that line of reasoning. But you saw what was happening. You heard what was happening and you didn't do anything.

But the fault at work is that she was the stepmother, not the actual mother. That's just a wild line of reasoning. Yeah, it is a wild line of reasoning. I don't believe the husband. 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 throat burnt out one after the other. Yeah.

I think it's stretching it a bit too far. But again, 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 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 Rendell change over time. And this is one of the things I find interesting,

because during the trial, there's a fairly 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 30 years. And by the way, Martha Randall is still being talked about, you know, a century later. But the reasons or the explanations for her violence have changed. beyond understanding. So we get a shift from the sort of degeneracy of Kraft Ebbing, this 19th 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 sexualization of her actions, which was not there at all in 1909. In 1909, there's nothing sexual in recounting what happened, let alone in providing explanations for it. But by the 1930s,

when they are expressing great horror for the crimes that Martha Rendell committed, suddenly we get the sexualization 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 lowered accounts, where you read that and you know Martha Rendell sat by their beds as they were screaming and torching in pain and she rocked in her rocking chair to orgasm. What? What? Yes.

Where did that come from? 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 30s through to the 60s and 70s. you get it that she's a sadist who gets sexual pleasure from watching people, in this case her stepchildren, suffer extreme torment. And she rocks in, the most famous account, is this rocking in the rocking chair to orgasm. Was there anything at the time about that? Well, at the time, you have a lock, Alice, another sexologist, and Kraft Ebbing. They had, they were writing in the

1890s. And so his book, Psychopathia Sexualas, that famous book, without had been translated into English by the time of Rendell's crimes. But it wasn't discussed in the trial. However, what Crafdegoving's book does is he's the one who kind of invents the term sadism and the sadist from the Imaki Desard. He invents this term. But of course for him, this, this, you know, he's a you know, sadism is a male crime. In the famous book, he devotes 50 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.

Yeah. Okay. So he has this terrible passage where, 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 a sadist just takes that to another extreme. Okay. But for him it's very masculine.

But by the 1930s, people are looking at his work from the 1890s, 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. 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? No, no, no. No, no, there was nothing sexual in the 1909. She denied everything.

You know, there was not... Wasn't me, didn't do it? No, it wasn't me, didn't do it. That was just her line, and she tried to get away with it. What was the main evidence against a presumably testimony from the one surviving child, but did they exhumed the bodies by this point? They exhumed bodies, they had testimonies from the neighbours. Obviously, the most important was 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, 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 the same room and that her testimony was very, very affecting for the jurors in particular. So she's sentenced to death, and in Australia at this point, how were they carrying that sentence out? She was hanged.

It was hanging, right. And then she was buried in an unnamed grave. What was the reaction to it at the time? 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 civilized society, in their words, 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

civilized society. And of course, Western Australia in this period is trying to portray themselves as an enlightened state, as a enlightened society, not the frontier society of the past, but can hold their heads high in Britain. And that's how they were trying to portray themselves. But even some politicians came out in her defense, not saying she didn't do it, but saying that she shouldn't be executed. It was the execution thing that was the concern for these people. I'll be back with Joanna after this short break. 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? 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 women in society that 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 is somehow more cruel, more dangerous, and more cunning. And the word cunning came up so many times in these discussions, more cunning than men,

and that women were somehow so much worse, were capable of doing so much worse things than men were capable of doing. So there's all those fears. But, you know, I also think it ties in two broader questions about step-parents and fairy tales and story-tellings. So, you know, the whole idea of Cinderella, for example, the evil stepmother in Cinderella, you know, and there's, 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 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 staleaces, with a hair comb and 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 really underlying stories that we tell, that humans tell each other through the centuries. And that was an important aspect of it, I think. 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. Yeah, the cruel and cunning is really a really big thing. I mean, the book that you mentioned are five evil women. 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, Cala Hamolka, you know, the fact that she was intelligent was actually used against her. You know, well, then she must be manipulative. She must be particularly cruel. So these, you know, this is a very common tray. 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, I, so, you know,

this whole idea that somehow women are the deadliest of the human creatures. Yeah, it's playing into wider narratives. is so dominant that is very, very difficult to sort of get around that, even today. So the final question, how did the case of Martha Rendell change how women were perceived in Australia? Did it have a lasting impact? 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 a century. She was a big case.

you get a real increase of extreme misogynistic writings about women. People saying 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 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 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? That's an interesting spin. Yeah. I mean, and they did try that line. That, you know, this is one reason is 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 make arguments about female employment. The really terrible lives of so many working class women who, you know, had very, very, very few options. The best option they had in a place like West Australia, factory works not much, it's farm work and it's domestic service. Farm work extremely difficult and hard, hard on the body.

And 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 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. 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

I want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? My website is Joanna Burke.com. Very simple. Thank you so much. You've been horrifying, but marvellous. It's always lovely talking to you. 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 review and follow along wherever it is, you get your podcasts.

If you like us to explore a subject, if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Come again, betwixta sheet's history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.