That Girl Is Poison: A Brief, Incomplete History of Female Poisoners

The idea that “poison is a woman’s weapon” is an old, made-up sawhorse. It’s a classic conceit: the femme fatale slipping a mickey into a glass of rye, the psychotic nana sprinkling arsenic on her grandchildren’s donuts, the jealous older woman offing her young competitionr, the cherubic nurse who is secretly an angel of death. But as Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, points out: 60.5% of poisoners are dudes, leaving only 39.5% of poisonings to the ladies.

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