PREFACE TO REISSUE
T
HE following essay was published at the end of
1913 and is now reissued as originally written.
Since the year before the World War the situation
of woman has, of course, changed. Feminism in this
and in some other countries has won well-nigh [near]
all its formal demands. Mr Asquith, who before
the war declared he would have nothing to do
with a House of Commons elected by a female
vote, during the war, for no assignable reason,
suddenly made a
volte-face [about-face] and became
a strong advocate of female franchise. The acquisition
of the suffrage has as its result carried with it the
right to all occupations and offices, as decreed by
the "Sex-Disability Repeal Act," and so the pitch-
forking of women into administrative posts proceeds
galore. But the main contentions of
The Fraud of
Feminism have not been affected by the change in
question. Though women have been conceded
all the rights of men, their privileges as females
have remained untouched, while the sentimental
"pull" they have over men, and the favouritism
shown them in the courts, civil and criminal,
often in flagrant violation of elementary justice,
continues as before. The result of their position
ix
on juries, as evinced in certain trials, has rather
confirmed the remarks made in Chapter II. anent [concerning]
hysteria than otherwise. The sex-bias of men in
favour of women and the love of the advanced
woman towards her sex-self show no sign of
abatement. Proposals to the effect that in the
event of infanticide by a mother the putative
father should be placed in the dock merely because
he is a man are received with applause. The other
day, at a court held in a fashionable town of the
south coast, on a prostitute being brought up
charged with soliciting, a female "justice," recently
appointed, declaimed against the wickedness
of punishing prostitutes for soliciting while men
were never brought up charged with the offence.
(Needless to say, there was the usual male fool to
be found in the body of the court, who shouted:
"Hear ! Hear !") Now is it conceivable, I ask, that
anybody can be so infatuated with Feminism as not
to see that a prostitute who solicits nightly in the
exercise of her trade--
i.e . for the purpose of
money-making--is in a different position from a man
who, once in a way, may, urged by natural passion,
make advances to a woman? Such a person must
be unable to see distinctions in anything, one would
think. Besides, it is not true that men, if charged
with the annoyance or molestation of women, cannot
be, and have not been, prosecuted for the offence.
The lady "justice" in question would probably
x
like to see a man paired with a prostitute in the
dock every time the latter gave occasion for police
action. Such is the Feminist notion of justice.
There are a vast number of men who cultivate
the pretence of having a contempt for, or a preju-
dice against, their own sex. The idea seems to be
to pander to the sex-vanity of the "New Woman."
Every popular writer caters for this prejudice. No
one can have failed to notice the persistent journal-
istic and literary "stunt" by which the man is por-
trayed in the light of a miserable and abject living
creature as a foil [frustration] to the "noble animal"
woman. There is scarcely a play, short story or
novel the plot of which in any way admits of it
where this now stale device is not dragged in in
some form or shape. Even Shaw, with all his some-
what ostentatious flouting of convention, cannot
resist the temptation of yielding to it in one or two
of his plays--e.g.
Catherine the Great. This sort of
thing is not without its influence on the course of
justice, as the daily papers still continue to show us.
Times have not changed in this respect. The war,
which has altered the face of things otherwise and
in the matter of the social and political aspect of
sex-relations, has been the occasion of revolutionary
transformation in the shape of political sex-equality,
has left female privilege, civil and criminal, as it
was in 1913. There is no indication that the
general public has a dawning sense that, to adapt
xi
the common metaphor, "What is sauce for the goose
is sauce for the gander." Everywhere we hear the
same old bogus grievances of the female sex trotted
out as crying for remedy, but never the injustice
of a man being compelled, whatever his economic
position, to keep his wife, while a woman is under no
corresponding obligation to keep her husband. No
urgency is suggested for removing the anomaly that
a husband is amenable for his wife's libels and
slanders; none that a boy of fourteen is punish-
able for a sexual offence to which he has been
incited by a girl of sixteen, who gets off scot-free;
none that the obligation of a husband, whose wife
wishes to bring an action for divorce against him,
to furnish her with the money to fight him, should
be abolished. On the other hand, every law, every
judicial decision, every case in the courts, civil and
criminal, that on the most superficial view can be
exploited by the conventional Feminist claptrap to
prove the wickedness of "man-made law" to
woman, is gripped by the beak of the Feminist
harpy to help build up her nest of lying sex-
prejudice, whence she and her confraternity may
sally forth and by their raids on male sentiment not
merely help to buttress up existing female privi-
lege, but wherever possible to increase the already
one-sided injustice of the law and its administration
towards men in the interest of the other sex.
August, 1921
xii
PREFACE
The present volume aims at furnishing a succinct ex-
posure of the pretensions of the Modern Feminist Move-
ment. It aims at presenting the case against it with an
especial view to tracking down and gibbetting the in-
famous falsehoods, the conventional statements, which are
not merely perversions of the truth, but which are directly
and categorically contrary to the truth, but which pass
muster by sheer force of uncontradicted repetition. It is
by this kind of bluff that the claims of Feminism are
sustained. The following is a fair example of the state-
ments of Feminist writers:-- "As for accusing the world
at large of fatuous indulgence for womanhood in general,
the idea is too preposterous for words. The true ' legends
of the Old Bailey [
Central Criminal Court]' tell, not of women
absurdly acquitted, but of
miserable girls sent to the gallows for
murders committed in half delirious dread of the ruthless-
ness of hypocritical Society." Now it is this sort of legend
that it is one of the chief objects of the following pages
to explode. Of course the "fatuous indulgence" for
"womanhood in general," practised by the "world at
large," is precisely one of the most conspicuous features
1
of our time, and the person who denies it, if he is not
deliberately prevaricating, must be a veritable Rip van
Winkle awakening out of a sleep lasting at least two
generations. Similarly the story of the "miserable girls
sent to the gallows," etc., is, as far as living memory
is concerned, a pure legend. It is well known that in
the cases referred to of the murder of their new-born
children by girls, at the very outside a year or two's
tight imprisonment is the only penalty actually inflicted.
The acquittal of women on the most serious charges,
especially where the victims are men, in the teeth of
the strongest evidence, is, on the other hand, an every-
day occurrence. Now it is statements like the above on
which, as already said, the Feminist Movement thrives;
its most powerful argumentative weapon with the man
in the street is the legend that woman is oppressed by
man. It is rarely that anyone takes the trouble to refute
the legend in general, or any specific case adduced as an
illustration of it. When, however, the bluff is exposed,
when the real facts of the case are laid bare to public
notice, and woman is shown, not only as not oppressed
but as privileged, up to the top of her bent, then the
apostles of feminism, male and female, being unable to
make even a plausible case out in reply, with one consent
resort to the boycott, and by ignoring what they cannot
answer, seek to stop the spread of the unpleasant truth so
2
dangerous to their cause. The pressure put upon publishers
and editors by the influential Feminist sisterhood is well
known.
For the rest, it must not be supposed that this little book
makes any claim to exhaust the subject or to be a scientific
treatise. It is, and is meant to be, a popular refutation of
the current arguments in favour of Feminism, and a brief
statement of the case against Feminism. Sir Almroth
Wright's short treatise, "The Unexpurgated Case against
Woman's Suffrage," which deals with the question from
a somewhat different standpoint, may be consulted with
advantage by the reader.
An acknowledgment should be made to the editor of
The New Age for the plucky stand made by that journal
in the attempt to dam the onrush of sentimental slush set
free by the self-constituted champions of womanhood. I
have also to thank two eminent medical authorities for
reading the proofs of my second chapter.
3
INTRODUCTION
I
N the following pages it is not intended to furnish
a treatise on the evolution of woman generally or
of her place in society, but simply to offer a
criticism on the theory and practice of what is
known as Modern Feminism.
By Modern Feminism I understand a certain
attitude of mind towards the female sex. This
attitude of mind is often self-contradictory and
illogical. While on the one hand it will claim, on
the ground of the intellectual and moral equality
of women with men, the concession of female
suffrage, and commonly, in addition thereto, the
admission of women to all professions, offices and
functions of public life; on the other it will strenu-
ously champion the preservation and intensification
of the privileges and immunities before the
law, criminal and civil, in favour of women, which
have grown up in the course of the nineteenth
century.
The above attitude, with all its inconsistencies,
has at its back a strong sex-conscious party,
5
or sex union, as we may term it, among women,
and a floating mass of inconsequent, slushy
sentiment among men. There is more than one
popular prejudice which obscures the meaning and
significance of Modern Feminism with many people.
There is a common theory, for instance, based upon
what really obtained to some extent before the
prevalence of Modern Feminism, that in any case
of antagonism between the two sexes, women
always take the man's side against the woman.
Now this theory, if it ever represented the true
state of the case, has long ceased to do so.
The powerful female sex union spoken of, in the
present day, exercises such a strong pressure in
the formation of public opinion among women, that
it is rapidly becoming next to impossible, even in
the most flagrant cases, where man is the victim,
to get any woman to acknowledge that another
woman has committed a wrong. On the other
hand it may be noted, that the entire absence of
any consciousness of sex antagonism in the attitude
of men towards women, combined with an intensi-
fication of the old-world chivalry prescribed by
tradition towards the so-called weaker sex, exer-
cises, if anything, an increasing sway over male
public opinion. Hence the terrific force Feminism has
obtained in the world of the early twentieth century.
It is again often supposed, and this is also a
mistake, that in individual cases of dispute between
6
the sexes, the verdict, let us say of a jury of men, in
favour of the female prisoner or the female litigant
is solely or even mainly determined by the fact of
the latter's good looks. This may indeed play
a part; but it is easy to show from records of
cases that it is a subordinate one--that, whatever
her looks or her age may be, the verdict is given
her not so much because she is a
pretty woman as
because she is a
woman. Here again the question
of attractiveness may have played a more potent
part in determining male verdicts in the days
before Feminist sentiment and Feminist views had
reached their present dominance. But now the
question of sex alone, of being a woman, is
sufficient to determine judgment in her favour.
There is a trick with which votaries of Feminism
seek to prejudice the public mind against its critics,
and that is the "fake" that any man who ventures
to criticise the pretensions of Feminism, is actuated
by motives of personal rancour against the female
sex, owing to real or imaginary wrongs suffered by
him at the hands of some member or members of
the sex. I suppose it may be possible that there are
persons, not precisely microcephalous [abnormally
small headed] idiots, who could be made to believe
such stuff as this in disparagement of him who ventures
an independent judgment on these questions; otherwise
the conduct of Feminists in adopting this line of
argument would be incomprehensible. But we
7
would fain [gladly] believe that the number of these
feebleminded persons, who believe there is any
connection between a man having independent judg-
ment enough to refuse to bend the knee to Modern
Feminist dogma, and his having quarrelled with any
or all of his female friends or relations, cannot be
very numerous. As a matter of fact there is not
one single prominent exponent of views hostile to
the pretensions of what is called the "Woman's
Movement" of the present day, respecting whom
there is a tittle of evidence of his not having lived
all his life on the best of terms with his woman-
kind. There is only one case known of indirectly
by the present writer, and that not of a prominent
writer or speaker on the subject, that would afford
any plausible excuse whatever for alleging anti-
Feminist views to have been influenced by personal
motives of this kind. I am aware, of course, that
Feminists, with their usual mendacity, have made
lying statements to this effect respecting well-nigh
every prominent writer on the anti-Feminist side,
in the hope of influencing the aforesaid feeble-
minded members of the public against their
opponents. But a very little investigation suffices
to show in every case the impudent baselessness
of their allegations. The contemptible silliness of
this method of controversy should render it un-
worthy of serious remark, and my only excuse for
alluding to it is the significant sidelight it casts
8
upon the intellectual calibre of those who resort
to it, and of the confidence or want of confidence
they have in the inherent justice of their cause and
the logical strength of their case.
9
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL
T
HE position of women in social life was for a
long time a matter of course. It did not arise as
a question, because it was taken for granted. The
dominance of men seemed to derive so obviously
from natural causes, from the possession of faculties
physical, moral and intellectual, in men, which
were wanting in women, that no one thought of
questioning the situation. At the same time, the
inferiority of woman was never conceived as so
great as to diminish seriously, much less to eliminate
altogether, her responsibility for crimes she might
commit. There were cases, of course, such as that
of offences committed by women under coverture
[legal "covering" by the husband], in which a diminution
of responsibility was recognised and was given effect to
in condonation of the offence and in mitigation of the
punishment. But there was no sentiment in general in
favour of a female more than of a male criminal. It
entered into the head of no one to weep tears of pity
over the murderess of a lover or husband rather than
over the murderer of a sweetheart or wife. Simi-
11
larly, minor offenders, a female blackmailer, a female
thief, a female perpetrator of an assault, was not
deemed less guilty or worthy of more lenient
treatment than a male offender in like cases. The
law, it was assumed, and the assumption was acted
upon, was the same for both sexes. The sexes
were equal before the law. The laws were
harsher in some respects than now, although not
perhaps in all. But there was no special line of
demarcation as regards the punishment of offences
as between men and women. The penalty
ordained by the law for crime or misdemeanour
was the same for both and in general applied
equally to both. Likewise in civil suits, pro-
ceedings were not specially weighted against the
man and in favour of the woman. There was, as
a general rule, no very noticeable sex partiality
in the administration of the law.
This state of affairs continued in England till
well into the nineteenth century. Thenceforward
a change began to take place. Modern Feminism
rose slowly above the horizon. Modern Feminism
has two distinct sides to it: (1) an articulate
political and economic side embracing demands for
so-called rights; and (2) a sentimental side which
insists in an accentuation of the privileges and
immunities which have grown up, not articulately
or as the result of definite demands, but as the
consequence of sentimental pleading in particular
12
cases. In this way, however, a public opinion became
established, finding expression in a sex favouritism
in the law and even still more in its administration,
in favour of women as against men.
These two sides of Modern Feminism are not
necessarily combined in the same person. One may,
for example, find opponents of female suffrage
who are strong advocates of sentimental favourit-
ism towards women in matters of law and its
administration. On the other hand you may find,
though this is more rare, strong advocates of political
and other rights for the female sex, who sincerely
deprecate the present inequality of the law in
favour of women. As a rule, however, the two
sides go together, the vast bulk of the advocates
of "Women's Rights" being equally keen on the
retention and extension of women's privileges.
Indeed, it would seem as though the main object
of the bulk of the advocates of the "Woman's
Movement" was to convert the female sex into the
position of a dominant
sexe noblesse [sex nobility].
The two sides of Feminism have advanced hand in
hand for the last two generations, though it was the
purely sentimental side that first appeared as a
factor in public opinion.
The attempt to paint women in a different light
to the traditional one of physical, intellectual and
moral inferiority to men, probably received its
first literary expression in a treatise published in
13
1532 by Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim entitled
De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Feminei Sexus and
dedicated to Margaret, Regent of the Netherlands,
whose favour Agrippa was at that time desirous of
courting. The ancient world has nothing to offer
in the shape of literary forerunners of Modern
Feminism, although that industrious collector of
historical odds and ends, Valerius Maximus, re-
lates the story of one Afrania who, with some of her
friends, created disturbances in the Law Courts of
ancient Rome in her attempt to make women's
voices heard before the tribunals. As regards
more recent ages, after Agrippa, we have to wait
till the early years of the eighteenth century for
another instance of Feminism before its time, in an
essay on the subject of woman by Daniel Defoe.
But it was not till the closing years of the
eighteenth century that any considerable ex-
pression of opinion in favour of changing the
relative positions of the sexes, by upsetting the
view of their respective values, founded on the
general experience of mankind, made itself notice-
able.
The names of Mary Wollstonecraft in English
literature and of Condorcet in French, will hardly fail
to occur to the reader in this connection. During
the French Revolution the crazy Olympe de
Gouges achieved ephemeral notoriety by her claim
for the intellectual equality of women with men.
14
Up to this time (the close of the eighteenth
century) no advance whatever had been made
by legislation in recognising the modern theory
of sex quality. The claims of women and their
apologists for entering upon the functions of men,
political, social or otherwise, although put forward
from time to time by isolated individuals, received
little countenance from public opinion, and still
less from the law. What I have called, how-
ever, the sentimental aspect of Modern Feminism
undoubtedly did make some headway in public
opinion by the end of the eighteenth century, and
grew in volume during the early years of the
nineteenth century. It effectuated in the Act
passed in 1820 by the English Parliament abolish-
ing the punishment of flogging for female criminals.
This was the first beginning of the differentiation of
the sexes in the matter of the criminal law. The
parliamentary debate on the Bill in question shows
clearly enough the power that Sentimental
1
Femi-
1 I should explain that I attach a distinct meaning to
the
word sentimental ; as used by me it does not signify, as
it does
with most people, an excess of sentiment over and above what
I feel myself, but a sentiment unequally distributed. As used
in this sense, the repulsion to the flogging of women while no
repulsion is felt to the flogging of men is
sentimentalism pure
and simple. On the other hand the objection to flogging
altogether as punishment for men or women could not be de-
scribed as sentimentalism, whatever else it might be. In the
same way the anti-vivisectionist's aversion to "physiological"
experiments on animals, if confined to household pets and not
15
extended to other animals, might be justly described as senti-
mentalism; but one who objected to such experiments on all
animals, no matter whether one agreed with his point of view
or not, could not be justly charged with sentimentalism (or at
least, not unless, while objecting to vivisection, he or she were
prepared to condone other acts involving an equal amount of
cruelty to animals).
nism had acquired in public opinion in the course
of a generation, for no proposal was made at the
same time to abolish the punishment of flogging
so far as men were concerned. Up to this time
the criminal law of England, as of other countries,
made no distinction whatever between the sexes
in the matter of crime and punishment, or at least
no distinction based on the principle or sentiment
of sex privilege. (A slight exception might be
made, perhaps, in the crime of "petty treason,"
which distinguished the murder of a husband by
his wife from other cases of homicide.) But from
this time forward, legislation and administration
have diverged farther and farther from the principle
of sex equality in this connection in favour of
female immunity, the result being that at the
present day, assuming the punishment meted out
to the woman for a given crime to represent a
normal penalty, the man receives an additional
increment over and above that accorded to the
crime,
for the offence of having been born a
man and not a woman.
The Original Divorce Law of 1857 in its
16
provisions respecting costs and alimony, constitutes
another landmark in the matter of female privilege
before the law. Other measures of unilateral
sex legislation followed in the years ensuing until
the present state of things, by which the whole
power of the State is practically at the disposal of
woman to coerce and oppress men. But this side
of the question we propose to deal with later on.
The present actual movement of Feminism
in political and social life may be deemed to
have begun in the early sixties, in the agitation
which preceded the motion of John Stuart Mill in
1867, on the question of conferring the parliament-
ary franchise upon women. This was coincident
with an agitation for the opening of various careers
to women, notably the medical faculty. We are
speaking, of course, here of Great Britain, which
was first in the field in Europe, alike in the theory
and practice of Modern Feminism. But the publica-
tion by the great protagonist of the movement,
John Stuart Mill, of his book, "The Subjection of
Women," in 1868, endowed the cause with a
literary gospel which was soon translated into the
chief languages of the Continent, and corresponding
movements started in other countries. Strangely
enough, it made considerable headway in Russia,
the awakening of Russia to Western ideas hav-
ing, recently begun to make itself felt at the
time of which we are speaking. The movement
17
henceforth took its place as a permanent factor
in the political and social life of this and other
countries. Bills for female suffrage were intro-
duced every year into the British House of
Commons with, on the whole, yearly diminishing
majorities against these measures, till a few years
back the scale turned on the other side, and the
Women's Enfranchisement Bill passed every year its
second reading until 1912, when for the first time
for many years it was rejected by a small majority.
