Add Men and Stir Pod

A few brief announcements about our third season and our new platforms! If you have a suggestion for women to talk about next season, send us a DM on social media or email us at [email protected]!

In this episode we each present to you one or two women who we believe were falsely accused of a crime and explain why we think they are or were they actually innocent. We cover a pretty wide range of time periods today from 1672 through the modern day. The women we will cover today are Ann Schmieg, Josefa “Chipita” Rodriguez, Mattie Crawford, and Cyntoia Brown.

In this episode we discuss the infamous group NXIVM. The focus of our episode is about the lives of people and mainly women who were a part of NXIVM. Our discussion today is based on research from the New York Times and the fantastic podcast “Uncover” by CBC Podcasts. Season One of Uncover is entitled “Escaping NXIVM” and CBC Documentarian Josh Bloch, investigates and follows a high-level member, Sarah Edmondson, and how she found out she was branded with Keith Raniere’s initials, which led her to escape from the self-help group, NXIVM.

In this episode we discuss LaShawn Harris' book Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground. The focus of our episode is on a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive informal economy. We look at these women, their surroundings, the social climate at the time, and how they created unique spaces to participate in the city’s informal economy and in turn impacted the working-class women around them.

In this episode we discuss Aileen Carol "Lee" Wuornos who was convicted as a serial killer and prostitute. She was charged with murdering seven men in Florida from 1989 to 1990. She is notorious for claiming self-defense and that she killed her victims because they had raped or attempted to rape her while they were soliciting here for sex. Aileen was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. Still to this day people question if she really was a monster or a victim. Listen along to decide for yourself!

In this episode we discuss the 1836 murder of young prostitute, Helen Jewett. Jewett's murder made the headlines in New York City and around the country. This case has still has no closure nor conviction and has haunted the country to this day. Some believe Helen to be a heroine others a sex scandal. This episode looks at Jewett's story and breaks down the conditions of the time period and her death. For this episode we read Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett, which goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett.

In this episode we discuss one of the most notorious serial killers of the Victorian period, Amelia Dyer. Dyer murdered infants in her care over a thirty-year period in the United Kingdom. Originally a nurse, she turned to baby farming after she was widowed in 1869. She initially cared for the children put in her care, but at some point a number of them died and she began murdering the children she "adopted". This episode looks at Dyer's story and breaks down the conditions of the time period and her downfall.

In this episode we discuss two of the most famous female murder suspects in history Elizabeth Báthory and Lizzie Borden, their lives, and why their stories continue to reverberate even today. For this episode we read Cara Robertson's The Trial of Lizzie Borden and various other sources to inform our discussion.

A quick announcement about Add Men and Stir Season 2: The Queens of Crime! Coming Soon!

In our special author interview episode we talk with Dr. Martha Few, professor of Latin American History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, about her book For All of Humanity and the intersection between race, gender, and public health in colonial Guatemala and today. For this episode, Kaitlin is joined by Lily Sanders and Mark Joslin, two graduate student colleagues at UTK and the hosts of the podcast, Medicinal Memory