Word: motherly
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When Davis went to interview the man's accuser, she learned that the woman was deaf and unable to communicate with anyone except her mother. The prosecutor couldn't make a case without an unbiased third-party interpreter, so Davis asked him to release her client. He refused, declaring that he had nine months to get an indictment. When that time was up, the prosecutor let the man go. "I know he's guilty," he told her. "At least he did nine months in jail...
...Merteuil [in Liaisons] invented herself to survive in a world where women were used and discarded on a daily basis." Even in The Closer, a cop show strongly driven by the crime of the week, Brenda's loyalty and drive for justice are intangibly, but decisively, female--"a mother with her cubs," as Sedgwick puts...
...almost killed in a riot over research. Medical students learn anatomy from cadavers, and in the past they got them on the sly, digging up fresh graves. In April 1788 a student at a New York City hospital jokingly told a boy that he was dissecting the boy's mother. When the boy's father found that her coffin had been robbed, the discovery set off two days of uproar. Many of New York's doctors hid in the city jail, where they were defended by local civic leaders, including diplomat John Jay. A mob pelted them with stones, knocking...
...Carrie Buck, a young woman in a Virginia home for the feebleminded, reached the Supreme Court. Writing for an 8-1 decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said society could "prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind ... Three generations of imbeciles are enough." (Buck's mother and daughter allegedly shared her disability.) The Catholic Church condemned sterilization laws in 1930, but the political process backed science, as it was then understood. The mass murder of "unfit" individuals and ethnic groups by the Nazis gave eugenics a black mark that can never be washed off. But the issue...
...sometimes the city feels different. On the subway, a mother plays peek-a-boo with her young daughter. I smile at her older son, and he smiles back. It is the first time I have met the eyes of another person on the subway for a long time. The mother looks at me protectively, and I grin back. Her expression softens, and before she goes back to playing with her little one, her lips tense into a guarded hint of a smile...