Meanwhile both sides of the Feminist movement,
apart from the question of the franchise, had been
gaining in influence. Municipal franchise "on the
same terms as for men" had been conceded. Women
have voted for and sat on School Boards, Boards
of Guardians, and other public bodies. Their
claim to exercise the medical profession has been
not merely admitted in law but recognised in
public opinion for long past. All the advantages
of an academic career have been opened to them,
with the solitary exception of the actual confer-
ment of degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. Such
has been the growth of the articulate and political
side of the theory of Modern Feminism.
The sentimental side of Feminism, with its
practical result of the overweighting of justice in
the interests of women in the courts, civil as well
as criminal, and their practical immunity from the
operation of the criminal law when in the dock
[place in court where the accused stands],
18
has advanced correspondingly; while at the same
time the sword of that same criminal law is
sharpened to a razor edge against the man even
accused, let alone convicted, of any offence against
the sacrosanct majesty of "Womanhood." Such
is the present position of the Woman question
in this country, which we take as typical, in the
sense that in Great Britain, to which we may
also add the United States of America and the
British Colonies, where--if possible, the movement
is stronger than in the mother country itself--we
see the logical outcome of Feminist theory and
sentiment. It remains to consider the existing
facts more in detail, and the psychological bearings
of that large number of persons who have been
in the recent past, and are being at the present
time, influenced to accept the dogmas of Modern
Feminism and the statements of alleged facts made
by its votaries. Before doing so it behoves us
to examine the credibility of the dogmas them-
selves, and the nature of the arguments used to
support them and also the accuracy of the alleged
facts employed by the Feminists to stimulate
the indignation of the popular mind against the
pretended wrongs of women.
19
CHAPTER II
THE MAIN DOGMA OF MODERN FEMINISM
W
E have pointed out in the last chapter that
Modern Feminism has two sides, the positive,
definite, and articulate side, which ostensibly claims
equality between the sexes, the chief concern of
which is the conferring of all the rights and duties
of men upon women, and the opening up of all
careers to them. The justification of these demands
is based upon the dogma, that, notwithstanding
appearances to the contrary, women are endowed
by nature with the same capacity intellectually
and morally as men. We have further pointed
out that there is another side in Modern Feminism
which in a vague way claims for women immunity
from criminal law and special privileges on the
ground of sex in civil law. The basis of this
side of Feminism is a sentimentalism--
i.e. an un-
equally distributed sentiment in favour of women,
traditional and acquired. It is seldom even at-
tempted to base this sentimental claim for women
on argument at all. The utmost attempts in this
direction amount to vague references to physical
20
weakness, and to the claim for special considera-
tion deriving from the old theory of the mental
and moral weakness of the female sex, so strenu-
ously combated as out of date, when the first
side of Modern Feminism is being contended
for. The more or less inchoate assumptions of
the second or sentimental side of the modern
"Woman's Movement" amounts practically, as
already stated, to a claim for women to be allowed
to commit crimes without incurring the penalties
imposed by the law for similar crimes when
committed by men. It should be noted that in
practice the most strenuous advocates of the
positive and articulate side of Feminism are also
the sincerest upholders of the unsubstantial and
inarticulate assumptions of the sentimental side of
the same creed. This is noticeable whenever a
woman is found guilty of a particularly atrocious
crime. It is somewhat rare for women to be
convicted of such crimes at all, since the influence
of sentimental Feminism with judges and juries is
sufficient to procure an acquittal, no matter how
conclusive the evidence to the contrary. Even if
women are found guilty it is usual for a virtually
nominal sentence to be passed. Should, however,
a woman by any chance be convicted of a heinous
crime, such as murder or maiming, under speci-
ally aggravated circumstances, and a sentence be
passed such as would be unanimously sanctioned by
21
public opinion in the case of a man, then we find
the whole Feminist world up in arms. The out-
cry is led by self-styled upholders of equality
between the sexes, the apostles of the positive
side of Feminism, who
bien entendu [of course] claim
the eradication of sex boundaries in political and social
life on the ground of women being of equal
capacity with men, but who, when moral responsi-
bility is in question, conveniently fall back on a
sentiment, the only conceivable ground for which
is to be found in the time-honoured theory of the
mental and moral weakness of the female sex.
As illustrations of the truth of the foregoing, the
reader may be referred to the cases of Florence
Doughty in 1906, who shot at and wounded a
solicitor with whom she had relations, together
with his son; to Daisy Lord in 1908, for the
murder of her new-born child; to the case of the
Italian murderess, Napolitano in Canada, convicted
of the cold-blooded butchery of her husband in his
sleep in 1911, for whose reprieve a successful
agitation was got up by the suffrage societies!
Let us first of all consider the dogma at the basis
of the positive side of Modern Feminism, which
claims rational grounds of fact and reason for
itself, and professes to be able to make good its
case by virtue of such grounds. This dogma con-
sists in the assertion of equality in intellectual
capacity, in spite of appearances to the contrary, of
22
women with men. I think it will be admitted that
the articulate objects of Modern Feminism, taking
them one with another, rest on this dogma, and on
this dogma alone. I know it has been argued as
regards the question of suffrage, that the demand
does not rest solely upon the admission of equality
of capacity, since men of a notoriously inferior
mental order are not excluded from voting upon
that ground, but the fallacy of this last argument
is obvious. In all these matters we have to deal
with averages. Public opinion has hitherto recog-
nised the average of women as being intellectually
below the voting standard, and the average man as
not. This, if admitted, is enough to establish the
anti-suffrage thesis. The latter is not affected by
the fact that it is possible to find certain individual
men of inferior intelligence and therefore less
intrinsically qualified to form a political judgment
than certain specially gifted women. The pre-
tended absurdity of "George Eliot having no vote,
and of her gardener having one" is really no
absurdity at all. In the first place, given the
economic advantages which conferred education
upon the novelist, and not upon the gardener,
there is not sufficient evidence available that his
judgment in public affairs might not have been
even superior to that of George Eliot herself.
Moreover, the possession of exceptionally strong
imaginative faculty, expressing itself as literary
23
genius or talent in works of fiction, does not
necessarily imply exceptional power of political
judgment. But, be this as it may, where averages
are in question, exceptions obviously do not count.
The underlying assumption of the suffrage
movement may therefore be taken to be the
average equality of the sexes as regards intellectual
value.
l
An initial difficulty exists in proving theoretic-
ally the intellectual inferiority of women to men,
or even their relative unsuitability for fulfilling
functions involving a special order of judgment.
There are such things as matters of fact which
are open to common observation and which none
think of denying or calling in question unless they
have some special reason for doing so. Now it is
always possible to deny a fact, however evident it
may be to ordinary perception, and it is equally
impossible to prove that the person calling in
question the aforesaid evident fact is either lying
(or shall we say "prevaricating"), or even that
he is a person hopelessly abnormal is his organs of
sense-perception.
At the time of writing, the normal person who
24
1 I believe there are some Feminist
fanatics who pretend to
maintain the superiority of the female mind, but I doubt
whether this thesis is taken seriously even by those who put
it forward. In any case there are limits to the patent
absurdities
which it is worth while to refute by argument.
has no axe to grind in maintaining the contrary,
declares the sun to be shining brightly, but should
it answer the purpose of anyone to deny this
obvious fact, and declare that the day is gloomy
and overcast, there is no power of argument by
which I can prove that I am right and he is wrong.
I may point to the sun, but if he chooses to affirm
that he doesn't see it I can't prove that he does.
This is, of course, an extreme case, scarcely likely
to occur in actual life. But it is in essence similar
to those cases of persons (and they are not seldom
met with) who, when they find facts hopelessly
destructive of a certain theoretical position
adopted by them, do not hesitate to cut the knot
of controversy in their own favour by boldly
denying the inconvenient facts. One often has
experience of this trick of controversy in discussing
the question of the notorious characteristics of the
female sex. The Feminist driven into a corner
endeavours to save his face by flatly denying
matters open to common observation and admitted
as obvious by all who are not Feminists. Such
facts are the pathological mental condition peculiar
to the female sex, commonly connoted by the term
hysteria; the absence, or at best the extremely
imperfect development of the logical faculty in
most women; the inability of the average woman
in her judgment of things to rise above personal
considerations; and, what is largely a consequence
25
of this, the lack of a sense of abstract justice and
fair play among women in general. The aforesaid
peculiarities of women, as women, are, I contend,
matters of common observation and are only dis-
puted by those persons--to wit Feminists--to
whose theoretical views and practical demands
their admission would be inconvenient if not fatal.
Of course these characterisations refer to averages,
and they do not exclude partial or even occasionally
striking exceptions. It is possible, therefore,
although perhaps not very probable, that indi-
vidual experience may in the case of certain
individuals play a part in falsifying their general
outlook; it is possible--although, as I before
said not perhaps very probable--that any given
man's experience of the other sex has been limited
to a few quite exceptional women and that hence his
particular experience contradicts that of the general
run of mankind. In this case, of course, his refusal
to admit what to others are self-evident facts
would be perfectly
bona fide. The above highly
improbable contingency is the only refuge for those
who would contend for sincerity in the Feminist's
denials. In this matter I only deal with the male
Feminist. The female Feminist is usually too biassed
a witness in this particular question.
Now let us consider the whole of the differentia-
tions of the mental character between man and
woman in the light of a further generalisation
26
which is sufficiently obvious in itself and which
has been formulated with special clearness by the
late Otto Weininger in his remarkable book,
"Geschlecht und Charakter" (Sex and Character).
I refer to the observations contained in Section II.,
Chaps. 2 and 3. The point has been, of course, pre-
viously noted, and the present writer, among others,
has on various occasions called special attention to
it. But its formulation and elaboration by Weininger
is the most complete I know. The truth in
question consists in the fact, undeniable to all those
not rendered impervious to facts by preconceived
dogma, that, as I have elsewhere put it, while man
has a sex, woman is a sex. Let us hear Weininger
on this point. "Woman is
only sexual, man is
also
sexual. Alike in time and space this difference may
be traced in man, parts of his body susceptible to
sexual excitement are small in number and strictly
localised. In woman sexuality is diffused over the
whole body, every contact on whatever part excites
her sexually." Weininger points out that while
the sexual element in man, owing to the physio-
logical character of the sexual organs, may be at
times more violent than that in woman, yet that
it is spasmodic and occurs in crises separated by
intervals of quiescence. In woman, on the other
hand, while less spasmodic, it is continuous. The
sexual instinct with man being, as he styles it, "an
appendix" and no more, he can raise himself
27
mentally entirely outside of it. "He is conscious of
it as of something which he possesses but which
is not inseparate from the rest of his nature. He
can view it objectively. With woman this is not
the case; the sex element is part of her whole
nature. Hence, it is not as with man, clearly recog-
nisable in local manifestations, but subtly affects the
whole life of the organism. For this reason the man
is conscious of the sexual element within him as
such, whereas the woman is unconscious of it as
such. It is not for nothing that in common parlance
woman is spoken of as 'the sex.' In this sexual
differentiation of the whole life-nature of woman
from man, deducible as it is from physiological and
anatomical distinctions, lies the ground of those
differentiations of function which culminate in the
fact that while mankind in its intellectual moral
and technical development is represented in the
main by Man, Woman has continued to find her
chief function in the direct procreation of the race."
A variety of causes, notably modern economic
development, in their effect on family life, also the
illegitimate application of the modern democratic
notion of the equality of classes and races, to
that of sex, has contributed to the modern revolt
against natural sex limitations.
Assuming the substantial accuracy of the above
statement of fact, the absurdity and cheapness
of the clap-trap of the modern "social purity"
28
monger, as to having one and the same sexual
morality for both sexes will be readily seen. The
recognition of the necessity of admitting greater
latitude in this respect to men than to women is
based clearly on physiology and common-sense.
With men sexual instinct manifests itself locally,
and at intervals its satisfaction is an urgent and
pressing need. With woman this is not so. Hence
the recognised distinction between the sexes in
this respect is, as far as it goes, a thoroughly
sound one. Not that I am championing the
severity of the restrictions of the current sexual
code as regards women. On the contrary, I think
it ought to be and will be, in a reasonable society
of the future, considerably relaxed. I am only
pointing out that the urgency is not so great in
the one case as in the other. And this fact it is
which has led to the toleration of a stringency,
originally arising mainly from economic causes
(questions of inheritance and the like), in the case
of women, which would not have been tolerated
in that of men, even had similar reasons for its
adoption in their case obtained. Any successful
attempt of social purity mongers to run counter
to physiology in enforcing either by legislation
or public opinion the same stringency on men in
this respect as on women could but have the most
disastrous consequences to the health and well-
being of the community.
29
It was a saying of the late Dr Henry Maudsley:
"
Sex lies deeper than culture. " By this we may
understand to be meant that sex differences are
organic. All authorities on the physiological
question are agreed that woman is less well-
organised, less well-developed, than man. Dr
de Varigny asserts that this fact is traceable
throughout the whole female organism, through-
out all its tissues, and all its functions. For
instance, the stature of the human female is less
than that of the man in all races. As regards
weight there is a corresponding difference. The
adult woman weighs, on the average, rather more
than 11 lbs. less than the man; moreover as a rule
a woman completes her growth some years
earlier than a man. The bones are lighter in the
woman than in the man; not absolutely but in
proportion to the weight of the body. They are,
it is stated, not merely thinner but more fragile.
The difference may be traced even to their
chemical composition. The whole muscular de-
velopment is inferior in woman to that in man
by about one-third. The heart in woman is
smaller and lighter than in man--being about
101/2 oz. in man as against slightly over
8 oz. in woman. In the woman the respiratory
organs show less chest and lung capacity. Again,
the blood contains a considerably less proportion
of red to white corpuscles. Finally, we come to
30
the question of the size and constitution of the
brain. (It should be observed that all these
distinctions of sex show themselves more or less
from birth onwards.)
Specialists are agreed that at all ages the
size of the brain of woman is less than that of
man. The difference in relative size is greater
in proportion according to the degree of civilisation.
This is noteworthy, as it would seem as though
the brain of man grew with the progress of
civilisation, whereas that of woman remains nearly
stationary. The average proportion as regards size
of skull between the woman and man of to-day
is as 85 to 100. The weight of brain in woman
varies from 38 1/2 oz. to 45 1/2 oz.; in man, from
42 oz. to 49 oz. This represents the absolute dif-
ference in weight, but, according to Dr de Varigny,
the relative weight--
i.e. the weight in proportion
to that of the whole body--is even more striking
in its indication of inferiority. The weight of the
brain in woman is but one-forty-fourth of the
weight of the body, while in man it is one-fortieth.
This difference accentuates itself with age. It is
only 7 per cent in favour of man between twenty and
thirty years; it is 11 per cent between thirty and
forty years. As regards the substance of the brain
itself and its convolutions, the enormous majority
of physiologists are practically unanimous in de-
claring that the female brain is simpler and
31
smoother, its convolutions fewer and more super-
ficial than those of the male brain, that the frontal
lobes, generally associated with the intellectual
faculties, are less developed than the occipital lobes,
which are universally connected with the lower
psychological functions. The grey substance is
poorer and less abundant in woman than in man,
while the blood vessels of the occipital region are
correspondingly fuller than those supplying the
frontal lobes. In man the case is exactly the
reverse. It cannot be denied by any sane person
familiar with the barest elements of physiology
that the whole female organism is subservient
to the functions of child-bearing and lactation,
which explains the inferior development of those
organs and faculties which are not specially
connected with this supreme end of Woman.
It is the fashion of Feminists, ignoring these
fundamental physiological sex differences, to
affirm that the actual inferiority of women, where
they have the honesty to admit such an obvious
fact, is accountable by the centuries of oppression
in which Woman has been held by wicked and
evil-minded Man. The absurdity of this conten-
tion has been more than once pointed out. As-
suming its foundation in fact, what does it imply!
Clearly that the girls inherit only through their
mothers and boys only through their fathers, an
hypothesis plainly at variance with the known
32
facts of heredity. Yet those who maintain that
distinction of intelligence, etc., between the sexes
are traceable to external conditions affecting one
sex only and inherited through that sex alone,
cannot evade the above assumption. Those,
therefore, who regard it as an article of their
faith that Woman would show herself not in-
ferior in mental power to man, if only she
had the chance of exercising that power, must
find a surer foundation for their opinion than
this theory of the centuries of oppression, under
which, as they allege, the female sex has
laboured.
We now come to the important question of
morbid and pathological mental conditions to
which the female sex is liable and which are
usually connected with those constitutional dis-
turbances of the nervous system which pass under
the name of
hysteria . The word is, as everyone
knows, derived from
hystera--the womb, and was
uniformly regarded by the ancients as directly
due to disease of the
uterus, this view maintaining
itself in modern medicine up till well-nigh the
middle of the nineteenth century. Thus Dr J.
Mason Good (in his "Study of Medicine," 1822,
vol. iii., p. 528, an important medical text-book
during the earlier half of the nineteenth century)
says: "With a morbid condition of this organ,
hysteria is in many instances very closely con-
33
nected, though it is going too far to say that it is
always dependent upon such condition, for we
meet with instances, occasionally, in which no
possible connexion can be traced between the
disease and the organ," etc. This is perhaps the
first appearance, certainly in English medicine,
of doubts being thrown on the uterine origin of
the various symptoms grouped under the general
term,
hysteria . Towards the latter part of the
nineteenth century the prevalent view tended
more and more to dissociate hysteria from uterine
trouble. Lately, however, some eminent patho-
logists have shown a tendency to qualify the
terms of the latter view. Thus Dr Thomas
Stevenson in 1902 admits that "it [hysteria]
frequently accompanies a morbid state of the
uterus," especially where inflammation and con-
gestion are present, and it is not an uncommon
thing for surgeons at the present time to remove
the ovaries in obstinate cases of hysteria. On the
other hand Dr Thomas Buzzard, in an article
on the subject in Quain's
Dictionary of Medicine,
1902, states that hysteria is only exceptionally
found in women suffering from diseases of the
genital organs, and its relation to uterine and
ovarian disturbances is probably neither more nor
less than that which pertains to the other affections
of the nervous system which may occur without
any obvious material cause. Dr Thomas Luff
34
("Text-Book on Forensic Medicine," 1895) shows
that the derangements of the reproductive functions
are undoubtedly the cause of various attacks of
insanity in the female. Dr Savage, in his book
"On Neuroses," says that acute mania in women
occurs most frequently at the period of adult and
mature life, and may occasionally take place at
either extreme age. Acute mania sometimes occurs
at the suppression of the
menses. The same is true
of melancholia and other pathological mental
symptoms. Dr Luff states that acute mania may
replace hysteria; that this happens at periods such
as puberty, change of life and menstruation.
These patients in the intervals of their attacks are
often morbidly irritable or excitable, but as time
goes on their energies become diminished and their
emotions blunted ("Forensic Medicine," ii. 307).
