JOURNAL CULTURE
Author revisits Union crime that gripped a nation Historian says images used to explain Susan Smith marked shift in view of motherhood By CINDY LANDRUM | staff
Many pictures were painted of Susan Smith during the days she riveted the nation back in October 1994 – first with her claims that a black man had carjacked her and kidnapped her two young sons, and then her confession that she had rolled her car into a lake with the boys strapped in their car seats. Loving single working mother. Racist white woman. Abused small-town girl. Scheming adultress. Exploited victim. Monster. A historian from Coastal Carolina University uses the case to analyze what she calls the “new sexism” found in the conservative politics of that time.
“Why did the world fixate on her? Because she fit into the different images of motherhood – although some did not fit very well – that we had,” said Dr. Williams Keira V. Williams, a professor in Coastal Carolina’s departments of history and women and gender studies. Williams, author of the book “Susan Smith and the Mommy Myth: Infanticide and the Politics of Gender,” will speak Monday at Converse College. The talk, which will include a discussion with the audience, is at 6:30 p.m. in Lever Auditorium on the second floor of Kuhn Hall. Williams said her book isn’t about the facts of the case. Instead, she explores how the world tried to make sense of a case that was beyond comprehension for most. Smith “originally fit into the way America saw motherhood in the 1990s,” Williams said. Beginning in
the 1980s and reaching a crescendo in the 1990s, America’s ideal mother was white, married and middle class, she said – a stay-at-home woman who dedicated her entire being to motherhood. “Think soccer mom, not a lot different from the 1950s moms we were seeing on television,” she said. Williams calls this ideal the “conservative counter-reaction” to feminism and women entering the workforce in droves. After Smith confessed, she immediately became the most hated woman
in America, Williams said. The media’s portrayal of her changed from grieving mother to Southern racist. She became a scheming woman who was sleeping around and did away with her children so she could do more of it. “In my book, I wanted to look at the case’s cultural framework,” she said. “We tried to use the available images to make sense of it all.” Williams’ lecture is free and open to the public. Contact Cindy Landrum at clandrum@communityjournals.com.
SO YOU KNOW WHAT: “Susan Smith and the Mommy Myth: Infanticide and the Politics of Gender” WHO: Historian and Coastal Carolina history and women and gender studies professor Dr. Keira V. Williams WHERE: Lever Auditorium, second floor of Kuhn Hall, Converse College WHEN: March 11, 6:30 p.m. COST: Free
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