Outside a Massachusetts courthouse this week, supporters of Lindsay Clancy—the mother accused of killing her three young children—have drawn national attention, with some dressed in pink and likening themselves to “Manson Girls.” But according to a new essay at The Federalist, the cultural impulse to cast Clancy as a victim rather than a perpetrator is nothing new. In fact, the narrative that women who kill their children are themselves victims of motherhood, mental illness, or an oppressive society has roots that long predate the 1960s sexual revolution.
The Federalist’s piece, titled “The Story About Lindsay Clancy Being A Victim Is An Old One,” points to the case of Constance Fisher, a New England mother who drowned her three young children in a bathtub in 1954. Fisher was widely pitied, hospitalized rather than prosecuted, and released. She and her husband, who forgave her, went on to have three more children. In 1966, Fisher drowned those three children as well. She was hospitalized again—and, the essay notes, the pattern of “toxic empathy” had repeated itself with chilling regularity.
The Clancy case, which has become a flashpoint in debates over feminism, mental health, and motherhood, has drawn comparisons to Fisher’s story. Clancy is accused of killing her children in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023, and her case has sparked a broader cultural argument about whether she should be seen as a victim of postpartum mental illness or held fully accountable for her actions. The Federalist essay argues that the “feminist victimhood dogma” often blamed for such sympathetic portrayals is actually a much older phenomenon.
Roots in the Progressive Era
According to the essay, the idea that women are inherently weak and in need of protection—and that motherhood is a kind of oppression—took hold well before second-wave feminism. In the decades after the Second Industrial Revolution, a diagnosis called “neurasthenia” was applied to women of the emerging management class, with the prescribed cure being bed rest and resort vacations. The early feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who herself suffered from postpartum depression and was prescribed bed rest, turned that experience into the 1892 horror story The Yellow Wallpaper, about a woman confined to a room by her physician husband. The story, the essay argues, helped establish a narrative that still resonates on the political left: “Motherhood is sickness, despair, and oppression.”
Around the same time, the essay notes, a landmark Progressive Era legal effort cemented the view of women as fragile creatures requiring state intervention. Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, then a lawyer, submitted what became known as the “Brandeis brief” in a case about labor laws. The brief argued, using the language of social science, that state regulation of women’s working hours was necessary because experts had concluded that “women are fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance.” That logic, the essay contends, helped professionalize women’s roles and rationalize why motherhood had to be managed by credentialed experts.
The Socialization of Reproduction
The essay draws on historian Christopher Lasch to describe what he called “the socialization of reproduction”—the idea that the twentieth century saw a long assault on the family as a moral and social center, with the “helping professions” replacing the roles of parents. Gilman herself wrote approvingly of how industrial bakeries had standardized bread, making it more consistent than the varying loaves produced by individual housewives, and she extended that logic to child-rearing: “The baker is not in the same industrial grade with the house-cook,” she wrote, but specialization and organization were “the basis of human progress.” By that reasoning, credentialed social workers would make better children than mothers.
The result, the essay argues, is the contradictory cultural condition we now see in the Clancy case and others like it. On one hand, women are told they are powerful, independent, and capable of anything—”girlboss” rhetoric that insists they don’t need men or traditional roles. On the other hand, they are depicted as so vulnerable that motherhood can destroy their mental health, leaving them blameless when they commit horrific acts. “You’re so mentally weak that babies will destroy you, powerful girlboss!” the essay summarizes, calling the muddle a symptom of unresolved conflicts between different waves of feminism.
A Reckoning in Real Time
The Federalist essay stops short of offering a neat resolution, instead framing the Clancy spectacle as part of a broader cultural “period of reconciliation” in which those contradictions are being forced into the open. The scene outside the Massachusetts courtroom—supporters rallying for Clancy, some dressed in pink—has become a lightning rod for critics who say the sympathy is misplaced. As one observer quoted in the essay put it: “You can’t demand equal authority then ask for discounted accountability.”
Whether that argument will sway the court or the public remains to be seen. Clancy’s case continues to wind through the Massachusetts legal system, and the cultural conversation around it shows little sign of cooling. But The Federalist’s analysis suggests that whatever happens in the courtroom, the deeper question—about how society views mothers, weakness, and responsibility—has been with us for more than a century, and is unlikely to be resolved by any single verdict.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/02/the-story-about-lindsay-clancy-being-a-victim-comes-from-deeper-roots-than-1960s-feminism/