Such patients are often seized with a desire to
commit violence; they are often very mischievous,
tearing up clothes, breaking windows, etc. In this
mental disorder the patient is driven by a morbid
and uncontrollable impulse to such acts. It is not
accompanied by delusions, and frequently no
change will have been noticed in the individual
prior to the commission of the act, and conse-
quently, says Dr Luff, "there is much difference
of opinion as to the responsibility of the individual"
(ii. 297). Among the acts spoken of Dr Luff
mentions a propensity to set fire to furniture,
35
houses, etc. All this, though written in 1895, might
serve as a commentary on the Suffragette agitation
of recent years. The renowned French professor,
Dr Paul Janet ("Les Hysteriques," 1894) thus
defined hysteria: "Hysteria is a mental affection
belonging to the large group of diseases due to
cerebral weakness and debility. Its physical
symptoms are somewhat indefinite, consisting
chiefly in a general diminution of nutrition. It is
largely characterised by moral symptoms, chief
of which is an impairment of the faculty of
psychological synthesis, an abolition and a con-
traction of the field of consciousness. This mani-
fests itself in a peculiar manner and by a certain
number of elementary phenomena. Thus sensations
and images are no longer perceived, and appear
to be blotted out from the individual perception,
a tendency which results in their persistent and
complete separation from the personality in some
cases and in the formation of many independent
groups. This series of psychological facts alternate
the one with the other or co-exist. Finally this
synthetic defect favours the formation of certain
independent ideas, which develop complete in
themselves, and unattached from the control of
the consciousness of the personality. These ideas
show themselves in affections possessing very
various and unique characteristics." According
to Mr A. S. Millar, F.R.C.S.E. (
Encyclopædia
36
Medica, vol. v.), "Hysteria is that ... condition
in which there is imagination, imitation, or ex-
aggeration.... It occurs mostly in females and
persons of nervous temperament, and is due to
some nervous derangement, which may or may
be pathological." Sir James Paget ("Clinical
Lectures on Mimicry") says also that hysterical
patients are mostly females of nervous tempera-
ment. "They think of themselves constantly, are
fond of telling everyone of their troubles and thus
court sympathy, for which they have a morbid
craving. Will power is deficient in one direction,
though some have it very strongly where their
interests are concerned.'' He thinks the term
"hysteria" in the sense now employed incorrect,
and would substitute "mimicry." "The will
should be controlled by the intellect," observes
Dr G. F. Still of King's College Hospital, "rather
than by the emotions and the lack of this control
appears to be at the root of some, at least, of the
manifestations of hysteria."
Dr Thomas Buzzard, above mentioned, thus
summarises the mental symptoms: "The intelli-
gence may be apparently of good quality, the
patient evincing sometimes remarkable quickness
of apprehension; but carefully tested it is found
to be wanting in the essentials of the highest class
of mental power. The memory may be good, but
the judgment is weak and the ability to concentrate
37
the attention for any length of time upon a subject
is absent. So also regard for accuracy, and the
energy necessary to ensure it in any work that is
undertaken, is deficient. The emotions are excited
with undue readiness and when aroused are in-
capable of control. Tears are occasioned not only
by pathetic ideas but by ridiculous subjects and
peals of laughter may incongruously greet some
tragic announcement, or the converse may take
place. The ordinary signs of emotion may be
absent and replaced by an attack of syncope [fainting],
convulsion, pain or paralysis. Perhaps more con-
stant than any other phenomenon in hysteria is
a pronounced desire for the sympathy and interest
of others. This is evidently only one of the most
characteristic qualities of femininity, uncontrolled
by the action of the higher nervous centres which
in a healthy state keep it in subjection. There is
very frequently not only a deficient regard for
truthfulness, but a proneness to active deception
and dishonesty. So common is this, that the
various phases of hysteria are often assumed to
be simple examples of voluntary simulation and
the title of disease refused to the condition. But
it seems more reasonable to refer the symptoms to
impairment of the highly complex nervous processes
which form the physiological side of the moral
faculties (Quain's
Dictionary of Medicine, 1902).
"It is not uncommon to find hysteria in females
38
accompanied by an utter indifference and insensi-
bility to sexual relations. Premature cessation of
ovulation is a frequent determining cause. In cases
where the ovaries are absent[,] the change from girl
to woman, which normally takes place at puberty,
does not occur. The girl grows but does not
develop, a masculine appearance supervenes, the
voice becomes manly and harsh, sexual passion is
absent, the health remains good. The most violent
instances of hysteria are in young women of the most
robust and masculine constitution" (John Mason
Good, M.D., "Study of Medicine," 1822). Other
determining causes are given, as painful impressions,
long fasting, strong emotions, imitation, luxury,
ill-directed education and unhappy surroundings,
celibacy, where not of choice but enforced by cir-
cumstances, unfortunate marriages, long-continued
trouble, fright, worry, overwork, disappointment
and such like nervous perturbations, all which
causes predispose to hysteria. "It attacks child-
less women more frequently than mothers and
particularly young widows," and, says Dr J.
Mason Good, "more especially still those who are
constitutionally inclined to that morbid salacity
which has often been called nymphomania . . .
the surest remedy is a happy marriage" ("Study of
Medicine," 1822, iii. 531). Hysteria is, in common
with other nervous disorders, essentially a heredi-
tary malady, and. Briquet ("Traité de l'hysterie,"
39
1899) gives statistics to show that in nine cases out
of ten hysterical parents have hysterical children.
Dr Paul Sainton of the Faculty of Medicine,
Paris, says: "The appearance of a symptom
of hysteria generally proves that the malady has
already existed for some time though latent. The
name of a provocative agent of hysteria is given
to any circumstance which suddenly reveals the
malady but the real cause of the disorder is a
hereditary disposition. If the real cause is unique,
the provocative agents are numberless. The moral
emotions, grief, fright, anger and other psychic
disturbances are the most frequent causes of
hysterical affections and in every walk of life
subjects are equally liable to attacks."
Hysteria may appear at any age. It is common
with children, especially during the five or six
years preceding puberty. Of thirty-three cases
under twelve years which came under Dr Still's
notice, twenty-three were in children over eight
years. Hysteria in women is most frequent between
the ages of fifteen and thirty, and most frequently
of all between fifteen and twenty. As a rule there
is a tendency to cessation after the "change." It
frequently happens, however, that the disease is
continued into an advanced period of life.
"There is a constant change," says Professor
Albert Moll ("Das nervöse Weib," p. 165),
"from a cheerful to a depressed mood. From
40
being free and merry the woman in a short time
becomes sulky and sad. While a moment before
she was capable of entertaining a whole company
without pause, talking to each member about that
which interested him, shortly afterwards she does
not speak a word more. I may mention the well-
worn example of the refusal of a new hat as being
capable of converting the most lively mood into its
opposite. The weakness of will shows itself here
in that the nervous woman [by "nervous" Dr Moll
means what is commonly termed "hysterical"]
cannot, like the normal one, command the ex-
pression of her emotions. She can laugh un-
interruptedly over the most indifferent matter until
she falls into veritable laughing fits. The crying
fits which we sometimes observe belong to the
same category. When the nervous woman is
excited about anything she exhibits outbreaks of
fury wanting all the characteristics of womanhood,
and she is not able to prevent these emotional out-
bursts. In the same way just as the emotions
weaken the will and the woman cannot suppress
this or that action, it is noticeable in many nervous
women that quite independently of these emotions
there is a tendency to continuous alterations in
their way of acting. It has been noticed as
characteristic of many nervous persons that their
only consistency lies in their inconsistency. But this
must in no way be applied to all nervous persons.
41
On this disposition, discoverable in the nature of so
many nervous women, rests the craving for change
as manifested in the continual search for new
pleasures, theatres, concerts, parties, tours, and
other things (p. 147). Things that to the normal
woman are indifferent or to which she has, in a
sense, accustomed herself, are to the nervous
woman a source of constant worry. Although she
may perfectly well know that the circumstances of
herself and her husband are the most brilliant and
that it is unnecessary for her to trouble herself in
the least about her material position as regards the
future, nevertheless the idea of financial ruin
constantly troubles her. Thus if she is a millionaire's
wife she never escapes from constant worry.
Similarly the nervous woman creates troubles out
of things that are unavoidable. If in the course of
years she gets more wrinkles, and her attraction for
man diminishes, this may easily become a source of
lasting sorrow for the nervous woman."
We now have to consider a point which is being
continually urged by Feminists in the present day
when confronted with the pathological mental
symptoms so commonly observed in women which
are usually regarded as having their origin in
hysteria. We often hear it said by Feminists in
answer to arguments based on the above fact:
"Oh, but men can also suffer from hysteria!"
"In England," says Dr Buzzard, "hysteria is
42
comparatively rarely met with in males, the female
sex being much more prone to the affection." The
proportion of males to females in hysteria is, ac-
cording to Dr Pitré ("Clinical Essay on Hysteria,"
1891), 1 to 3; according to Bodensheim, 1 to 10;
and according to Briquet, 1 to 20. The author of the
article on Hysteria in
The Encyclopædia Britannica
(11th edition, 1911) also gives 1 to 20 as the
numerical proportion between male and female
cases. Dr Pitré, in the work above cited, gives
82 per cent of cases of convulsions in women as
against 22 in men. But in all this, under the con-
cept hysteria are included, and indeed chiefly
referred to, various physical symptoms of a con-
vulsive and epileptic character which are quite
distinct from the mental conditions rightly or
wrongly connected, or even identified, with
hysteria in the popular mind, and by many medical
authorities. But even as regards hysteria in the
former sense of the word, a sharp line of distinction
based on a diagnosis of cases was long ago drawn
by medical men between
hysteria masculina and
hysteria
fœminina, and in the present day eminent authorities
--
e.g. Dr Bernard Holländer--would deny that the
symptoms occasionally diagnosed as hysteria in men
are identical with or due to the same causes as
the somewhat similar conditions known in women
under the name.
After all, this whole question in its broader
43
bearings is more a question of common-sense
observation than one for medical experts.
What we are here chiefly concerned with as
"hysteria" (in accordance with popular usage of
the term) are certain pathological mental symptoms
in women open to everybody's observation, and
denied by no one unprejudiced by Feminist views.
Every impartial person has only to cast his eye
round his female acquaintance, and to recall the
various women, of all classes, conditions and
nationalities, that he may have come in contact
with in the course of his life, to recognise those
symptoms of mental instability commonly called
hysterical, as obtaining in at least a proportion of
one to every four or five women he has known, in
a marked and unmistakable degree. The proper-
tion given is, in fact, stated in an official report to
the Prussian Government issued some ten years
back as that noticeable among female clerks, post
office servants and other women employed in the
Prussian Civil Service. Certainly as regards women
in general, the observation of the present writer,
and others whom he has questioned on the subject,
would seem to indicate that the proportions given
in the Prussian Civil Service report as regards the
number of women afflicted in this way are rather
under than over stated.
l There are many
medical
1 The insanities mentioned above are the extremes.
There are
mental disturbances of less severity constantly occurring which
44
are connected with the regular menstrual period as well as with
disordered menstruation, with pregnancy, with parturition,
with Lactation, and especially with the change of life
[menopause].
men who aver that no woman is entirely free from
such symptoms at least immediately before and
during the menstrual period. The head surgeon at
a well-known London hospital informed a friend
of mine that he could always tell when this period
was on or approaching with his nurses, by the
mental change which came over them.
Now these pathological symptoms noticeable in
a slight and more or less unimportant degree in the
vast majority, if not indeed in all women, and in a
marked pathological degree in a large proportion
of women, it is scarcely too much to say do not
occur at all in men. I have indeed known, I think,
two men, and only two, in the course of my life,
exhibiting mental symptoms analogous to those
commonly called "hysterical" in women. On the
other hand my own experience, and it is not alone,
is that very few women with whom I have come
into more or less frequent contact, socially or
otherwise, have not at times shown the symptoms
referred to in a marked degree. If, therefore, we
are to admit the bare possibility of men being
afflicted in a similar way it must be conceded that
such cases represent such
rarœ aves [rare things]
as to be negligible for practical purposes.
A curious thing in pronounced examples of this
45
mental instability in women is that the symptoms
are often so very similar in women of quite different
birth, surroundings and nationality. I can recall
at the present moment three cases, each different as
regards birth, class, and in one case nationality,
and yet who are liable to develop the same symptoms
under the influence of quite similar
idées fixes [obsessions].
But it seems hardly necessary to labour the point
in question at greater length. The whole experi-
ence of mankind since the dawn of written records
confirmed by, as above said, that of every living
person not specially committed to the theories of
Modern Feminism, bears witness alike to the pre-
valence of what we may term the hysterical mind in
woman and to her general mental frailty. It is not for
nothing that women and children have always been
classed together. This view, based as it is on the
unanimous experience of mankind and confirmed
by the observation of all independent persons, has,
I repeat, not been challenged before the appear-
ance of the present Feminist Movement and hardly
by anyone outside the ranks of that movement.
It is not proposed here to dilate at length on the
fact, often before insisted upon, of the absence
throughout history of the signs of genius, and, with
a few exceptions, of conspicuous talent, in the
human female, in art, science, literature, invention
or "affairs." The fact is incontestable, and if it be
46
argued that this absence in women, of genius or
even of a high degree of talent, is no proof of the
inferiority of the average woman to the average
man the answer is obvious.
Apart from conclusive proof, the fact of the
existence in all periods of civilisation, and even
under the higher barbarism, of exceptionally gifted
men, and never of a correspondingly gifted woman,
does undoubtedly afford an indication of inferiority
of the average woman as regards the average man.
From the height of the mountain peaks we may,
other things equal, undoubtedly conclude the
existence of a tableland beneath them in the same
tract of country whence they arise. I have already,
in the present chapter, besides elsewhere, referred
to the fallacy that intellectual or other fundamental
inferiority in woman existing at the present day is
traceable to any alleged repression in the past, since
(Weissmann and his denial of transmission of ac-
quired characteristics apart), assuming for the sake
of the argument such repression to have really
attained the extent alleged, and its effects to have
been transmitted to future generations, it is against
all the laws of heredity that such transmission should
have taken place
through the female line alone ,
as is contended by the advocates of this theory.
Referring to this point, Herbert Spencer has
expressed the conviction of most scientific thinkers
on the subject when he declares a difference
47
between the mental powers of men and women to
result from "a physiological necessity, and no
amount of culture can obliterate it." He further
observes (the passages occur in a letter of his to
John Stuart Mill) that "the relative deficiency of
the female mind is in just those most complex
faculties, intellectual and moral, which have political
action for their sphere."
One of the points as regards the inferiority of
women which Feminists are willing and even
eager to concede, and it is the only point of which
this can be said, is that of physical weakness.
The reason why they should be particularly
anxious to emphasise this deficiency in the sex is
not difficult to discern. It is the only possible
semblance of an argument which can be plausibly
brought forward to justify female privileges in
certain directions. It does not really do so, but it
is the sole pretext which they can adduce with
any show of reason at all. Now it may be observed
(1) that the general frailty of woman would militate
coetaris paribus [all other things equal], against
their own dogma of the intellectual equality between the
sexes; (2) that this physical weakness is more particularly
a muscular weakness, since constitutionally the organ-
ism of the human female has enormous power of
resistance and resilience, in general, far greater than
that of man (see below, pp. 125-128). It is a matter
of common observation that the average woman can
48
pass through strains and recover in a way few
men can do. But as we shall have occasion to
revert to these two points at greater length later
on, we refrain from saying more here.
How then, after consideration, shall we judge of
the Feminist thesis, affirmed and reaffirmed, insisted
upon by so many as an incontrovertible axiom, that
woman is the equal, intellectually and morally, if not
physically, of man? Surely that it has all the characteristics
of a true dogma. Its votaries might well say with Tertullian,
credo quia absurdum [ I believe because it is
absurd.]
It contradicts the whole experience of mankind in
the past. It is refuted by all impartial observation
in the present. The facts which undermine it are
seriously denied by none save those committed to
the dogma in question. Like all dogmas, it is sup-
ported by "bluff." In this case the '"bluff" is to the
effect that it is the "part, mark, business, lot" (as
the Latin grammars of our youth would have had
it) of the "advanced" man who considers himself
up to date, and not "Early Victorian," to regard it
as unchallengeable. Theological dogmas are backed
up by the bluff of authority, either of scriptures
or of churches. This dogma of the Feminist cult is
not vouchsafed by the authority of a Communion
of saints but by that of the Communion of advanced
persons up to date. Unfortunately dogma does not
sit so well upon the community of advanced persons
up to date--who otherwise profess to, and generally
49
do, bring the tenets they hold to the bar of
reason and critical test--as it does on a church
or community of saints who suppose themselves
to be individually or collectively in communication
with wisdom from on high. Be this as it may, the
"advanced man" who would claim to be "up to
date" has to swallow this dogma and digest it as
best he can. He may secretly, it is true, spew it out
of his mouth, but in public, at least, he must make
a pretence of accepting it without flinching.
50
CHAPTER III
THE ANTI-MAN CRUSADE
W
E have already pointed out that Modern
Feminism has two sides or aspects. The first
formulates definite political, juridical and economic
demands on the grounds of justice, equity, equality
and so forth, as general principles; the second does
not formulate in so many words definite demands
as general principles, but seems to exploit the
traditional notions of chivalry based on male sex
sentiment, in favour of according women special
privileges on the ground of their sex, in the
law, and still more in the administration of the
law. For the sake of brevity we call the first
Political Feminism, for, although its demands are
not confined to the political sphere, it is first
and foremost a political movement, and its typical
claim at the present time, the Franchise, is a
purely political one; and the second
Sentimental
Feminism, inasmuch as it commonly does not profess
to be based on any general principle whatever,
whether of equity or otherwise, but relies ex-
clusively on the traditional and conventional
51
sex sentiment of Man towards Woman. It may
be here premised that most Political Feminists,
however much they may refuse to admit it, are
at heart also Sentimental Feminists. Sentimental
Feminists, on the other hand, are not invariably
Political Feminists, although the majority of them
undoubtedly are so to a greater or lesser extent.
Logically, as we shall have occasion to insist upon
later on, the principles professedly at the root of
Political Feminism are in flagrant contradiction
with any that can justify Sentimental Feminism.
Now both the orders of Feminism referred to
have been active for more than a generation past
in fomenting a crusade against the male sex--an
Anti-Man Crusade. Their efforts have been largely
successful owing to a fact to which attention has,
perhaps, not enough been called. In the case of
other classes, or bodies of persons, having com-
munity of interests this common interest invariably
interprets itself in a sense of class, caste, or race
solidarity. The class or caste has a certain
esprit de
corps in its own interest. The whole of history
largely turns on the conflict of economic classes
based on a common feeling obtaining between
members of the respective classes; on a small
scale, we see the same thing in the solidarity of a
particular trade or profession. But it is unnecessary
to do more than call attention here to this funda-
mental sociological law upon which alike the class
52
struggles of history, and of modern times, the
patriotism of states from the city-state of the
ancient world to the national state of the modern
world, is based. Now note the peculiar manner
in which this law manifests itself in the sex question
of the present day. While Modern Feminism has
succeeded in establishing a powerful sex-solidarity
amongst a large section of women as against
men, there is not only no sex-solidarity of men as
against women, but, on the contrary, the prevalence
of an altogether opposed sentiment. Men hate their
brother-men in their capacity of male persons. In any
conflict of interests between a man and a woman,
male public opinion, often in defiance of the most
obvious considerations of equity, sides with the
woman, and glories in doing so. Here we seem to
have a very flagrant contradiction with, as has
already been said, one of the most fundamental
sociological laws. The explanations of the pheno-
mena in question are, of course, ready to hand:--
Tradition of chivalry, feelings, perhaps inherited,
dating possibly back to the prehuman stage of
man's evolution, derived from the competition of
the male with his fellow-male for the possession
of the coveted female, etc.
These explanations may have a measure of
validity, but I must confess they are to me scarcely
adequate to account for the intense hatred which
the large section of men seem to entertain towards
53
their fellow-males in the world of to-day, and
their eagerness to champion the female in the
sex war which the Woman's "sex union," as it
has been termed, has declared of recent years.
Whatever may be the explanation, and I confess
I cannot find one completely satisfactory, the fact
remains. A Woman's Movement unassisted by
man, still more if opposed energetically by the
public opinion of a solid phalanx of the man-
hood of any country, could not possibly make
any headway. As it is, we see the legislature,
judges, juries, parsons, specially those of the non-
conformist persuasion, all vie with one another in
denouncing the villainy and baseness of the male
person, and ever devising ways and means to make
his life hard for him. To these are joined a host of
literary men and journalists of varying degrees of
reputation who contribute their quota to the stream
of anti-manism in the shape of novels, storiettes,
essays, and articles, the design of which is to paint
man as a base, contemptible creature, as at once
a knave and an imbecile, a bird of prey and a
sheep in wolfs clothing, and all as a foil to the
glorious majesty of Womanhood. There are not
wanting artists who are pressed into this service.
