An Evening with Hope Reese | 8th July, Linghams
An Evening with Hope Reese | 8th July, Linghams
We are thrilled to be hosting an event with Hope Reese for the publication of The Women Are Not Fine.
The Women Are Not Fine:
When Zsuzsanna Fazekas became the village midwife in Nagyrév, Hungary around 1900, she also began assisting women with abortions. The women were desperate; many could not afford an extra mouth to feed. But as Auntie Zsuzsi began listening to their stories of suffering at home, often involving their husbands, she offered another solution: arsenic. A group of women, later called the Angelmakers, began poisoning the men.
Two decades later, the poisonings had spiralled into a full-blown epidemic. Nagyrév was dubbed “the murder district” of Hungary. Twenty-eight defendants — nearly all women — stood accused in the deaths of 101 people, mostly men. But the true figure was likely far higher. In what is now considered the greatest mass poisoning event of the 20th century, estimates suggest that more than 300 people were killed in this rural region south of Budapest, along the Tisza River.
Why did they do it? How did these murders spin out of control? How did these women get away with their crimes for two decades?
Journalist Hope Reese weaves together archival newspapers, court trial documents, police records, and the vital early work of a Hungarian historian with the insights of contemporary historians, sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and feminists. The result is a prismatic account that moves beyond the events themselves to explore the bigger questions they raise.
The Women Are Not Fine is, more than anything, a timely book of ideas about what happens when women in a community are suffering.
Hope Reese is a journalist who writes for the New York Times and dozens of other publications, covering topics from culture to politics to technology.
She has spent more than a decade reporting on gender — exploring boys’ deep emotional lives, hookup culture, and abuse in lesbian relationships.
Her writing is featured in Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power, Violence, #MeToo (Verso Books). She lives in Hungary.
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