The Midwife, the Witch, and the Murderess, or Why Stormy Daniels Can't Catch a Damn Break
The Midwife, the Witch, and the Murderess, or Why Stormy Daniels Can't Catch a Damn Break
An unexpected book review
Hello! Thanks for joining me! Sit down; make yourself cozy. The item on today's agenda: God, I freaking hate how incredibly suspicious men are of women.
And they are, you know. Think you haven't noticed it? Whether it's some oaf asking you whether your breasts are actually "real (no, they're just a Magritte-style picture of breasts?)," your boss treating you like you're slacking off while not seeming to mind what the men do, or your dad insisting you'd wreck the car while cheerfully tossing the keys to your younger brother, I bet you've encountered this.
And those are the more benign forms male suspicion can take!
After all, women are mysterious, right? And not just in a sexy perfume-ad way. They're secretive. They're cagey. They get together and they talk about stuff all day long that we men have no idea about. And it's infuriating! You never know what they might do, because they're waiting - just biding their time - for the right moment to screw you over, buddy boy. You won't even know what the hell happened.
Ugh! Spare me. But right now, that exact same fear and suspicion are on display, aimed via firehose at Stormy Daniels, the adult actress, script writer, and director who has been raked over the coals in her attempt to provide witness testimony in the first criminal trial of a former US president.
“Why is she doing it?” everyone wants to know. Should she have taken the money and shut up forever? Should she have refused the money in 2006 and called a press conference in 2016? No one seems to know - but they all know they don't trust her.
“Just look at her!” I can hear sneering men crow. “She has fake breasts!”
“Coerced?!” they snort. “What'd she even go to his room for, then?”
You can't trust a word that comes out of her mouth, is what they mean. And it's no subtext: it's very clear.
As much as I despise this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't, thumb-on-the-scale judgment system, I recognized the genesis of it in a fascinating book I devoured last weekend - “The Angel Makers: The True Story of the Most Astonishing Murder Ring in History,” by Patti McCracken.
My big takeaway: sometimes one woman can really slow down progress for the rest of us.
“Angel Makers" is the tantalizingly-rendered story of such a woman; namely, WWI-era Hungarian Roma midwife Suzannah "Auntie Suzy" Fazekas. Fazekas was popularly regarded as a witch or a "wise woman," and she dispensed her wisdom in her capacity as the officially-appointed midwife and de facto physician in the tiny hamlet of Nagyrév, two hours east by rail of Budapest in the Great Hungarian Plains.
Oh, yeah: Auntie Suzy was also a murderess. In fact, she may count as the 20th century's most prolific serial killer.
Part of Auntie Suzy's service as a midwife was in what has long been called "family planning." Women who are students of history have known that, for hundreds and even thousands of years, female midwives and healers dispensed herbal tinctures and potions to women who needed to "bring back their menses."
That's a euphemism hiding in plain sight: while there are several reasons a woman's monthly cycle might be interrupted, the big one is and has always been pregnancy. When it wasn't a good time - for any number of reasons - preparations were often readily available to assist a frightened woman, especially in rural areas. These can be understood in today's parlance as non-surgical abortions. They happened for hundreds of years while men were completely unaware. It was within the woman's realm, and for the most part, they never thought to inquire about it.
Even today, many men don't seem to realize this.
But Auntie Suzy took things a little further. When a new mother had no milk and couldn't feed a child she'd just given birth to; when her husband was shiftless or crazy or permanently drunk; when the family home was little more than a stable, Auntie Suzy didn't just offer to terminate the pregnancy. She actually killed the newborn babies - and sometimes, she didn't even offer. Or ask.
Her weapon of choice was arsenic. Suzy openly bought flypaper in bulk in her village. She discovered that, by slipping the strands into boiling water and then cooking the mixture low and slow, she could reliably recreate a potent reduction of arsenic. She'd mix it into sugar water and moisten a newborn's lips and tongue with it. After three to five days - enough time for a tortured mother, wishing things could be different, to plan a baptism - the baby would close its eyes for the last time.
Though Suzy knew that drinking milk would neutralize the poisonous solution, there was often none on hand for the poorest residents of this small, pre-modernity Hungarian Plains village. In Nagyrév - which had only received a formal name in 1900 - the streets were not always wide enough to accommodate the rare carriage that came through: this at a time when 20% of Americans already owned cars.
So, in a place where people only had soap to wash with or candlelight to see by if they managed to come across some tallow and could make those goods at home, what was the greater cruelty? To take a hopeless life immediately and in a somewhat controlled way, or to let it continue for months or even years of torture via starvation? There's a case to be made that Auntie Suzy was doing the very hardest and saddest of the Lord's work.
Until the end of the Great War, a checked-out, elderly doctor based somewhere else had periodically visited Nagyrév to collect and pass on the village's death certificates to the authorities. He obviously didn't pay much attention to the causes of death Auntie Suzy had provided, and that worked in her favor. But he retired. He was replaced by his son, who was eager to make a name for himself, and he started taking a much closer look at births and deaths in the village of Nagyrév.
Pretty soon, Auntie Suzy was hauled in for questioning.
"Are you a baby killer?!" outraged gendarmes imported from the city for the purpose are said to have screamed in Suzy's face during interrogation. The town was so small, and life there run so unofficially, that there was no law enforcement of any kind.
"I prefer the term 'angel maker,'" Suzy is said to have answered calmly before treating the appalled male political figures to a detailed discourse on the historical role of the midwife in family planning. Again, this had been going on under mens’ disinterested noses for centuries, even millennia.