The picture of the Thames Embankment at
night, of the drowned unfortunate with the
angel's face, the lady and gentleman in evening
dress who have just got out of their cab--the lady
54
with uplifted hands bending over the dripping
form, and the callous and brutal gentleman turning
aside to light a cigarette--this is a typical
specimen of Feminist didactic art. By these means,
which have been carried on with increasing ardour
for a couple of generations past, what we may term
the anti-man cultus has been made to flourish and
to bear fruit till we find nowadays all recent legis-
lation affecting the relations between the sexes
carrying its impress, and the whole of the judiciary
and magistracy acting as its priests and ministrants.
On the subject of Anti-man legislation, I have
already written at length elsewhere,
l but for
the
sake of completeness I state the case briefly
here. (1) The marriage laws of England to-day
are a monument of Feminist sex partiality.
If I may be excused the paradox, the parti-
ality of the marriage laws begins with the
law relating to breach of promise, which, as is
well known, enables a woman to punish a man
vindictively for refusing to marry her after having
once engaged himself to her. I ought to add, and
this, oftentimes, however good his grounds may be
for doing so. Should the woman commit perjury,
in these cases, she is never prosecuted for the
1 Cf. Fortnightly Review , November 1911, "A
Creature of
Privilege," also a pamphlet (collaboration) entitled "The
Legal Subjection of Men." Twentieth Century Press, reprinted
by New Age Press, 1908.
55
offence. Although the law of breach of promise
exists also for the man, it is well known to be
totally ineffective and practically a dead letter.
It should be remarked that, however gross the
misrepresentations or undue influences on the part
of the woman may have been to induce the man
to marry her, they do not cause her to lose her
right to compensation. As, for instance, where an
experienced woman of the world of thirty or forty
entraps a boy scarcely out of his teens. (2) Again,
according to the law of England, the right to
maintenance [support] accrues solely to the woman.
Formerly this privilege was made dependent on her
cohabitation with the man and generally decent
behaviour to him. Now even these limitations
cease to be operative, while the man is liable to
imprisonment and confiscation of any property he
may have. A wife is now at full liberty to leave
her husband, while she retains her right to get
her husband sent to gaol if he refuses to maintain
her--to put the matter shortly, the law imposes
upon the wife no legally enforceable duties what-
ever
towards her husband. The one thing which
it will enforce with iron vigour is the wife's right of
maintenance
against her husband. In the case of
a man of the well-to-do classes, the man's property
is confiscated by the law in favour of his wife. In
the case of a working man the law compels her
husband to do
corvée [unpaid work] for her, as the
56
feudal serf had to do for his lord. The wife, on
the other hand, however wealthy, is not compelled
to give a farthing towards the support of her
husband, even though disabled by sickness or by
accident; the single exception in the latter case
being should he become chargeable to the parish,
in which case the wife would have to pay the
authorities a pauper's rate for his maintenance.
In a word, a wife has complete possession and
control over any property she may possess, as well
as over her earnings; the husband, on the other
hand, is liable to confiscation of capitalised property
or earnings at the behest of the law courts in
favour of his wife. A wife may even make her
husband bankrupt on the ground of money she
alleges that she lent him; a husband, on the other
hand, has no claim against his wife for any money
advanced, since a husband is supposed to
give, and
not to
lend , his wife money, or other valuables.
(3) The law affords the wife a right to commit torts
against third parties--e.g. libels and slanders--
the husband alone being responsible, and this rule
applies even although the wife is living apart from
her husband, who is wholly without knowledge
of her misdeeds. With the exception of murder,
a wife is held by the law to be guiltless of practic-
ally any crime committed in the presence of her
husband. (4) No man can obtain a legal separation
or divorce from his wife (save under the Licensing
57
Act of 1902, a Police Court separation for habitual
drunkenness alone) without a costly process in the
High Court. Every wife can obtain, if not a
divorce, at least a legal separation, by going
whining to the nearest police court, for a few
shillings, which her husband, of course, has to pay.
The latter, it is needless to say, is mulcted [fined]
in alimony at the "discretion of the Court." This
"discretion" is very often of a queer character
for the luckless husband. Thus, a working man
earning only twenty shillings a week may easily
find himself in the position of having to pay from
seven to ten shillings a week to a shrew out of
his wages.
In cases where a wife proceeds to file a
petition for divorce, the way is once more smoothed
for her by the law, at the husband's expense.
He has to advance her money to enable her to
fight him. Should the case come on for hearing
the husband finds the scale still more weighted
against him; every slander of his wife is assumed
to be true until he has proved its falsity, the
slightest act or a word during a moment of
irritation, even a long time back, being twisted
into what is termed "legal cruelty," even though
such has been provoked by a long course of ill
treatment and neglect on the part of the wife.
The husband and his witnesses can be indicted
for perjury for the slightest exaggeration or
58
inaccuracy in their statements, while the most
calculated falsity in the evidence of the wife and
her witnesses is passed over. Not the grossest
allegation on the part of the wife against the
husband, even though proved in court to be false,
is sufficient ground for the husband to refuse to
take her back again, or from preventing the court
from confiscating his property if he resists doing
so. Knowledge of the unfairness of the court
to the husband, as all lawyers are aware, prevents
a large number of men from defending divorce
actions brought by their wives. A point should
here be mentioned as regards the action of a
husband for damages against the seducer of his
wife. Such damages obviously belong to the
husband as compensation for his destroyed home
life. Now these damages our modern judges in
their feminist zeal have converted into a fund for
endowing the adulteress, depriving the husband
of any compensation whatever for the wrong done
him. He may not touch the income derived from
the money awarded him by the jury, which is
handed over by the court to his divorced wife.
It would take us too long to go through all the
privileges, direct and indirect, conferred by statute
or created by the rulings of judges and the practice
of the courts, in favour of the wife against the
husband. It is the more unnecessary to go into
them here as they may be found in detail with
59
illustrative cases in the aforesaid pamphlet in which
I collaborated, entitled "The Legal Subjection
of Men" (mentioned in the footnote to p. 55).
At this point it may be well to say a word on
the one rule of the divorce law which Feminists
are perennially trotting out as a proof of the
shocking injustice of the marriage law to women:
that to obtain her divorce the woman has to prove
cruelty in addition to adultery against her husband,
while in the case of the husband it is sufficient
to prove adultery alone. Now to make of this
rule a grievance for the woman is, I submit,
evidence of the destitution of the Feminist case.
In default of any real injustice pressing on
the woman the Feminist is constrained to make
as much capital as possible out of the merest
semblance of a grievance he can lay his hand on.
The reasons for this distinction which the law
draws between the husband and the wife, it is
obvious enough, are perfectly well grounded. It
is based mainly on the simple fact that while
a woman by her adultery may foist upon her
husband a bastard which he will be compelled
by law to support as his own child, in the
husband's case of having an illegitimate child the
wife and her property are not affected. Now in
a society such as ours is, based upon private
property-holding, it is only natural, I submit, that
the law should take account of this fact. But not
60
only is this rule of law almost certainly doomed
to repeal in the near future, but in even the present
day, while it still nominally exists, it is practically
a dead letter in the divorce court, since any trivial
act of which the wife chooses to complain is
strained by the court into evidence of cruelty in
the legal and technical sense. As the matter stands,
the practical effect of the rule is a much greater
injustice to the husband than to the wife, since the
former often finds himself convicted of "cruelty"
which is virtually nothing at all, in order that the
wife's petition may be granted, and which is often
made the excuse by Feminist judges for depriving
the husband of the custody of his children. Mis-
conduct on the wife's part, or neglect of husband
and children, does not weigh with the court which
will not on that ground grant relief to the husband
from his obligation for maintenance, etc. On the
other hand, neglect of the wife by the husband
is made a ground for judicial separation with the
usual consequences--alimony, etc. "Thus," as it
has been put, "between the upper and the nether
millstone, cruelty on the one hand, neglect on the
other, the unhappy husband can be legally ground
to pieces, whether he does anything or whether he
does nothing." Personal violence on the part of
the husband is severely punished; on the part of
wife she will be let off with impunity. Even
if she should in an extreme case be imprisoned, the
61
husband, if a poor man, on her release will be
compelled to take her back to live with him. The
case came under the notice of the writer a few
years ago in which a humane magistrate was
constrained to let off a woman who had nearly
murdered a husband on the condition of her
graciously consenting to a separation, but she had
presumably still to be supported by her victim.
The decision in the notorious Jackson case
precluded the husband from compelling his wife
to obey an order of the court for the restitution
of conjugal rights. The persistent Feminist tendency
of all case-law is illustrated by a decision of the
House of Lords in 1894 in reference to the law
of Scotland constituting desertion for four years
a ground
ipso facto for a divorce with the right
of remarriage. Here divorce was refused to a man
whose wife had left him for four years and taken
her child with her. The Law Lords justified their
own interpretation of the law on the ground that
the man did not really want her to come back.
But inasmuch as this plea can be started in every
case where it cannot be proved that the husband
had absolutely grovelled before his wife, imploring
her to return, and possibly even then--since the
sincerity even of this grovelling might conceivably
be called in question--it is clear that the decision
practically rendered this old Scottish law inoperative
for the husband.
62
As regards the offence of bigamy, for which a
man commonly receives a heavy sentence of penal
servitude, I think I may venture to state, without
risking contradiction, that no woman during recent
years has been imprisoned for this offence. The
statute law, while conferring distinct privileges
upon married women as to the control of their
property, and for trading separately and apart from
their husbands, renders them exempt from the
ordinary liabilities incurred by a male trader as
regards proceedings under the Debtors Acts and
the Bankruptcy Law. See Acts of 1822 (45 & 46
Vict. c. 75); 1893 (56 & 57 Vict. c. 63), and
cases Scott
v. Morley, 57 L.J.R.Q.B. 43. L.R. 20
Q.B.D. In
re Hannah Lines
exparte Lester C.A.
(1893), 2. 2. B. 113.
In the case of Lady Bateman
v. Faber and others
reported in Chancery Appeal Cases (1898 Law
Reports) the Master of the Rolls (Sir N. Lindley)
is reported to have said: "The authorities showed
that a married woman could not by hook or by
crook--even by her own fraud--deprive herself
of restraint upon anticipation. He would say
nothing as to the policy of the law, but it had been
affirmed by the Married Woman's Property Act"
(the Act of 1882 above referred to) "and the
result was that a married woman could play fast
and loose to an extent to which no other person
could." (
N.B. --Presumably a male person.)
63
It has indeed been held, to such a length does
the law extend its protection and privileges to the
female, that even the concealment by a wife from
the husband at the time of marriage that she was
then pregnant by another man was no ground for
declaring the marriage null and void.
The above may be taken as a fair all-round,
although by no means an exhaustive, statement of
the present one-sided condition of the civil law
as regards the relation of husband and wife. We
will now pass on to the consideration of the
relative incidence of the criminal law on the two
sexes. We will begin with the crime of murder.
The law of murder is still ostensibly the same for
both sexes, but in effect the application of its
provisions in the two cases is markedly different.
As, however, these differences lie, as just stated,
not in the law itself but rather in its administration,
we can only give in this place, where we are
dealing with the principles of law rather than
with their application, a general formula of the
mode in which the administration of the law of
murder proceeds, which, briefly stated, is as follows:
The evidence even to secure conviction in the case
of a woman must be many times stronger than
that which would suffice to hang a man. Should a
conviction be obtained, the death penalty, though
pronounced, is not given effect to, the female
prisoner being almost invariably reprieved. In
64
most cases where there is conviction at all, it is
for manslaughter and not for murder, when a
light or almost nominal sentence is passed. Cases
confirming what is here said will be given later
on. There is one point, however, to be observed
here, and that is the crushing incidence of the law
of libel. This means that no case of any woman,
however notoriously guilty on the evidence, can
be quoted, after she has been acquitted by a
Feminist jury, as the law holds such to be innocent
and provides them with "a remedy" in a libel
action. Now, seeing that most women accused of
murder are acquitted irrespective of the evidence,
it is clear that the writer is fatally handicapped
so far as confirmation of his thesis by cases is
concerned.
Women are to all intents and purposes allowed
to harass men, when they conceive they have a
grievance, at their own sweet will, the magistrate
usually telling their victim that he cannot interfere.
In the opposite case, that of a man harassing a
woman, the latter has invariably to find sureties
for his future good behaviour, or else go to gaol.
One of the most infamous enactments indicative
of Feminist sex bias is the Criminal Law Amend-
ment Act of 1886. The Act itself was led up to
with the usual effect by an unscrupulous newspaper
agitation in the Feminist and Puritan interest,
designed to create a panic in the public mind,
65
under the influence of which legislation of this
description can generally be rushed through Parlia-
ment. The reckless disregard of the commonest
principles of justice and common-sense of this
abominable statute may be seen in the shameless sex
privilege it accords the female in the matter of
seduction. Under its provisions a boy of fourteen
years can be prosecuted and sent to gaol for an
offence to which he has been instigated by a girl just
under sixteen years, whom the law, of course, on the
basis of the aforesaid sex privilege, holds guiltless.
The outrageous infamy of this provision is especi-
ally apparent when we consider the greater
precocity of the average girl as compared with
the average boy of this age.
We come now to the latest piece of Anti-man
legislation, the so-called
White Slave Trade Act of
1912 (Criminal Law Amendment Act 1912, 2 & 3
Geo. V. c. 20). This statute was, as usual,
rushed through the legislature on the wave of
factitious public excitement organised for the
purpose, and backed up by the usual faked state-
ments and exaggerated allegations, the whole
matter being three parts bogus and deliberate
lying. The alleged dangers of the unprotected
female were, for the object of the agitation, pur-
posely exaggerated in the proverbial proportion of
the mountain to the molehill. But as regards many
of those most eager in promoting this piece of
66
Anti-man legislation, there were probably special
psychological reasons to account for their attitude.
The special features of the Bill, the Act in question,
are (1) increased powers given to the police in
the matter of arrest on suspicion, and (2) the
flogging clauses.
Up till now the flogging of garrotters [stranglers]
was justified against opponents, by its upholders,
on the ground of the peculiarly brutal nature of the
offence of highway robbery with violence. It
should be noted that in the Act in question no
such excuse can apply, for it is appointed to be
indicted for offences which, whatever else they
may be, do not in their nature involve violence,
and hence which cannot be described as brutal
in the ordinary sense of the term. The Anti-man
nature of the whole measure, as of the agitation
itself which preceded it, is conclusively evidenced
by the fact that while it is well known that the
number of women gaining a living by "procura-
tion" [pimping] is much greater than the number of
men engaged therein, comparatively little vituperation
was heard against the female delinquents in the
matter, and certainly none of the vitriolic ferocity
that was poured out upon the men alleged to
participate in the traffic. A corresponding distinc-
tion was represented in the measure itself by the
allocation of the torture of the lash to men
alone. It is clear, therefore, that the zeal for the
67
suppression of the traffic in question was not the
sole motive in the ardour of the flogging fraternity.
Even the Anti-manism at the back of the whole
of this class of legislation seems insufficient to
account for the outbreak of bestial blood-lust, for
the tigerish ferocity, of which the flogging clauses
in the Act are the outcome. There is, I take it,
no doubt that psychical sexual aberration plays a
not inconsiderable part in many of those persons
--in a word, that they are labouring under some
degree of homo-sexual Sadism. The lustful glee
on the part of the aforesaid persons which greets
the notion of the partial flaying alive, for that is what
the "cat[-o'-nine tails]" means, of some poor wretch
who has succumbed to the temptation of getting his
livelihood by an improper method, is hardly to be
explained on any other hypothesis. Experts allege
that traces of psycho-sexual aberration are latent
in many persons where it would be least expected,
and it is,
prima facie, likely enough that these latent
tendencies in both men and women should become
active under the cover of an agitation in favour of
purity and anti-sexuality, to the point of gratify-
ing itself with the thought of torture inflicted
upon men. A psycho-sexual element of another
kind doubtless also plays a not unimportant rôle
in the agitation of "ladies" in favour of that
abomination, "social purity," which, being inter-
preted, generally means lubricity turned upside
68
down. The fiery zeal manifested by many of those
ladies for the suppression of the male sex is
assuredly not without its pathological significance.
The monstrosity of the recent
White Slave Traffic
enactment and its savage anti-male vindictiveness
is shown not merely, as already observed, in the
agitation which preceded it, with its exaggerated
vilification of the male offenders in the matter of
procuration and its passing over with comparative
slight censure the more numerous female offenders,
or in the general spirit animating the Act itself,
but it is noticeable in the very preposterous
exaggeration of its provisions. For example, in the
section dealing with the
souteneur [pimp], the
framers of this Act, and the previous Criminal Law
Amendment Acts to which this latest one is merely
supplementary, are not satisfied with penalising the
man who has no other means of subsistence beyond
what he derives from the wages of some female
friend's prostitution, but they strike with impartial
rigour the man who knowingly lives
wholly or in part
from such a source. If, therefore, the clause were
taken in its strict sense, any poor out-at-elbow man
who accepted the hospitality of a woman of doubt-
ful virtue in the matter of a drink, or a dinner,
would put himself within the pale of this clause
in the Act, and might be duly flayed by the "cat"
in consequence. The most flagrant case occurred
in a London police court in March 1913, in
69
a youth of eighteen years, against whose general
character nothing was alleged and who was known
to be in employment as a carman, was sentenced
to a month's hard labour under the following
circumstances:--It was reported that he had been
living with a woman apparently considerably older
than himself, whom admittedly he had supported
by his own exertions and, when this was in-
sufficient, even by the pawning of his clothes,
and whom as soon as he discovered she was
earning money by prostitution he had left. Would
it be believed that a prosecution was instituted by
the police against this young man under the
iniquitous White Slave Traffic Act? But what
seems still more incredible is that the magistrate,
presumably a sane gentleman, after admitting
that the poor fellow was "more sinned against
than sinning," did not hesitate to pass on him a
sentence of one month's hard labour!!! Of course
the woman, who was the head and front of the
offending, if offending there was, remained un-
touched. The above is a mild specimen of
"justice" as meted out in our police courts,
"for men only"! Quite recently there was a
case in the north of England of a carter, who
admittedly worked at his calling but who, it was
alleged, was assisted by women with whom he had
lived. Now this unfortunate man was sentenced
to a long term of imprisonment plus flogging. For
70
the judges, of course, any extension of their power
over the prisoner in the dock is a godsend. It is
quite evident that they are revelling in their new
privilege to inflict torture. One of them had the
shamelessness recently to boast of the satisfac-
tion it gave him and to sneer at those of his
colleagues who did not make full use of their
judicial powers in this direction.
The bogus nature of the reasons urged in favour
of the most atrocious clauses of this abominable
Act came out clearly enough in the speeches of
the official spokesmen of the Government in its
favour. For example, Lord Haldane in the House
of Lords besought the assembled peers to bethink
themselves of the unhappy victim of the
souteneur.
He drew a picture of how a heartless bully might
beat, starve and otherwise ill treat his victim, be-
sides taking away her earnings. He omitted to
explain how the heartless bully in a free country
could coerce his "victim" to remain with him
against her will. He ignored the existence of the
police, or of a whole army of social purity busy-
bodies, and vigilance societies for whom her case
would be a tasty morsel only too eagerly snapped
at. If the "victim" does not avail herself of any of
those means of escape, so ready to her hand, the
presumption is that she prefers the company of her
alleged brutal tyrant to that of the chaste Puritan
ladies of the vigilance societies. To those who follow
71
the present state of artificially fomented public
opinion in the matter, Lord Haldane's suggestion
that there was any danger of the precious
"victim" not being sufficiently slobbered over,
will seem to be not without a touch of humour.
