“He took up arms against the loins from which he sprang and the womb that bore him”: Gender and Parricide During the American Agrarian Crisis — A Case Study

Abstract

In the fall of 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery murdered his parents, as well as a visiting local businessman, at their farm near Brownsville, Oregon. Roughly two months later, Loyd met his own demise at the end of a hangman's noose behind the Linn County Jail in Albany. Historian Peter Boag situates this tragedy in the depression of the 1890s, showing that the economic turmoil of the time challenged rural families and communities and undermined the highly gendered systems of authority on which these twin pillars of society had been based. Gender was central to the way people understood and documented the parricide. As they struggled to make sense of it, people near to and far from the event either attempted to reinforce the rural gender system that the murders had undermined, or invoked newer models of gender emanating from urban-industrial America.