But once discovered by indignant men, this could no longer stand. Auntie Suzy's explanation of her actions was taken as a full confession. After many months, a conviction at one trial - at which dozens of Nagyrév women showed up to testify to Suzy's good character and value to the village - and finally, a successful appeal after being advised to recant her testimony, Suzy finally returned from Budapest to Nagyrév, shaken but relieved - and relieved of her position as village midwife.
Her relative wealth and status seemed to be in danger with this development, but Auntie Suzy had a couple more tricks up her sleeve. She promptly installed her daughter, Mari, as the village's new midwife, making sure she never practiced outside the range of her mother's instructive eye. This way, she was able to continue to prevent helpless mothers from having to watch their babies starve.
But Suzy also felt emboldened to branch out. She started helping village women poison and kill their husbands.
Her flypaper arsenic reduction, Auntie Suzy found, could be slipped into bowls of coffee, glasses of local brandy - the village's specialty - or even dishes of goulash and go undetected. In this way, a woman stuck under the thumb of a violent, drunken, abusive spouse could exercise a little bit of agency and make what was often the only escape available to her.
And yes, a few women also orchestrated escapes simply because they found they'd rather be married to someone else - although it's worth pointing out that marriages were usually arranged in those days, and divorce was an instant reputation-ruiner in such traditional communities. It was also prohibitively expensive, meaning it's not easy to say that the women should've simply gotten divorced.
You didn't “simply” “get divorced.” It was a contradiction in terms - like suggesting you quickly jog to Guatemala.
Scores of men were poisoned over a period of years. Of course, this activity could not fly under the radar forever, and by 1931, many Nagyrév women had been sent to prison as accessories to their husbands' or fathers-in-laws' murder. At least one, Maria Szendi Kardos, was hanged after poisoning to death two ex-husbands and her adult son: the first Hungarian woman to meet the gallows in over 80 years. And Auntie Suzannah Fazekas herself took a convenient exit before she could be held to account for her crimes - courtesy of her own arsenic solution.
It's now believed that Auntie Suzy and her flypaper solution killed as many as 160 babies and men, with hundreds more suspicious area deaths during Suzy's lifetime leaving remains that were no longer able to be arsenic-tested.
If I've sounded a little glib - if I sound like I was kind of rooting for ol’ Auntie Suzy just a tad; Suzy and her arsenic and old Roma lace - well, I've been under a violent, drunken, abusive spouse's thumb myself. Thankfully, I had about a million times more resources than an illiterate Hungarian peasant woman with too many babies in 1920! But I still recognize the desperation these women must have felt.
Still, the law is the law. Why did the age-old practice of controlling reproductivity finally arouse suspicion in 1929? Author McCracken does an excellent job demonstrating that it was likely because the world had recently changed so much, and so fast.
World War I meant a horrific loss of life throughout Europe, and systematically preventing babies from growing up was no way to replace the damaged population. The end of the war also brought about incredible political instability: as new national boundaries were redrawn, Hungary specifically forfeited half of its geographical territory to Romania, meaning the country suffered yet another hit to its population. Hungarians lived in fear of being taken over by Romania, and indeed, the village of Nagyrév was occupied by Romanian military conscripts for more than a year after the war ended, as they tried to forcibly demand allegiance to the Romanian King Ferdinand.
War had never been conducted at such an industrial scale before, either, and those men who did come home often arrived angry, shell-shocked, and totally misunderstood by the women who loved them. How could they ever understand? Their sphere was the home, not the battlefield, and these returning veterans had witnessed horrors heretofore undreamt-of by even the most hardened warriors. Women knew nothing of this, and resentment began to build at a scale that matched the bloodshed.
So it's no wonder, with the country and its culture totally in flux, that Nagyrév - and other small burgs where Auntie Suzy had relatives also working as midwives - began to attract some attention. Yes, villages all over Europe had ways of preventing births that couldn't be coped with, but they weren't all murdering living children! Or husbands. Or adult sons.
What was Suzannah Fazekas actually thinking during all of this? Was she on a crusade to save women from the singular cruelty of bringing into biting poverty children who couldn't be fed; from suffering under tyrannical torment from spouses who couldn't be saved? Was she simply remaking her village in an image she liked better? In at least one case, she used her arsenic to hasten the death of a dear friend who was lingering painfully.
Was that a good deed, in Auntie Suzy's mind? Or was she simply a cackling puppet master?
We don't know. But we do know that, even a hundred years ago, people had an appetite for a good, shocking trial. The cases made news worldwide. In Hungary - indeed, in the whole Danube region of Europe - the "Arsenic Trials" were the OJ Simpson trial of their day.
The Trump trials - plural - of their day, even.
So as Stormy Daniels takes the stand again, let's remember that we don't actually know anything about what happened that day. We weren't there. We have to hold off on recrimination and insistence that she must simply be doing this - sleeping with Trump; testifying in a historic legal proceeding - for the money.
Maybe she is! Maybe she's not. Or maybe the truth is just a little more complicated than an assessment we can coarsely toss off in half a second. And minimizing her actions to fit within this binary choice reduces Daniels to a stock character: it does not allow for the full breadth of her humanity.
So let's quit automatically viewing her with suspicion of because of her job. Let's quit casting her as the vixen, the inevitably tragic Achilles heel of a great president.
Angel. Devil. Savior. Downfall. Midwife. Witch. Murderess.
Sometimes they're one and the same.