Furthermore, as illustrating the utter illogicality of
the line taken by the promoters of the Act, for
whom Lord Haldane acted as the mouthpiece, we
have only to note the fact that the measure does
not limit the penalties awarded to cases accom-
panied by circumstances of aggravation such as
Lord Haldane pictures, which it might easily have
done, but extends it impartially to all cases
whether accompanied by cruelty or not. We can
hardly imagine that a man of Lord Haldane's
intellectual power and general humanity should not
have been aware of the hollowness of the case he
had to put as an official advocate, and of the
rottenness of the conventional arguments he had
to state in its support. When confronted with the
unquestionably true contention that corporal pun-
ishments, especially such as are of a savage and vin-
dictive kind, are degrading alike to the inflicters of
them and to those who are their victims, he replied
that criminals in the cases in question were already
so degraded that they could not be degraded
further. One would imagine he could hardly have
failed to know that he was talking pernicious
twaddle. It is obvious that this argument, in
72
addition to its being untrue, in fact opens the flood-
gates to brutal penal legislation all round, so far at
least as the more serious offences are concerned. One
could equally well assert of murder, burglary, even
abus de confidence[breach of trust] in some cases,
and other offences, that the perpetrators of them must be
so degraded that no amount of brutal punishment could
degrade them further. Everybody can regard the crime to
which he has a pet aversion more than other crimes
as indicating the perpetrator thereof to be outside
the pale of humanity.
But as regards the particular case in point, let
us for a moment clear our minds of cant upon the
subject. Procuration and also living on the pro-
ceeds of prostitution may be morally abominable
methods of securing a livelihood, though even
here, as in most other offences, there may be cir-
cumstances of palliation in individual cases. But
after all [is] said and done, it is doubtful whether, apart
from any fraud or misrepresentation, which, of
course, places it altogether in a different category,
these ought to be regarded as
criminal offences.
To offer facilities or to act as an agent for women
who are anxious to lead a "gay life," or even to suggest
such a course to women,
so long as prostitution
itself is not recognised by the law as crime, however
reprehensible morally, would scarcely seem to
transcend the limits of legitimate individual liberty.
In any case, the constituting of such an action a
73
crime must surely open out an altogether new
principle in jurisprudence, and one of far-reaching
consequences. The same remarks apply even more
forcibly to the question of sharing the earnings of
a prostitute. Prostitution
per se is not in the eyes of
the law a crime or even a misdemeanour. The woman
who makes her living as a prostitute is under the
protection of the law, and the money she receives
from her customer is recognised as her property.
If she, however, in the exercise of her right of free
disposition of that property, gives some of it to a
male friend, that friend, by the mere acceptance of
a free gift, becomes a criminal in the eyes of the
law. Anything more preposterous, judging by all
hitherto recognised principles of jurisprudence, can
scarcely be imagined. Even from the moral point
of view of the class of cases coming under the
purview of the Act, of men who in part share in
the proceeds of their female friends' traffic, must
involve many instances in which no sane person--
i.e.
one who is not bitten by the rabid man-hatred of
the Feminist and social purity monger--must re-
gard the moral obliquity involved as not very
serious. Take, for instance, the case of a man
who is out of work, who is perhaps starving, and
receives temporary assistance of this kind. Would
any reasonable person allege that such a man was in
the lowest depths of moral degradation, still less
that he merited for this breach, at most, of fine
74
delicacy of feeling, the flaying alive prescribed by
the Act under consideration. Besides all this, it
is well known that some women, shop assistants
and others, gain part of their living by their re-
putable avocation and part in another way. Now
presumably the handing over of a portion of her
regular salary to her lover would not constitute
the latter a flayable criminal, but the endowment
of him with a portion of any of the "presents"
obtained by her pursuit of her other calling would
do so. The process of earmarking the permissible
and the impermissible gift strikes one as very diffi-
cult even if possible.
The point last referred to leads us on to another
reflection. If the man who "in whole or in part"
lives on the proceeds of a woman's prostitution is of
necessity a degraded wretch outside the pale of all
humanity, as he is represented to be by the flog-
ging fraternity, how about the employer or em-
ployeress of female labour who bases his or her
scale of wages on the assumption that the girls and
women he or she employs, supplement these wages
by presents received after working hours, for their
sexual favours--in other words, by prostitution?
Many of these employers of labour are doubtless
to be found among the noble band of advocates
of White Slave Traffic Bills, flogging and social
purity. The above persons, of course, are respectable
members of society, while a
souteneur is an outcast.
75
In addition to the motives before alluded to as
actuating the promoters of the factitious and bogus
so-called "White Slave" agitation, there is one
very powerful political and economic motive which
must not be left out of sight. In view of the exist-
ing "labour unrest," it is highly desirable from the
point of view of our possessing and governing
classes that popular attention should be drawn off
labour wrongs and labour grievances on to some-
thing less harassing to the capitalist and official
mind. Now the Anti-man agitation forms a capital
red herring for drawing the popular scent off class
opposition by substituting sex antagonism in its
place.
If you can set public opinion off on the question
of wicked Man and down-trodden Woman, you
have done a good deal to help capitalistic enter-
prise to tide over the present crisis. The insistence
of public opinion on better conditions for the
labourer will thus be weakened by being diverted
into urging forward vindictive laws against men,
and for placing as far as may be the whole power
of the State at the disposal of the virago, the
shrew and the female sharper, in their designs
upon their male victim. For, be it remembered,
it is always the worst type of woman to whom
the advantage of laws passed as the result of
the Anti-man campaign accrues. The real nature
of the campaign is crucially exhibited in some
76
of the concrete demands put forward by its
advocates.
One of the measures proposed in the so-called
"Woman's Charter" drawn up with the approval
of all prominent Feminists by Lady M'Laren (now
Lady Aberconway) some four or five years back,
and which had been previously advocated by other
Feminist writers, was to the effect that a husband,
in addition to his other liabilities, should be legally
compelled to pay a certain sum to his wife,
ostensibly as wages for her housekeeping services,
no matter whether she performs the services well,
or ill, or not at all. Whatever the woman is, or
does, the husband has to pay all the same. Another
of the clauses in this precious document is to the
effect that a wife is to be under no obligation to
follow her husband, compelled probably by the
necessity of earning a livelihood for himself and
her, to any place of residence outside the British
Islands. That favourite crank of the Feminist, of
raising the age of consent with the result of increas-
ing the number of victims of the designing young
female should speak for itself to every unbiassed
person. One of the proposals which finds most
favour with the Sentimental Feminist is the demand
that in the case of the murder by a woman of her
illegitimate child, the putative father should be
placed in the dock as an accessory! In other words,
a man should be punished for a crime of which
77
he is wholly innocent, because the guilty person
was forsooth a woman. That such a suggestion
should be so much as entertained by otherwise
sane persons is indeed significant of the degeneracy
of mental and moral fibre induced by the Feminist
movement, for it may be taken as typical. It
reminds me of a Feminist friend of mine who,
challenged by me, sought (for long in vain) to
find a case in the courts in which a man was
unduly favoured at the expense of a woman. At
last he succeeded in lighting upon the following
from somewhere in Scotland: A man and woman
who had been drinking went home to bed, and
the woman caused the death of her baby by
"overlaying it." Both the man and the woman
were brought before the court on the charge of
manslaughter, for causing the death, by culpable
negligence, of the infant. In accordance with the
evidence, the woman who had overlaid the baby was
convicted and sentenced to six months' imprison-
ment, and naturally the man, who had not done so,
was released. Now, in the judgment of my Feminist
friend, in other matters sane enough, the fact that
the man who had not committed any offence was
let off, while his female companion, who had, was
punished, showed the bias of the court in favour
of the man!! Surely this is a noteworthy illustration,
glaring as it is, of how all judgment is completely
overbalanced and destroyed in otherwise judicial
78
minds--of how such minds are completely hypno-
tised by the adoption of the Feminist dogma. As
a matter of fact, of course, the task my friend set
himself to do was hopeless. As against the cases,
which daily occur all over the country, of flagrant
injustice to men and partiality to women on the
part of the courts, there is, I venture to assert,
not to be found a single case within the limits of
the four seas of a judicial decision in the contrary
sense--
i.e. of one favouring the man at the expense
of the woman.
This sex hatred, so often vindictive in its
character, of men for men, which has for its
results that: "man-made" laws invariably favour
the opposite sex, and that "man-administered
justice" follows the same course, is a psycho-
logical problem which is well worth the earnest
attention of students of sociology and thinkers
generally.
79
CHAPTER IV
ALWAYS THE "INJURED INNOCENT" !
W
HILE what we have termed Political Feminism
vehemently asserts its favourite dogma, the in-
tellectual and moral equality of the sexes--that
the woman is as good as the man if not better--
Sentimental Feminism as vehemently seeks to
exonerate every female criminal, and protests
against any punishment being meted out to her
approaching in severity that which would be
awarded a man in a similar case. It does so on
grounds which presuppose the old theory of the
immeasurable inferiority, mental and moral, of
woman, which are so indignantly spurned by
every Political Feminist--
i.e. in his or her capacity
as such. We might suppose, therefore, that Political
Feminism, with its theory of sex equality based on
the assumption of equal sex capacity, would be in
strong opposition in this matter with Sentimental
Feminism, which seeks, as its name implies, to
attenuate female responsibility on grounds which
are not distinguishable from the old-fashioned
assumption of inferiority. But does Political
80
Feminism consistently adopt this logical position?
Not one whit. It is quite true that some Feminists,
when hard pressed, may grudgingly concede the
untenability on rational grounds of the Sentimental
Feminists' claims. But taken as a whole, and in
their practical dealings, the Political Feminists are
in accord with the Sentimental Feminists in claim-
ing female immunity on the ground of sex. This is
shown in every case where a female criminal re-
ceives more than a nominal sentence.
We have already given examples of the fact in
question, and they could be indefinitely extended.
At the end of the year 1911, at Birmingham, in the
case of a woman convicted of the murder of her
paramour by deliberately pouring inflammable oil
over him while he was asleep, and then setting it
afire, and afterwards not only exulting in the action
but saying she was ready to do it again, the jury
brought in recommendation to mercy with their
verdict. And, needless to say, the influence of
Political and Sentimental Feminism was too strong
to allow the capital sentence to be carried out, even
with such a fiendish wretch as this. In the case
of the Italian woman in Canada, Napolitano, before
mentioned, the female franchise societies issued a
petition to Mr Borden, the Premier of Canada, in
favour of the commutation of sentence. The usual
course was adopted in this case, as in most others in
which a woman murders a man--to wit, the truly
81
"chivalrous" one of trying to blacken the char-
acter of the dead victim in defence of the action
of the murderess. In other cases, more especially,
of course, where the man is guilty of a crime against
a woman, when mercy is asked for the offender,
we are pitifully adjured to "think of the poor
victim." As we have seen, Lord Haldane trotted
out this exhortation in a case where it was absurdly
inappropriate, since the much-commiserated
"victim" had only herself to thank for being a
"victim," and still more for remaining a "victim."
We never hear this plea for the "victim" urged
where the "victim" happens to be a man and the
offender a woman. Compare this with the case
of the boy of nineteen, Beal, whom Mr M'Kenna
hanged for the murder of his sweetheart, and that
in the teeth of an explanation given in the defence
which was at least possible, if not probable, and
which certainly, putting it at the very lowest,
introduced an element of doubt into the case.
Fancy a girl of nineteen being convicted, what-
ever the evidence, of having poisoned her paramour
or even if,
per impossibile [the impossible took
place]
, [and] she were convicted, fancy
her being
given more than a short term of imprisonment!
A man murdered by a woman is always the
horrid brute, while the woman murdered by the
man is just as surely the angelic victim. Anyone
who reads reports of cases with an unbiassed mind
must admit the absolute accuracy of this statement,
82
Divine woman is always the "injured innocent,"
not only in the graver crimes, such as murder, but
also in the minor offences coming under the
cognisance of the law. At the Ledbury Petty
Sessions a woman in the employment of a draper,
who had purloined goods to the amount of
£150,
was acquitted on the ground of "kleptomania,"
and this notwithstanding the fact that she had
been in the employment of the prosecutor for over
five years, had never complained of illness and
had never been absent from business; also that
her landlady gave evidence showing that she was
sound in mind and body. At the very same sessions
two men were sentenced respectively to eight and
twelve months' imprisonment for stealing goods
to the value of
£5 ! (
John Bull, 12th November
1910).
At this point I may be permitted to quote from
the article formerly alluded to (
Fortnightly Review,
November 1911, case taken from a report in
The
News of the World of 28th February 1909): "A
young woman shot at the local postman with
a revolver; the bullet grazed his face, she having
fired point blank at his head. Jury returned a
verdict of not guilty, although the revolver was
found on her when arrested, and the facts were
admitted and were as follows:--At noon she left
her house, crossing three fields to the house of
the victim, who was at home and alone; upon his
83
appearing she fired point blank at his head; he
banged to the door, and thus turned off the bullet,
which grazed his face and 'ploughed a furrow
through his hair.' She had by her when arrested
a revolver cocked and with four chambers undis-
charged."
Let us now take the crime of violent assault
with attempt to do bodily injury. The following
cases will serve as illustrative examples:--From
The News of the World, 9th May 1909: A nurse
in Belfast sued her lost swain for breach of promise.
She obtained £100 damages although it was admitted
by her counsel that she had thrown vitriol over the
defendant, thereby injuring him, and the defendant
had not prosecuted her! Also it was admitted that
she had been "carrying on" with another man. From
The Morning Leader of 8th July 1905 I have
taken the following extraordinary facts as to the
varied punishment awarded in cases of vitriol-
throwing: That of a woman who threw vitriol
over a sergeant at Aldershot, and was sentenced
to six months' imprisonment without hard labour
while a man who threw it over a woman at Ports-
mouth was tried and convicted at the Hants
Assizes, on 7th July 1905, and sentenced by Mr
Justice Bigham to twelve years' penal servitude!
As regards the first case it will be observed that,
(notwithstanding a crime, which in the case of
a man was described by the judge as "cowardly
84
and vile" and meriting twelve years' penal servitude)
the woman was rewarded by damages for
£100,
to be obtained from the very victim whom she
had done her best to maim for life (besides being
unfaithful to him) and who had generously
abstained from prosecuting.
But it is not merely in cases of murder, attempted
murder or serious assault that justice is mocked by
the present state of our law and its administration
in the interests of the female sex. The same attitude
is observed, the same farcical sentences on women,
whether the crime be theft, fraud, common assault,
criminal slander or other minor offences. We
have the same preposterous excuses admitted, the
same preposterous pleas allowed, and the same
farcical sentences passed--if, indeed, any sentence
be passed at all. The following examples I have
culled at random:--From
John Bull , 26th February
1910: At the London Sessions, Mr Robert
Wallace had to deal with the case of a
well-dressed woman living at Hampstead, who
pleaded guilty to obtaining goods to the amount
of
£50 by false pretences. In explanation of
her crime it was stated that she was under a
mistaken impression that her engagement would
not lead to marriage, that she became de-
pressed, and that she "did not know what she
said or did," while in mitigation of punishment it
was urged that the money had been repaid, that
85
her fiancé could not marry her if she were sent
to gaol, and that her life would be irretrievably
ruined, and she was discharged! From
The Bir-
mingham Post, 4th February 1902: A female
clerk (twenty-six) pleaded guilty to embezzling
£5, 1s. 9d. on 16th November,
£ 2, 2s. 4d. on
2lst December and
£ 5, 0s. 9d. on a 23rd December
last, the moneys of her employer. Prosecuting
counsel said prisoner entered prosecutor's employ
in 1900, and in June last her salary was raised to
27s. 6d. a week. The defalcations [embezzlements],
which began a month before the increase, amounted
to
£134. She had falsified the books, and when
suspicion fell upon her destroyed two books, in order,
as she thought, to prevent detection. Her counsel
pleaded for leniency on the ground of her previous
good character
and because she was engaged ! The
recorder merely bound her over, stating that her
parents and young man were respectable, and so
was the house in which she lodged! A correspon-
dent mentions in
The Birmingham Post of February
1902 a case where a woman had burned her
employer's outhouses and property, doing
£1800
worth of damage, and got off with a month's
imprisonment. On the other hand, the
same judge,
at the
same Quarter Sessions, thus dealt with two
male embezzlers: C. C. (twenty-eight), clerk, who
pleaded guilty to embezzling two sums of money
from his master in August and September of 1901
86
(amounts not given), was sent to gaol for six
calendar months; and S. G. (twenty-four), clerk,
pleaded guilty to embezzling 7s. 6d. and 3s. For
the defence it was urged that the prisoner had
been poorly paid, and the recorder, hearing that
a gentleman was prepared to employ the man as
soon as released, sentenced him to three months'
hard labour! O merciful recorder!
The "injured innocent" theory usually comes
into play with magistrates when a woman is
charged with aggravated annoyance and harassing
of men in their business or profession, when, as
already stated, the administrator of the law will
usually tell the prosecutor that he cannot interfere.
In the opposite case of a man annoying a woman
under like circumstances he invariably has to find
substantial sureties for his good behaviour or go to
gaol. No injured innocence for him!
There is another case in which it seems probable
that, animated by the same fixed idea, those re-
sponsible for the framing of laws have flagrantly
neglected an obvious measure for public safety. We
refer to the unrestricted sale of sulphuric acid
(vitriol) which is permitted. Now here we have a
substance subserving only very special purposes in
industry, none in household economy, or in other
departments, save for criminal ends, which is never-
theless procurable without let or hindrance. Is it
possible to believe that this would be the case if men
87
were in the habit of using this substance in settling
their differences with each other, even still more
if they employed it by way of emphasising their
disapproval of the jilting of sweethearts? That it
should be employed by women in wreaking their
vengeance on recalcitrant lovers seems a natural
if not precisely a commendable action, in the eyes
of a Sentimental Feminist public opinion, and one
which, on the mildest hypothesis, "doesn't matter."
Hence a deadly substance may be freely bought
and sold as though it were cod-liver oil. A very
nice thing for dastardly viragoes for whom public
opinion has only the mildest of censures! In
any reasonable society the indiscriminate sale of
corrosive substances would in itself be a crime
punishable with a heavy term of imprisonment.
It is not only by men, and by a morbid public
opinion inflamed by Feminist sentiment in general,
that female criminals are surrounded by a halo of
injured innocence. The reader can hardly fail to
notice that such women have the effrontery to pre-
tend to regard themselves in this light. This is often
so in cases of assault, murder or attempted murder
of lovers by their sweethearts. Such is, of course,
particularly noticeable in the senselessly wicked
outrages, of which more anon. The late Otto
Weininger, in his book before quoted, "Geschlecht
und Charakter" (Sex and Character), has some note-
worthy remarks on this, remarks which, whether we
88
accept his suggested theory or not, might well
have been written as a comment on recent cases
of suffragette crimes and criminals. "The male
criminal," says Weininger, "has from his birth
the same relation to the idea of value [moral value]
as any other man in whom the criminal tendencies
governing himself may be wholly absent. The
female on the other hand often claims to be fully
justified when she has committed the greatest
conceivable infamy. While the genuine criminal
is obtusely silent against all reproaches, a woman
will express her astonishment and indignation that
anyone can doubt her perfect right to act as she
has done. Women are convinced of their being in
the right without ever having sat in judgment on
themselves. The male criminal, it may be true, does
not do so either, but then he never maintains that
he is in the right. He rather goes hastily out of
the way of discussing right and wrong, because it
reminds him of his guilt. In this fact we have a
proof that he has a relationship to the [moral] idea,
and that it is unfaithfulness to his better self of
which he is unwilling to be reminded. No male
criminal has ever really believed that injustice has
been done him by punishment. The female criminal
on the other hand is convinced of the maliciousness
of her accusers, and if she is unwilling no man can
persuade her that she has done wrong. Should
someone admonish her, it is true that she often
89
bursts into tears, begs for forgiveness and admits
her fault; she may even believe indeed that she
really feels this fault. Such is only the case, how-
ever, when she has felt inclined to do so, for this
very dissolving in tears affects her always with a
certain voluptuous pleasure. The male criminal is
obstinate, he does not allow himself to be turned
round in a moment as the apparent defiance of a
woman may be converted into an apparent sense of
guilt, where, that is, the accuser understands how to
handle her "("Geschlecht und Charakter," pp. 253-
254). Weininger's conclusion is: "Not that woman
is naturally evil or
anti -moral, but rather that she
is merely
a-moral, in other words that she is
destitute of what is commonly called 'moral
sense.'" The cases of female penitents and others
which seem to contradict this announcement
Weininger explains by the hypothesis that "it is
only in company and under external influence that
woman can feel remorse."
