Editing Female Trouble (section)

==Plot==
In Baltimore in 1960, delinquent high-school student Dawn Davenport being very ungrateful when her parents refuse to buy her the [[Cha-cha-cha (dance)|cha-cha]] heels she wanted for Christmas. In a fit of rage, she smashes the presents and topples the family Christmas tree on her mother, and storms out of the house barely even dressed. Dawn hitchhikes a ride with a repulsive, lecherous man, Earl Peterson, who drives her to a dump where they have sex on a discarded mattress. Dawn becomes pregnant, but Earl refuses to support her. She eventually gives birth to a daughter, Taffy, whom she often beats and punishes severely. Dawn works various dead-end jobs, such as a waitress in a diner, and a stripper, and engages in criminal activities such as burglary and street prostitution with her former high-school friends Concetta and Chicklette.

Dawn frequents the Lipstick Beauty Salon and marries Gater Nelson, her hair stylist and next-door neighbor. Donald and Donna Dasher, the owners of the beauty salon, recruit Dawn to be part of an artistic experiment to prove "crime and beauty are the same". They entice Dawn to commit crimes by promising her fame, and photograph her crimes to stoke her vanity.

Gater's aunt, Ida Nelson, is distraught over her nephew's marriage because she wants him to date men instead of women. When the marriage fails, Dawn persuades the Dashers to fire Gater, who moves to Detroit to work in the auto industry. Ida blames Dawn for driving Gater away and exacts revenge by [[Acid attack|throwing acid in her face]], leaving Dawn hideously disfigured. The Dashers discourage Dawn from having corrective cosmetic surgery and use her as a grotesquely made-up model. They redecorate her home, and provide her with new clothes, money and make-up (which they make her inject like a drug). After they kidnap Ida and imprison her in a large birdcage as a gift to Dawn, they give Dawn an axe to chop off her hand as revenge for the acid attack.

Taffy, now a teenager, is distressed by her mother's criminal lifestyle and the fact that Dawn keeps trying to make her believe she is [[intellectually disabled]]. Taffy persuades Dawn to reveal the identity of her father, but when Taffy traces him, she finds him drunk, disheveled and living in squalor. She stabs him to death with a [[chef's knife]] after he tries to molest her. Taffy returns home, falsely claims she was unable to locate her father, and announces she is joining the [[International Society for Krishna Consciousness|Hare Krishna]] movement. Dawn threatens to kill her if she does.

Dawn, now with bizarre hair, make-up and outfits provided by the Dashers, mounts a nightclub act. When Taffy appears backstage in religious attire, Dawn fulfills her threat and strangles her to death. As part of her nightclub act, Dawn bounces on a trampoline, tears a phone directory into pieces, and cavorts in a crib full of dead fish. She then brandishes a gun onstage and begins firing into the crowd, wounding and killing several audience members. When police arrive to ostensibly subdue the crowd, they shoot several audience members themselves but allow the Dashers to leave when they claim to be upright citizens. Dawn flees into a forest, but is soon arrested by the police and put on trial for murder.

At the trial, the judge grants the Dashers [[Witness immunity|immunity]] from prosecution for testifying against Dawn. The Dashers feign innocence and completely blame Dawn for the crimes she committed at their behest, and they bribe Ida to give false testimony in order to get Dawn convicted. Although Dawn's lawyer tries to have her found not guilty by reason of insanity, the jury finds Dawn guilty and sentences her to die in the [[electric chair]]. In prison, after Dawn says goodbye to her fellow inmate and lesbian lover Earnestine, she is escorted by a priest and two guards to her execution. As Dawn is strapped to the chair, she makes a speech to an imaginary audience as if she were accepting an award, and is then executed.