Column | For 130 years, we’ve been rewriting Lizzie Borden’s motive

Any self-respecting student of history or women’s studies or schoolyard chants knows that Lizzie Borden murdered her mother by giving her 40 whacks with an extremely large hatchet, or, if you want to uphold a rhyme scheme, an ax. Not 38, not 39, but a tidy and even 40. And further, when she was finished with that unpleasant business — when she saw what she had done — she went and gave her father 41.