Be all this as it may, the fact remains that
women when most patently and obviously guilty
of vile and criminal actions will, with the most
complete nonchalance, insist that they are in the
right. This may be, and very possibly often is,
mere impudent effrontery, relying on the privilege
of the female sex, or it may, in part at least, as
Weininger insists, be traceable to "special deep-
lying sex-characteristics." But in any case the
90
singular fact is that men, and men even of other-
wise judicial capacity, are to be found who are
prepared virtually to accept the justice of this
attitude, and who are ready to condone, if not
directly to defend, any conduct, no matter how
vile or how criminal, on the part of a woman.
We have illustrations of this class of judgment
almost every day, but I propose to give two
instances of what I should deem typical, if slightly
extreme, perversions of moral judgment on the
part of two men, both of them of social and
intellectual standing, and without any doubt
personally of the highest integrity. Dr James
Donaldson, Principal of the University of St
Andrews, in his work entitled "Woman, her
Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and
Rome and among the Early Christians," comment-
ing on the well-known story attributed to the
year 331 B.C., which may or may not be historical,
of the wholesale poisoning of their husbands by
Roman matrons, as well as of subsequent cases
of the same crime, concludes his remarks with
these words: "It seems to me that we must
regard them [namely these stories or facts, as we
may choose to consider them] as indicating that
the Roman matrons felt sometimes that they were
badly treated, that they ought not to endure the
bad treatment, and that they ought to take the
only means that they possessed of expressing their
91
feelings, and of wreaking vengeance, by employing
poison" (p. 92). Now though it may be said
that in this passage we have no direct justification
of the atrocious crime attributed to the Roman
matrons, yet it can hardly be denied that we have
here a distinct condonation of the infamous and
dastardly act, such a condonation as the worthy
Principal of St Andrews University would hardly
have meted out to men under any circumstances.
Probably Professor Donaldson, in writing the above,
felt that his comments would not be resented very
strongly, even if not actually approved, by public
opinion, steeped as it is at the present time in
Feminism, political and sentimental.
Another instance, this time of direct special
pleading to prove a woman guilty of an atrocious
crime to be an "injured innocent." It is taken from
an eminent Swiss alienist in his work on Sex. Dr
Forel maintains a thesis which may or may not be
true to the effect that the natural maternal instinct
is either absent or materially weakened in the case
of a woman who has given birth to a child begotten
by rape, or under circumstances bordering upon
rape, and indeed more or less in all cases where
the woman is an unwilling participant in the sexual
act. By way of illustration of this theory he cites
the case of a barmaid in St Gallen who was seduced
by her employer under such circumstances as those
above mentioned; a child resulted, who was put
92
out to nurse at an institution until five years of
age, when it was handed over to the care of the
mother. Now what does the woman do? Within a
few hours of receiving the little boy into her keep-
ing she took him to a lonely place and deliberately
strangled him, in consequence of which she was
tried and condemned. Now Dr Forel, in his
Feminist zeal, feels it incumbent upon him to try
to whitewash this female monster by urging, on
the basis of this theory, the excuse that under the
circumstances of its conception one could not
expect the mother to have the ordinary instincts of
maternity as regards her child. The worthy doctor
is apparently so blinded by his Feminist prejudices
that (quite apart from the correctness or otherwise
of his theory) he is oblivious of the absurd irrele-
vancy of his argument. What, we may justly ask,
has the maternal instinct, or its absence, to do
with the guilt of the murderess of a helpless child
committed to her care! Who or what the child
was is immaterial! That a humane and otherwise
clear-headed man like Dr Forel could take a wretch
of this description under his æ
gis [care], and still
more that in doing so he should serve up such utterly
illogical balderdash by way of argument, is only
one more instance of how the most sane-thinking
men are rendered fatuous by the glamour of
Sentimental Feminism.
In the present chapter we have given a few
93
typical instances of the practice which constitutes
one of the most conspicuous features of Modern
Feminism and of the public opinion which it has
engendered. We hear and read,
ad nauseam, of
excuses, and condonation, for every crime com-
mitted by a woman, while a crime of precisely
similar a character and under precisely similar
circumstances, where a man is the perpetrator, meets
with nothing but virulent execration from that
truculent ass, British public opinion, as manipu-
lated by the Feminist fraternity, male and female.
This state of public opinion reacts, of course,
upon the tribunals and has the result that women
are practically free to commit any offence they
please, with always a splendid sporting chance of
getting acquitted altogether, and a practical
certainty that even if convicted they will receive
farcical sentences, or, should the sentence be in any
degree adequate to the offence, that such sentence
will not be carried out. The way in which criminal
law is made a jest and a mockery as regards female
prisoners, the treatment of criminal suffragettes,
is there in evidence. The excuse of health being
endangered by their going without their breakfasts
has resulted in in the release after a few days
of women guilty of the vilest crimes--
e.g. the
attempt to set fire to the theatre at Dublin. It
may be well to recall the outrageous facts of
modern female immunity and free defiance of the
94
law as illustrated by one quotation of a description
of the merry time of the window-smashers of
March 1912 in Holloway prison given by a corre-
spondent of
The Daily Telegraph . The correspondent
of that journal describes his visit to the aforesaid
prison, where he said there appeared to have been
no punishment of any kind for any sort of mis-
behaviour. "All over the place," he writes, "is
noise--women calling to women everywhere, and
the officials seem powerless to preserve even the
semblance of discipline. A suffragist will call out
her name while in a cell, and another one who
knows her will answer, giving her name in re-
turn, and a conversation will then be carried on
between the two. This chattering obtains all day
and far into the night. The 'officials' as the
wardresses prefer themselves called, have already
given the prison the name of 'the monkey-house.'
Certain it is that the prisoners are treated with
all deference, the reason being perhaps that the
number of officials is insufficient to establish
proper order. While I was waiting yesterday one
lady drove up in a carriage and pair [of horses], in
which were two policemen and several bundles of
clothes, to enter upon her sentence and this is the
note which seems to dominate the whole of the prison.
Seventy-six of the prisoners are supposed to be
serving sentences with hard labour, but none of
them are wearing prison clothes, and in only one
95
or two instances have any tasks of any description
been given, those generally being a little sewing
or knitting." Again a member of the Women's
Freedom League at a meeting on 19th May 1912
boasted that the suffragettes had a wing of their
own at Holloway. "They had nice hot water pipes
and all the latest improvements and were able to
climb up to the window and exchange sentiments
with their friends." She had saved money and
enjoyed herself very much!!
Here we have a picture of the way the modern
authorities of the law recognise the "injured
innocence" of female delinquents who claim the
right wantonly to destroy property. Our present
society, based as it is on private property-holding,
and which usually punished with the utmost severity
any breach of the sanctity of private property,
waives its claims where women are concerned.
Similarly arson under circumstances directly en-
dangering human life, for which the law prescribes
the maximum sentence of penal servitude for life,
is considered adequately punished by a week or
two's imprisonment when those convicted of the
crime are of the female sex. Oh, but they were
acting from political motives! Good, and have not
terrorist anarchists, Fenians and Irish dynamiters
of the Land League days also acted from political
motives? The terrorist anarchist, foolish and in-
defensible though his tactics may be, believes
96
honestly enough that he is paving the way for
the abolition of poverty, misery and social in-
justice, a far more vital thing than the franchise!
The Irish Fenians and dynamiters pursued a similar
policy and there is no reason to doubt their honest
belief that it would further the cause of the free-
dom and national independence of Ireland. Yet
were these "political" offenders dealt with other-
wise than as ordinary criminals when convicted of
acts qualified by the law as felonies? And their
acts, moreover, whatever we may think of them
otherwise, were, in most cases at least, politically
logical from their own point of view, and not
senseless injuries to unoffending persons, as those
of the present-day female seekers after the suffrage.
97
CHAPTER V
THE "CHIVALRY" FAKE
T
HE justification for the whole movement of
Modern Feminism in one of its main practical
aspects--namely, the placing of the female sex in
the position of privilege, advantage and immunity
--is concentrated in the current conception of
"chivalry." It behoves us, therefore, to devote
some consideration to the meaning and implication
of this notion. Now this word chivalry is the
dernier
ressort [last resort] of those at a loss for a
justification of the modern privileging of women. But
those who use it seldom give themselves the trouble to
analyse the connotation of this term. Brought to
book [account] as to its meaning, most persons would
probably define it as deference to, or consideration
for, weakness, especially bodily weakness. Used
in this sense, however, the term covers a very much
wider ground than the "kow-towing" to the
female section of the human race, usually associ-
ated with it. Boys, men whose muscular strength
is below the average, domestic animals, etc., might
all claim this special protection as a plea of
98
chivalry, in their favour. And yet we do not find
different criminal laws, or different rules of prison
treatment, say, for men whose stamina is below
the average. Neither do we find such men or boys
exempted by law from corporal punishment in
consequence of their weakness, unless as an excep-
tion in individual cases when the weakness amounts
to dangerous physical disability. Neither, again, in
the general affairs of life are we accustomed to see
any such deference to men of weaker muscular or
constitutional development as custom exacts in the
case of women. Once more, looking at the question
from the other side, do we find the claim of
chivalry dropped in the case of the powerful
virago or the muscularly developed female athlete,
the sportswoman who rides, hunts, plays cricket,
football, golf and other masculine games, and who
may even fence or box? Not one whit!
It would seem then that the definition of the
term under consideration, based on the notion of
deference to mere weakness as such, will hardly
hold water, since in its application the question of
sex always takes precedence of that of weakness.
Let us try again! Abandoning for the moment the
definition of chivalry as a consideration for weak-
ness, considered
absolutely , as we may term it, let
us see whether the definition of consideration for
relative defencelessness--
i.e. defencelessness in a
given situation--will coincide with the current
99
usage of the word. But here again we are met
with the fact that the man in the hands of the law--
to wit, in the grip of the forces of the State, ay [yes],
even the strongest man, were he a very Hercules, is
in as precisely as defenceless and helpless a position
relative to those in whose power he finds himself,
as the weakest woman would be in the like case,
neither more nor less! And yet an enlightened and
chivalrous public opinion tolerates the most fiendish
barbarities and excogitated [thought out] cruelties being
perpetrated upon male convicts in our gaols, while it
shudders with horror at the notion of female con-
victs being accorded any severity of punishment at
all even for the same, or, for that matter, more
heinous offences. A particularly crass and crucial
illustration is that infamous piece of one-sided sex
legislation which has already occupied our attention
in the course of the present volume--to wit, the
so-called "White Slave Traffic Act" 1912.
It is plain then that chivalry as understood in
the present day really spells sex privilege and sex
favouritism pure and simple, and that any attempts
to define the term on a larger basis, or to give it
a colourable rationality founded on fact, are simply
subterfuges, conscious or unconscious, on the part
of those who put them forward. The etymology of
the word chivalry is well known and obvious
enough. The term meant originally the virtues
associated with knighthood considered as a whole,
100
bravery even to the extent of reckless daring,
loyalty to the chief or feudal superior, generosity
to a fallen foe, general open-handedness, and open-
heartedness, including, of course, the succour of the
weak and the oppressed generally,
inter alia [among
others], the female sex when in difficulties. It would be
idle, of course, to insist upon the historical definition of
the term. Language develops and words in course
of time depart widely from their original connota-
tion, so that etymology alone is seldom of much
value in practically determining the definition of
words in their application at the present day. But
the fact is none the less worthy of note that only
a fragment of the original connotation of the word
chivalry is covered by the term as used in our
time, and that even that fragment is torn from its
original connection and is made to serve as a scare-
crow in the field of public opinion to intimidate all
who refuse to act upon, or who protest against, the
privileges and immunities of the female sex.
l
I have said that even that subsidiary element
in the old original notion of chivalry which is now
1 One among many apposite cases, which has occurred
re-
cently, was protested against in a letter to The Daily
Telegraph,
21st March 1913, in which it was pointed out that while a
suffragette got a few months' imprisonment in the second
division for wilfully setting fire to the pavilion in Kew
Gardens, a few days previously, at the Lewes Assizes, a man
had been sentenced to five years' penal servitude for burning
a rick !! [a pile of e.g. hay]
101
well-nigh the only surviving remnant of its
original connotation is torn from its connection and
hence has necessarily become radically changed in
its meaning. From being part of a general code
of manners enjoined upon a particular guild or
profession it has been degraded to mean the
exclusive right in one sex guaranteed by law and
custom to certain advantages and exemptions with-
out any corresponding responsibility. Let us make
no mistake about this. When the limelight of
a little plain but critical common-sense is turned
upon this notion of chivalry hitherto regarded as
so sacrosanct, it is seen to be but a poor thing
after all; and when men have acquired the habit
of habitually turning the light of such criticism
upon it, the accusation, so terrible in the present
state of public opinion, of being "unchivalrous"
will lose its terrors for them. In the so-called ages
of chivalry themselves it never meant, as it does
to-day, the woman right or wrong. It never meant
as it does to-day the general legal and social
privilege of sex. It never meant a social defence
or a legal exoneration for the bad and even the
criminal woman, simply because she is a woman.
It meant none of these things. All it meant was a
voluntary or gratuitous personal service to the for-
lorn women which the members of the Knights' guild
among other such services, many of them taking
precedence of this one, were supposed to perform.
102
So far as courage is concerned, which was
perhaps the first of the chivalric virtues in the old
days, it certainly requires more courage in our
days to deal severely with a woman when she
deserves it (as a man would be dealt with in like
circumstances) than it does to back up a woman
against her wicked male opponent.
It is a cheap thing, for example, in the case
of a man and woman quarrelling in the street, to
play out the stage rôle of the bold and gallant
Englishman "who won't see a woman maltreated
and put upon, not he!" and this, of course, without
any inquiry into the merits of the quarrel. To
swim with the stream, to make a pretence of
boldness and bravery, when all the time you
know you have the backing of conventional
public opinion and mob-force behind you, is
the cheapest of mock heroics.
Chivalry to-day means the woman, right or
wrong, just as patriotism to-day means "my
country right or wrong." In other words, chivalry
to-day is only another name for Sentimental
Feminism. Every outrageous pretension Of Senti-
mental Feminism can be justified by the appeal
to chivalry, which amounts (to use the German
expression) to an appeal from Pontius to Pilate."
This Sentimental Feminism commonly called
chivalry is sometimes impudently dubbed by its
votaries, "manliness." It will presumably continue
103
in its practical effects until a sufficient minority
of sensible men will have the moral courage to
beard [oppose] a Feminist public opinion and
shed a little of this sort of "manliness." The plucky
Welshmen at Llandystwmdwy in their dealings with
the suffragette rowdies on memorable occasion
showed themselves capable of doing this. In fact
one good effect generally of militant suffragetteism
seems to be the weakening of the notion of
chivalry--
i.e. in its modern sense of Sentimental
Feminism--amongst the populace of this country.
The combination of Sentimental Feminism with
its invocation of the old-world sentiment of chivalry
which was based essentially on the assumption of
the mental, moral and physical inferiority of woman
to man, for its justification, with the pretensions
of modern Political Feminism, is simply grotesque
in its inconsistent absurdity. In this way Modern
Feminism would fain achieve the feat of eating
its cake and having it too. When political and
economic rights are in question,
bien entendu, such
as involve gain and social standing, the assump-
tion of inferiority magically disappears before the
strident assertion of the dogma of the equality of
woman with man--her mental and moral equality
certainly! When, however, the question is of a
different character--for example, for the relieving
of some vile female criminal of the penalty of her
misdeeds-then Sentimental Feminism comes into
104
play, then the whole
plaidoyer [plea] is based on the
chivalric sentiment of deference and consideration
for poor, weak woman. I may point out that here,
if it be in the least degree logical, the plea for
mercy or immunity can hardly be based on any
other consideration than that of an intrinsic moral
weakness in view of which the offence is to be
condoned. The plea of physical weakness, if such
be entertained, is here in most cases purely
irrelevant. Thus, as regards the commutation of
the death sentence, the question of the muscular
strength or weakness of the condemned person
does not come in at all. The same applies,
mutatis
mutandis [with the necessary changes], to many
other forms of criminal punishment. But it must not
be forgotten that there are two aspects of physical
strength or weakness. There is, as we have already
pointed out, the muscular aspect and the constitutional
aspect. If we concede the female sex as essentially
and inherently weaker in muscular power and develop-
ment than the male, this by no means involves the
assumption that woman is constitutionally weaker
than man. On the contrary, it is a known fact
attested, as far as I am aware, by all physiologists,
no less than by common observation, that the
constitutional toughness and power of endurance
of woman in general far exceeds that of man,
as explained in an earlier chapter. This resilient
power of the system, its capacity for enduring
105
strain, it may here be remarked in passing, is by
no means necessarily a characteristic of a specially
high stage of organic evolution. We find it in-
deed in many orders of invertebrate animals in
striking forms. Be this as it may, however, the
existence of this greater constitutional strength or
resistant power in the female than in the male
organic system--as crucially instanced by the
markedly greater death-rate of boys than of girls
in infancy and early childhood--should, in respect
of severity of punishment, prison treatment, etc.,
be a strong counter-argument against the plea
for leniency, or immunity in the case of female
criminals, made by the advocates of Sentimental
Feminism.
But these considerations afford only one more
illustration of the utter irrationality of the whole
movement of Sentimental Feminism identified with
the notion of "chivalry." For the rest, we may
find illustrations of this galore. A very flagrant
case is that infamous "rule of the sea" which
came so much into prominence at the time of the
Titanic disaster. Recording to this preposterous
"chivalric" Feminism, in the case of a ship
foundering, it is the unwritten law of the seas,
not that the passengers shall leave the ship and
be rescued in their order as they come, but that
the whole female portion shall have the right
of being rescued before any man is allowed to
106
leave the ship. Now this abominable piece of sex
favouritism, on the face of it, cries aloud in its
irrational injustice. Here is no question of bodily
strength or weakness, either muscular or constitu-
tional. In this respect, for the nonce, all are on a
level. But it is a case of life itself. A number of
poor wretches are doomed to a watery grave,
simply and solely because they have not had the
luck to be born of the privileged female sex.
Such is "chivalry" as understood to-day--the
deprivation, the robbery from men of the most
elementary personal rights in order to endow
women with privileges at the expense of men.
During the ages of chivalry and for long after it
was not so. Law and custom then was the same for
men as for women in its incidence. To quote the
familiar proverb in a slightly altered form,
then--
"what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the
goose." Not until the nineteenth century did this
state of things change. Then for the first time the
law began to respect persons and to distinguish in
favour of sex.
Even taking the matter on the conventional
ground of weakness and granting, for the sake of
argument, the relative muscular weakness of the
female as ground for her being allowed the im-
munity claimed by Modern Feminists of the senti-
mental school, the distinction is altogether lost
sight of between weakness as such and
aggressive
107
weakness. Now I submit there is a very con-
siderable difference between what is due to
weakness that is harmless and unprovocative, and
weakness that is
aggressive , still more when this
aggressive weakness presumes on itself as weak-
ness, and on the consideration extended to it, in
order to become tyrannical and oppressive. Weak-
ness as such assuredly deserves all consideration,
but aggressive weakness deserves none save to
be crushed beneath the iron heel of strength.
Woman at the present day has been encouraged
by a Feminist public opinion to become meanly
aggressive under the protection of her weakness.
She has been encouraged to forge her gift of
weakness into a weapon of tyranny against man,
unwitting that in so doing she has deprived her
weakness of all just claim to consideration or even
to toleration.
108
CHAPTER
VI
SOME FEMINIST LIES AND FALLACIES
B
Y Feminist lies I understand false statements put
forward by persons, many of whom should be
perfectly well aware that they are false, apparently
with the deliberate intention of misleading public
opinion as to the real position of woman before
the law. By fallacies I understand statements
doubtless dictated by Feminist prepossessions or
Feminist bias, but not necessarily suggesting con-
scious or deliberate
mala fides [bad faith].
Of the first order, the statements are made
apparently with intentional dishonesty in so far
as many of the persons making them are concerned,
since we may reasonably suppose them to have
intelligence and knowledge enough to be aware
that they are contrary to fact. The talk about the
wife being a chattel, for example, is so palpably
absurd in the face of the existing law that it is
nowadays scarcely worth making (although we do
hear it occasionally even now). But it was not even
true under the old common law of England, which,
for certain disabilities on the one hand, conceded
109
to the wife certain corresponding privileges on the
other. The law of husband and wife, as modified
by statute in the course of the nineteenth century,
as I have often enough had occasion to point
out, is a monument of legalised tyranny over the
husband in the interests of the wife.
If in the face of the facts the word chattel, as
applied to the wife, has become a little too pre-
posterous even for Feminist controversial methods,
there is another falsehood scarcely less brazen that
we hear from Feminist fanatics every day. The
wife, we are told, is the only
unpaid servant! A
more blatant lie could scarcely be imagined. As
every educated person possessing the slightest
acquaintance with the laws of England knows, the
law requires the husband to maintain his wife in a
manner according with his own social position;
has, in other words, to feed, clothe and afford
her all reasonable luxuries, which the law, with
a view to the economic standing of the husband,
regards as necessaries. This although the husband
has no claim on the wife's property or income,
however wealthy she may be. Furthermore, it
need scarcely be said, a servant who is inefficient,
lazy, or otherwise intolerable, can be dismissed or
her wage can be lowered. Not so that privileged
person, the legally wedded wife. It matters not
whether she perform her duties well, badly, in-
differently, or not at all, the husband's legal
110
obligations remain just the same. It will be seen,
therefore, that the wife in any case receives from
the husband economic advantages compared with
which the wages of the most highly paid servant
in existence are a mere pauper's pittance. This talk
we hear
ad nauseum, from the Feminist side, of the
wife being an "unpaid servant," is typical of the
whole Feminist agitation. We find the same de-
liberate and unscrupulous dishonesty characterising
it throughout. Facts are not merely perverted or
exaggerated, they are simply turned upside down.
Another statement commonly made is that
women's lower wages as compared with men's is
the result of not possessing the parliamentary
franchise. Now this statement, though not perhaps
bearing on its face the wilful deception charac-
terising the one just mentioned, is not any the less
a perversion of economic fact, and we can hardly
regard it otherwise than as intentional. It is quite
clear that up to date the wages of men have not
been raised by legislation, and yet sections of the
working classes have possessed the franchise at
least since 1867. What legislation has done for
the men has been simply to remove obstacles in the
way of industrial organisation on the part of the
workman in freeing the trade unions from dis-
abilities, and even this was begun, owing to working-
class pressure from outside, long before--as long
ago as the twenties of the last century under the
111
auspices of Joseph Hume and Francis Place. Now
women's unions enjoy precisely the same freedom
as men's unions, and nothing stands in the way
of working women organising and agitating for
higher wages. Those who talk of the franchise as
being necessary for working women in order to
obtain equal industrial and economic advantages
with working men must realise perfectly well that
they are performing the oratorical operation collo-
quially known as "talking through their hat." The
reasons why the wages of women workers are
lower than those of men, whatever else may be their
grounds, and these are, I think, pretty obvious,
clearly are not traceable to anything which the
concession of the franchise would remove. If it be
suggested that a law could be enacted compulsorily
enforcing equal rates of payment for women as for
men, what the result would be the merest tyro [novice]
in such matters can foresee--to wit, that it would
mean the wholesale displacement of female by male
labour over large branches of industry, and this,
we imagine, is not precisely what the advocates of
female suffrage are desirous of effecting.
Male labour, owing to its greater efficiency and
other causes, being generally preferred by employers
to female labour, it is not likely that, even for the sake
of female
beaux yeux [beautiful eyes], they are going
to accept female labour in the place of male, on an
equal wage basis. All this, of course, is quite apart
112
from the question referred to on a previous page,
as to the economic responsibilities in the interests
of women, which our Feminist law-makers have
saddled on the man--namely, the responsibility
of the husband, and the husband alone, for the
maintenance of his wife and family, obligations
from anything corresponding to which the female
sex is wholly free.
In a leaflet issued by the "Men's Federation for
Women's Suffrage" it is affirmed that many laws
are on the statute book which inflict injustice on
Women." We challenge this statement as an un-
mitigated falsehood. Its makers ought to know
perfectly well that they cannot justify it. There are
no laws on the statute book inflicting injustice on
women as a Sex, but there are many laws inflicting
injustice on men in the supposed interests of
women. The worn-out tag which has so long done
duty with Feminists in this connection--viz. the
rule of the Divorce Court, that in order to procure
divorce a wife has to prove cruelty as well as
adultery on the part of a husband, whereas a
husband has to prove adultery alone on the part
of a wife--has already been dealt with and its
rottenness as a specimen of a grievance sufficiently
exposed in this work and elsewhere by the present
writer. Is what the authors of the leaflet may
possibly have in their mind (if they have anything
at all) when they talk about statutes inflicting in-
113
justice on women, that the law does not carry sex
vindictiveness against men far enough to please
them! With all its flogging, penal servitude, hard
labour and the rest, for offences against women,
some of them of a comparatively trivial kind, does
the law as regards severity on men not even yet
satisfy the ferocious Feminist souls of the members
Of the "Men's Federation for Women's Suffrage"?
This is the only explanation of the statement in
question other than that it is sheer bald bluff
designed to mislead those ignorant of the law.
Another flagrant falsehood perpetually being
dinned into our ears by the suffragists is the statement
that
women have to obey the same laws as men.
The conclusion drawn from this false statement is,
of course, that since they have to obey these laws
equally with men, they have an equal claim with
men to take part in the making or the modifying
of them. Now without pausing to consider the
fallacy underlying the conclusion, we would point
out that it is sufficient for our present purpose to
call attention to the falsity of the initial assumption
itself. It needs only one who follows current
events and reads his newspaper with impartial
mind to see that to allege that women
have to, in
the true sense of the words (
i.e. are compelled
to), obey the same laws as men is a glaringly
mendacious statement. It unnecessary in this
place to go over once more the mass of`evidence
114
comprised in previous writings of my own--
e.g.
in the pamphlet, "The Legal Subjection of Man"
(Twentieth Century Press), in the article, "A
Creature of Privilege" (
Fortnightly Review, Nov-
ember 1911), and elsewhere in the present volume,
illustrating the unquestionable fact that though in
theory women may have to obey the law as men
have, yet in practice they are absolved from all
the more serious consequences men have to suffer
when they disobey it. The treatment recently
accorded to the suffragettes for crimes such as
wilful damage and arson, not to speak of their
previous prison treatment when convicted for
obstruction, disturbance and minor police misde-
meanours, is a proof, writ large, of the mendacity
of the statement that women no less than men
have to obey the laws of the country, so far, that
is, as any real meaning is attached to this phrase.
Another suffragist lie which is invariably allowed
to pass muster by default, save for an occasional
protest by the present writer, is the assumption
that the English law draws a distinction as regards
prison treatment, etc., as between political and non-
political offenders. Everyone with even the most
elementary legal knowledge is aware that no such
distinction has ever been recognised or suggested
by the English law--at least until the prison ordi-
nance made quite recently, expressly to please the
suffragettes, by Mr Winston Churchill when Home
115
Secretary. However desirable many may consider
such a distinction to be, nothing is more indubitable
than the fact that it has never [been] previously obtained
[recognized] in the letter or practice of the law
of England. And yet, without a word of contradiction
from those who know better, arguments and protests
galore have been fabricated on the suffragist side,
based solely on this impudently false assumption.
Misdemeanours and crimes at common law when
wilfully committed, have in all countries always
remained misdemeanours and crimes, whatever
motive can be conveniently put forward to account
for them. A political offence has always meant
the expression of opinions or the advocacy of
measures or acts (not of the nature of common law
crimes) which are in contravention of the existing
law--
e.g. a "libel" on the constituted authorities
of the State, or the forcible disregard of a law or
police regulation in hindrance of the right of public
speech or meeting. This is what is meant by
political offence in any country recognising such as
a special class of offence entitling those committing
it to special treatment. This is so where the
matter refers to the internal legislation of the
country. Where the question of extradition comes
in the definition of political offence is, of course,
wider. Take the extreme case, that of the assassina-
tion of a ruler or functionary, especially in a
despotic State, where free Press and the free
116
expression of opinion generally do not exist. This
is undoubtedly a political, not a common law offence,
in so far as other countries are concerned, and
hence the perpetrator of such a deed has the right
to claim immunity, on this ground, from extra-
dition. The position assumable is, that under despotic
conditions the progressive man is at war with the
despot and those exercising authority under him;
therefore, in killing the despot or the repositories
of despotic authority, he is striking directly at the
enemy. It would, however, be absurd for the agent
in a deed of this sort to expect special political
treatment
within the jurisdiction of the State itself
immediately concerned. As a matter of fact he
never does so. Fancy a Russian Nihilist, when
brought to trial, whining that he is a political
offender and hence to be exempted from all harsh
treatment! No, the Nihilist has too much self-
respect to make himself ridiculous in this way.
Hardly even the maddest Terrorist Anarchist
would make such a claim. For example, the French
law recognises the distinction between political and
common law offences. But for all this the
bande
tragique [tragic band], Bonnet and his associates,
did not receive any benefit from the distinction or even
claim to do so, though otherwise they were loud enough
in proclaiming the political motives inspiring them.
Even as regards extradition, running amuck at large,
setting fire promiscuously to private buildings or
117
injuring the ordinary non-political citizen, as a
"protest," would not legally come into the category
of political offences and hence protect their authors
from being surrendered as ordinary criminals.
The real fact, of course, is that all this talk on
the part of suffragettes and their backers about
"political" offences and "political" prison treat-
ment is only a mean and underhand way of trying
to secure special sex privileges under false pre-
tences. Those who talk the loudest in the strain
in question know this perfectly well.
These falsehoods are dangerous, in spite of
what one would think ought to be their obvious
character as such, by reason of the psychological
fact that you only require to repeat a lie often
enough, provided you are uncontradicted, in order
for the aforesaid lie to be received as established
truth by the mass of mankind ("mostly fools," as
Carlyle had it).
It is a preposterous claim, I contend, that any
misdemeanour and
a fortiori [for stronger reason]
any felony has, law apart, and even from a merely
ethical point of view, any claim to special consideration
and leniency on the bare declaration of the felon or
misdemeanant that it had been dictated by political
motive. In no country, at any time, has the mere
assertion of political motive been held to bring an
ordinary crime within the sphere of treatment of political
offences. According to the legal and ethical logic
118
of the suffragettes, it is perfectly open for them
to set on fire theatres, churches and houses, and
even to shoot down the harmless passer-by in
the street, and claim the treatment of first-class
misdemeanants on the ground that the act was
done as a protest against some political grievance
under which they imagined themselves to be labour-
ing. The absurdity of the suggestion is evident on
its mere statement. And yet the above preposterous
assumption has been suffered equally with the
one last noted to pass virtually without protest,
and what is more serious, it has been acted upon by
the authorities as though it were indubitably sound
law as well as sound ethics! It may be pointed out
that what has cost many an Irish Fenian in the old
days, and many a Terrorist Anarchist at a later date,
a sentence of penal servitude for life, can be indulged
in by modern suffragettes at the expense of a few
weeks' imprisonment in the first or second division [for
milder offences]. Of course, this whole talk of "political
offences," when they are, on the face of them, mere
common crimes, is purely and simply a trick designed
to shield the cowardly and contemptible female
creatures who perpetrate these senseless and
dastardly outrages from the punishment they
deserve and would receive if they had not the
good fortune to be of the privileged sex. In the
case of men this impudent nonsense would, of
course, never have been put forward, and, if it had,
119
would have been summarily laughed out of court.
That it should be necessary to point out these
things in so many words is a striking illustration
of the moral and intellectual atrophy produced
by Feminism in the public mind.
There is another falsehood we often hear by
way of condoning the infamous outrages of the
suffragettes. The excuse is often offered when
the illogical pointlessness of the "militant" methods
of the modern suffragette are in question: "Oh!
men have also done the same things: men have
used violence to attain political ends!" Now the
fallacy involved in this retort is plain enough.
It may be perfectly true that men have used
violence to attain their ends on occasion. But to
assert this fact in the connection in question is
purely irrelevant. There is violence
and violence.
It is absolutely false to say that men have ever
adopted purposeless and inane violence
as a policy.
The violence of men has always had an intelligible
relation to the ends they had in view, either
proximate or ultimate. They pulled down Hyde
Park railings in 1866. Good! But why was this?
Because they wanted to hold a meeting, and found
the park closed against them, the destruction of
the railings being the only means of gaining access
to the park. Again, the Reform Bill riots of 1831
were at least all directed against Government
property and governmental persons--that is, the
120
enemy with whom they were at war. In most
cases, as at Bristol and Nottingham, there was
(as in that of the Hyde Park railings) a very
definite and immediate object in the violence and
destruction committed -- namely, the release of
persons imprisoned for the part they had taken
in the Reform movement, by the destruction of
the gaols where they were confined. What con-
ceivable analogy have these things with a policy
of destroying private property, setting fire to tea
pavilions, burning boat-builders' stock-in-trade,
destroying private houses, poisoning pet dogs,
upsetting jockeys, defacing people's correspond-
ence, including the postal orders of the poor,
mutilating books in a college library, pictures in a
public gallery, etc., etc.? And all these,
bien entendu,
not openly and in course of a riot, but furtively,
in the pursuit of a deliberately premeditated policy!
Have, I ask, men ever, in the course of the world's
history, committed mean, futile and dastardly
crimes such as these in pursuit of any political
or public end? There can be but one answer
to this question. Every reader must know that
there is no analogy whatever between suffragettes'
"militancy" and the violence and crimes of which
men may have been guilty. Even the Terrorist
Anarchist, however wrong-headed he may be, and
however much his deeds may be deemed morally
reprehensible, is at least logical in his actions,
121
in so far as the latter have always had some definite
bearing on his political ends and were not mere
senseless "running amuck." The utterly discon-
nected, meaningless and wanton character signal-
ising the policy of the "militant" suffragettes
would of itself suffice to furnish a conclusive
argument for the incapacity of the female intellect
to think logically or politically, and hence against
the concession to women of public powers, political,
judicial or otherwise.
Another fallacy analogous to the preceding,
inasmuch as it seeks to counterbalance female
defects and weaknesses by the false allegation of
corresponding deficiencies in men, is the Feminist
retort sometimes heard when the question of
hysteria in women is raised: "Oh! men can also
suffer from hysteria!" This has been already dealt
with in an earlier chapter, but for the sake of com-
pleting the list of prominent Feminist fallacies I
restate it concisely here. Now as we have seen it
is exceedingly doubtful whether this statement is
true in any sense whatever. There are eminent
authorities who would deny that men ever have
true hysteria. There are others, of course, again,
who would extend the term hysteria so as to
include every form of neurasthenic [nervous] disturb-
ance. The question is largely, with many persons
who discuss the subject, one of terminology. It
suffices here to cut short quibbling on this score.
122
For the nonce [moment], let us drop the word
hysteria and formulate the matter as follows:--
Women are frequently subject to a pathological
mental condition, differing in different cases but
offering certain well-marked features in common,
a condition which seldom, if ever, occurs in men.
This I take to be an incontrovertible proposition
based upon experience which will be admitted by
every impartial person.
Now the existence of the so-called hysterical
man I have hitherto found to be attested on
personal experience solely by certain Feminist
medical practitioners who allege that they have
met with him in their consulting-rooms. His
existence is thus vouchsafed for just as the reality
of the sea-serpent is vouchsafed for by certain
sea captains or other ancient mariners. Far be
it from me to impugn the ability, still less the
integrity, of these worthy persons. But in either
case I may have my doubts as to the accuracy of
their observation or of their diagnosis. It may be
that the sea-serpent exists and it may be that
hysteria is at times discoverable in male persons.
But while a conclusive proof of the discovery of
a single sea-serpent of the orthodox pattern would
go far to justify the yarn of the ancient mariner,
the proof of the occurrence, in an occasional case,
of hysteria in men, would not by far justify the
implied contention that hysteria is not essentially
123
a female malady. If hysterical men are as common
a phenomenon as certain hard-pressed Feminists
would make out, what I want to know is: Where
are they? While we come upon symptoms which
would be commonly attributed to hysteria in well-
nigh every second or third woman of whose life
we have any intimate knowledge, how often do
we find in men symptoms in any way resembling
these! In my own experience I have come across
but two cases of men giving indications of a
temperament in any way analogous to that of the
"hysterical woman." After all, the experience of
the average layman, and in this I contend my own
is more or less typical, is more important in the
case of a malady manifesting itself in symptoms
obvious to common observation, such as the one
we are considering, than that of the medical
practitioner, who by reason of his profession would
be especially likely to see [such] cases, if there
were any at all, however few they might be. The
possibility, moreover, at least suggests itself, that
the latter may often mistake for hysteria (using
the word in the sense commonly applied to the
symptoms presented by women) symptoms re-
sulting from general neurasthenia or even from
purely extraneous causes, such as alcohol, drugs,
etc. That this is sometimes the case is hardly open
to question. That the pathological mental symptoms
referred to as prevalent in the female, whether
124
we attribute them to hysteria or not, are rarely if
ever found in the male sex is an undoubted fact.
The rose, it is said, is as sweet by any other name,
and whether we term these affections symptoms
of hysteria, or describe them as hysteria itself, or
deny that they have anything to go with "true
hysteria," their existence and frequency in the
female sex remains nevertheless a fact. No!
whether some of the symptoms of hysteria, "true"
or "so-called," are occasionally to be found in men
or not, every impartial person must admit: that they
are extremely rare, whereas as regards certain
pathological mental symptoms, common in women
and popularly identified (rightly or wrongly) with
hysteria, there is, I contend, little evidence
of their occurring in men at all. Wriggle and
prevaricate as they may, it is impossible for
Suffragists and Feminists to successfully evade
the undoubted truth that the mentality of women
is characterised constitutionally by a general insta-
bility, manifesting itself in pathological symptoms
radically differing in nature and in frequency from
any that obtain in men.
Very conspicuous among the fallacies that have
done yeoman [great and loyal] service in the Feminist
Movement is the assumption that women are constitu-
tionally the "weaker sex." This has also been discussed
by us in Chapter II., but the latter may again be supple-
mented here by a few further remarks, so deeply
125
rooted is this fallacy in public opinion. The reason of
the unquestioned acceptance of the assumption is
partly due to a confusion of two things under one
name. The terms, "bodily strength" and "bodily
weakness" cover two distinct facts. The attribution
of greater bodily weakness to the female sex than
to the male undoubtedly expresses a truth, but no
less does the attribution of greater bodily strength
to the female than to the male sex equally express
a truth. In size, weight and muscular development,
average man has an unquestionable, and in most
cases enormous, advantage over average woman.
It is in this sense that the bodily structure of the
human female can with some show of justice be
described as frail. On the other hand, as regards
tenacity of life, recuperative power and what we
may term toughness of constitution, woman is
without doubt considerably stronger than man.
Now this vigour of constitution may, of course, also
be described as bodily strength, and to this con-
fusion the assumption of the general frailty of the
female bodily organism as compared with the male
has acquired general currency in the popular mind.
The most carefully controlled and reliable statistics
of the Registrar-General and other sources show
the enormously greater mortality of men than of
women at all ages and under all conditions of life.
Under the age of five the evidence shows that
120 boys die to every 100 girls. In adult life the
126
Registrar-General shows that diseases of the chest
are the cause of nearly 40 per cent of more
deaths among men than among women. That
violence and accident should be the occasion of
150 per cent more deaths amongst men than
women is accounted for, partly, at least, by the
greater exposure of men, although the enormous
disparity would lead one to suspect that here also
the inferior resisting power in the male constitution
plays a not inconsiderable part in the result. The
report of the medical officer to the Local Govern-
ment Board proves that between the ages of fifty-
five and sixty-five there is a startling difference
in numbers between the deaths of men and those
of women. The details for the year 1910 are as
follows:--
Diseases Male
Females
Nervous system 1614 1240
Heart 5762
5336
Blood vessels 3424
3298
Respiratory system 3110 2473
Digestive system 1769 1681
Kidneys, etc. 2241
1488
Acute infections 2259
1164
Violent deaths 1624
436
Various additional causes, connected with the more
active and anxious life of men, the greater strain
to which they are subjected, their greater exposure
alike to infection and to accident, may explain a
127
certain percentage of the excessive death-rate of
the male population as opposed to the female, yet
these explanations, even allowing the utmost
possible latitude to them, really only touch the
fringe of the difference, with the single exception
of deaths from violence and accident above alluded
to, where liability and exposure may account for
a somewhat larger percentage. The great cause
of the discrepancy remains, without doubt, the
enormously greater potentiality of resistance, in
other words of constitutional strength, in the
female bodily organism as compared with the male.
We must now deal at some length with a fallacy
of some importance, owing to the apparatus of
learning with which it has been set forth, to be
found in Mr Lester F. Ward's book, entitled
"Pure Sociology," notwithstanding that its falla-
cious nature is plain enough when analysed. Mr
Ward terms his speculation the "Gynœcocentric
Theory," by which he understands apparently the
Feminist dogma of the supreme importance of the
female in the scheme of humanity and nature
generally. His arguments are largely drawn from
general biology, especially that of inferior organ-
isms. He traces the various processes of repro-
duction in the lower departments of organic nature,
subdivision, germination, budding, etc., up to
the earlier forms of bi-sexuality, culminating in
conjugation or true sexual union. His standpoint
128
he thus states in the terms of biological origins:
"Although reproduction and sex are two distinct
things, and although a creature that reproduces
without sex cannot properly be called either male
or female, still so completely have these concep-
tions become blended in the popular mind that
a creature which actually brings forth offspring
out of its own body, is instinctively classed as
female. The female is the fertile sex, and whatever
is fertile is looked upon as female. Assuredly it
would be absurd to look upon an organism
propagating sexually as male. Biologists have
proceeded from this popular standpoint and
regularly speak of 'mother cells,' and 'daughter
cells.' It, therefore, does no violence to language
or to science to say that life begins with the
female organism and is carried on a long distance
by means of females alone. In all the different
forms of a-sexual reproduction, from fission to
parthenogenesis, the female may in this sense
be said to exist alone and perform all the functions
of life, including reproduction. In a word, life
begins as female."
In the above remarks it will be seen that Mr
Ward, so to say, jumps the claim of a-sexual
organisms to be considered as female. This, in
itself a somewhat questionable proceeding, serves
him as a starting-point for his theory. The a-sexual
female (?), he observes, is not only primarily the
129
original sex, but continues throughout, the main
trunk [body], though afterwards the male element
is added "for the purposes of fertilisation." "Among
millions of humble creatures," says Mr Ward,
"the male is simply and solely a fertiliser." The
writer goes on in his efforts to belittle the male
sex in the sphere of biology. "The gigantic female
spider and the tiny male fertiliser, the Mantis
insect with its similarly large and ferocious female,
bees, and mosquitoes," all are pressed into the
service. Even the vegetable kingdom, in so far as
it shows signs of sex differentiation, is brought
into the lists in favour of his theory of female
supremacy, or "gynæcocentricism," as he terms it.
This theory may be briefly stated as follows:--
In the earliest organisms displaying sex differentia-
tion, it is the female which represents the organism
proper, the rudimentary male existing solely for
the purpose of the fertilisation of the female. This
applies to most of the lower forms of life in which
the differentiation of sex obtains, and in many
insects, the Mantis being one of the cases specially
insisted upon by our author. The process of the
development of the male sex is by means of the
sexual selection of the female. From being a mere
fertilising agent, gradually, as evolution proceeds,
it assumes the form and characteristics of an
independent organism like the original female
trunk organism. But the latter continues to main-
130
tain its supremacy in the life of the species, by
means chiefly of sexual selection, until the human
period,
i.e. more or less(!), for Mr Ward is
bound to admit signs of male superiority in the
higher vertebrates--viz. birds and mammals. This
superiority manifests itself in size, strength,
ornamentation, alertness, etc. But it is with man,
with the advent of the reasoning faculty, and, as a
consequence, of human supremacy, that it becomes
first unmistakably manifest. This superiority, Mr
Ward contends, has been developed under the ægis
of the sexual selection of the female, and enabled
cruel and wicked man to subject and enslave down-
trodden and oppressed woman, who has thus been
crushed by a Frankenstein of her own creation.
Although in various earlier phases of human organ-
isation woman still maintains her social supremacy,
this state of affairs soon changes. Androcracy estab-
lishes itself, and woman is reduced to the role of
breeding the race and of being the servant of man.
Thus she has remained throughout the periods
of the higher barbarism and of civilisation. Our
author regards the lowest point of what he terms
the degradation of woman to have been reached
in the past, and the last two centuries as having
witnessed a movement in the opposite direction--
namely, towards the emancipation of woman and
equality between the sexes. (
Cf. "Pure Soci-
ology," chap. xiv., and especially pp. 290-377.)
131
The above is a brief, but, I think, not unfair
skeleton statement of the theory which Mr Lester
Ward has elaborated in the work above referred
to, in great detail and with immense wealth of
illustration. But now I ask, granting the correct-
ness of Mr Ward's biological premises and the
accuracy of his exposition, and I am not specialist
enough to be capable of criticising these in detail:
What does it all amount to? The "business end"
(as the Americans would say) of the whole theory,
it is quite evident, is to afford a plausible and
scientific basis for the Modern Feminist Movement,
and thus to further its practical pretensions. What
Mr Ward terms the androcentric theory, at least
as regards man and the higher vertebrates, which
is on the face of it supported by the facts of
human experience and has been accepted well-
nigh unanimously up to quite recent times, is,
according to him, all wrong. The male element in
the universe of living things is not the element
of primary importance, and the female element
the secondary, but the converse is the case. For this
contention Mr Ward, as already pointed out, has,
by dint of his biological learning, succeeded at least
in making out a case
in so far as lower forms of
life are concerned. He has, however, to admit--a
fatal admission surely--that evolution has tended pro-
gressively to break down the superiority of the
female (by means, as he contends, of her own
132
sexual selection) and to transfer sex supremacy
to the male, according to Mr Ward, hitherto a
secondary being, and that this tendency becomes
very obvious in most species of birds and mammals.
With the rise of man, however, out of the
pithecan-
thropos, the
homosynosis, or by whatever other
designation we may call the intermediate organism
between the purely animal and the purely human,
and the consequent supersession of instinct as the
dominant form of intelligence by reason, the
question of superiority, as Mr Ward candidly
admits, is no longer doubtful, and upon the
unquestionable superiority of the male, in due
course of time, follows the unquestioned supremacy.
It is clear then that, granting the biological
premises of our author that the lowest sexual
organisms are virtually female and that in the her-
maphrodites the female element predominates; that
in the earliest forms of bi-sexuality the fertilising or
male element was merely an offshoot of the female
trunk and that this offshoot develops, mainly by
means of sexual selection on the part of the female,
into an organism similar to the latter; that not
until we reach the higher vertebrates, the birds
and the mammals, do we find any traces of male
superiority; and that this superiority only becomes
definite and obvious, leading to male domination, in
the human species--granting all this, I say, what
argument can be founded upon it in support of the
133
equal value physically, intellectually and morally
of the female sex in human society, or the desir-
ability of its possessing equal political power with
men in such society? On the contrary, Mr Ward's
whole exposition, with his biological facts of
illustration, would seem to point rather in the
opposite direction. We seem surely to have here,
if Mr Ward's premises be accepted as to the
primitive insignificance of the male element--at
first overshadowed and dominated by the female
stem, but gradually evolving in importance, char-
acter and fruition, till we arrive at man the highest
product of evolution up to date--a powerful
argument for anti-Feminism. On Mr Ward's own
showing, we find that incontestible superiority,
both in size and power of body and brain, has
manifested itself in Androcracy, when the female
is relegated, in the natural course of things, to the
function of child-bearing. This, it can hardly be
denied, is simply one more instance of the general
process of evolution, whereby the higher being is
evolved from the lower, at first weak and depend-
ent upon its parent, the latter remaining dominant
until the new being reaches maturity, when in its
turn it becomes supreme, while that out of which
it developed, and of which it was first the mere
offshoot, falls into the background and becomes in
its turn subordinate to its own product.
Let us turn now to another scientific fallacy, the
134
result of a good man struggling with adversity--
i.e. a sound and honest scientific investigator, but
one who, at the same time, is either himself obsessed
with the principles of Feminism as with a religious
dogma, or else is nervously afraid of offending
others who are. His attitude reminds one of nothing
so much as that of the orthodox geologist of the first
half of the nineteenth century, who wrote in mortal
fear of incurring the
odium theologicum [hatred of
theologians] by his exposition of the facts of geology,
and who was therefore nervously anxious to per-
suade his readers that the facts in question did not
clash with the Mosaic cosmogony as given in the
Book of Genesis. With Mr Havelock Ellis in his
work, "Man and Woman," it is not the dogma of
Biblical infallibility that he is concerned to defend,
but a more modern dogma, that of female equality,
so dear to the heart of the Modern Feminist. Mr
Ellis's efforts to evade the consequences of the
scientific truths he honestly proclaims are almost
pathetic. One cannot help noticing, after his ex-
position of some fact that goes dead against the
sex-equality theory as contended for by Feminists,
the eagerness with which he hastens to add some
qualifying statement tending to show that after all
it is not so incompatible with the Feminist dogma
as it might appear at first sight.
The pièce de résistance, however, of Mr Havelock
Ellis is contained in his "conclusion." The author
135
has for his problem to get over the obvious in-
compatibility of the truth he has himself abundantly
demonstrated in the course of his book, that the
woman-type, in every respect, physiological and
psychological, approaches the child-type, while the
man-type, in its proper progress towards maturity,
increasingly diverges from it. The obvious implica-
tion of this fact is surely plain, on the principle of
the development of the individual being a shorthand
reproduction of the evolution of the species, or,
to express it in scientific phraseology, of
ontogeny
being the abbreviated recapitulation of the stages
presented by
philogeny . If we proceed on this well-
accredited and otherwise universally accepted
principle of biology, the inference is clear enough
--to wit, that woman is, as Herbert Spencer and
others have pointed out, simply "undeveloped
man"--in other words, that Woman represents a
lower stage of evolution than Man. Now this
would obviously not at all suit the book of Mr
Ellis's Feminism. Explained away it has to be in
some fashion or other. So our author is driven
to the daring expedient of throwing overboard one
of the best established generalisations of modern
biology, and boldly declaring that the principle
contained therein is reversed (we suppose "for
this occasion only") in the case of Man. In this
way he is enabled to postulate a theory consoling
to the Feminist soul, which affirms that adult man
136
is nearer in point of development to his pre-human
ancestor than either the child or the woman! The
physiological and psychological analogies observable
between the child and the savage, and even, especi-
ally in early childhood, between the child and the
lower mammalian types--analogies which, notably
in the life of instinct and passion, are traceable
readily also in the human female--all these count
for nothing; they are not dreamt of in Mr Ellis's
Feminist philosophy. The Modern Feminist dogma
requires that woman should be recognised as equal
in every respect (except in muscular strength) with
man, and if possible, as rather superior to him. If
Nature has not worked on Feminist lines, as common
observation and scientific research alike testify on
the face of things, naughty Nature must be
"corrected," in theory, at least, by the ingenuity of
Feminist savants of the degraded male persuasion.
To this end we must square our scientific hypo-
theses!
The startling theory of Mr Havelock Ellis,
which must seem, one would think, to all impartial
persons, so out of accord with all the acknow-
ledged laws and facts of biological science, appears
to the present writer, it must be confessed, the very
reductio ad absurdum [falsity of premise shown
by absurdity of conclusion] of Feminist controversial
perversity.
I will conclude this chapter on Feminist Lies and
Fallacies with a fallacy of false analogy or false
137
illustration, according as we may choose to term
it. This quasi-argument was recently put forward
in a defence speech by one of the prisoners in a
suffragette trial and was subsequently repeated by
George Bernard Shaw in a letter to
The Times.
Put briefly, the point attempted to be made is as
follows:--Apostrophising men, it is said: "How
would you like it if the historical relations of the
sexes were reversed, if the making and the
administrating of the laws and the whole power of
the State were in the hands of women? Would not
you revolt in such a condition of affairs?" Now to
this quasi-argument the reply is sufficiently clear.
The moral intended to be conveyed in the
hypothetical question put, is that women have just
as much right to object to men's domination, as men
would have to object to women's domination. But
it is plain that the point of the whole question resides
in a
petitio principie[unproven assertion] --to
wit, in the assumption that those challenged admit
equal intellectual capacity and equal moral stability
as between the average woman and the average man.
Failing this assumption the challenge becomes
senseless and futile. If we ignore mental and moral
differences it is only a question of degree as to when
we are landed in obvious absurdity. In "Gulliver's
Travels" we have a picture of society in which
horses ruled the roost, and lorded it over human
beings. In this satire Swift in effect put the
138
question: "How would you humans like to be
treated by horses as inferiors, just as horses are
treated by you to-day?" I am, be it remembered,
not instituting any comparison between the two
cases, beyond pointing out that the argument as
an argument is intrinsically the same in both.
139
CHAPTER
VII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MOVEMENT
W
E have already spoken of two strains in Modern
Feminism which, although commonly found to-
gether, are nevertheless intrinsically distinguishable.
The first I have termed Sentimental Feminism and
the second Political Feminism. Sentimental Feminism
is in the main an extension and emotional elabora-
tion of the old notion of chivalry, a notion which
in the period when it was supposed to have been
at its zenith, certainly played a very much smaller
part in human affairs than it does in its extended
and metamorphosed form in the present day. We
have already analysed in a former chapter the
notion of chivalry. Taken in its most general and
barest form it represents the consideration for
weakness which is very apt to degenerate into a
worship of mere weakness.
La faiblesse prime le
droit[The weakness precedes the right] is not nec-
essarily nearer justice than
la force prime le droit [the
force precedes the right]; although to hear much of
the talk in the present day one would imagine that the
inherent right of the weak to oppress the strong
were a first principle of eternal rectitude. But the
140
theory of chivalry is scarcely invoked in the
present day save in the interests of one particular
form of weakness--viz. the woman as the
muscularly weaker sex, and here it has acquired
an utterly different character.
l
Chivalry, as understood by Modern Sentimental
Feminism, means unlimited licence for women in
their relations with men, and unlimited coercion
for men in their relations with women. To men
all duties and no rights, to women all rights and
no duties, is the basic principle underlying Modern
Feminism, Suffragism, and the bastard chivalry
it is so fond of invoking. The most insistent
female shrieker for equality between the sexes
among Political Feminists, it is interesting to ob-
serve, will, in most cases, on occasion be found
an equally insistent advocate of the claims of
Sentimental Feminism, based on modern meta-
morphosed notions of chivalry. It never seems to
strike anyone that the muscular weakness of
woman has been forged by Modern Feminists into
1 As regards this point it should be remarked that
mediæval
chivalry tolerated (as Wharton expressed it in his "History
of Poetry ") "the grossest indecencies and obscenities between
the sexes," such things as modern puritanism would stigmatise
with such words as "unchivalrous," "unmanly" and the like.
The resemblance between the modern worship of women and the
relations of the mediæval knight to the female sex is very
thin indeed. Modern claims to immunity for women from the
criminal law and mediæval chivalry are quite different things.
141
an abominable weapon of tyranny. Under cover
of the notion of chivalry, as understood by Modern
Feminism, Political and Sentimental Feminists alike
would deprive men of the most elementary rights
of self-defence against women and would exonerate
the latter practically from all punishment for the
most dastardly crimes against men. They know
they can rely upon the support of the sentimental
section of public opinion with some such parrot
cry of' "What! Hit a woman!"
Why not, if she molests you?
"Treat a woman in this way!" "Shame!"
responds automatically the crowd of Sentimental
Feminist idiots, oblivious of the fact that the real
shame lies in their endorsement of an iniquitous
sex privilege. If the same crowd were prepared to
condemn any special form of punishment or mode
of treatment as inhumane for both sexes alike, there
would, of course, be nothing to be said. But it is
not so. The most savage cruelty and vindictive
animosity towards men leaves them comparatively
cold, at most evoking a mild remonstrance as against
the inflated manifestation of sentimental horror and
frothy indignation produced by any slight hardship
inflicted by way of punishment (let us say) on a
female offender.
The psychology of Sentimental Feminism gener-
ally is intimately bound up with the curious
phenomenon of the hatred of men by their own
142
sex as such. With women, in spite of what is
sometimes alleged, one does not find this pheno-
menon of anti-sex. On the contrary, nowadays we
are in presence of a powerful female sex-solidarity
indicating the beginnings of a strong sex-league
of women against men. But with men, as already
said, in all cases of conflict between the sexes, we
are met with a callous indifference, alternating with
positive hostility towards their fellow-men, which
seems at times to kill in them all sense of justice.
This is complemented on the other side by an
imbecile softness towards the female sex in general
which reminds one of nothing so much as of the
maudlin
bonhomie
[good-naturedness] of the
amiable drunkard. This besotted indulgence, as
before noted, is proof even against the outraged
sense of injury to property.
As we all know, offences against property, as
a rule, are those the average bourgeois is least
inclined to condone, yet we have recently seen
a campaign of deliberate wanton destruction by
arson and other means, directed expressly against
private property, which nevertheless the respect-
able propertied bourgeois, the man of law and
order, has taken pretty much "lying down." Let
us suppose another case. Let us imagine an
anarchist agitation, with a known centre and
known leaders, a centre from which daily outrages
were deliberately planned by these leaders and
143
carried out by their emissaries, all,
bien entendu,
of the male persuasion.
Now what attitude does the reader suppose
"public opinion" of the propertied classes would
adopt towards the miscreants who were responsible
for these acts? Can he not picture to himself the
furious indignation, the rabid diatribes, the ad-
vocacy of hanging, flogging, penal servitude for
life, as the minimum punishment, followed by
panic legislation on these lines, which would ensue
as a consequence. Yet of such threatenings and
slaughter, where suffragettes who imitate the
policy of the Terrorist Anarchist are concerned,
we hear not a sound. The respectable propertied
bourgeois, the man of law and order, will, it is
true, probably condemn these outrages in an
academic way, but there is an undernote of
hesitancy which damps down the fire of his
indignation. There is no vindictiveness, no note
of atrocity in his expostulations; nay, he is even
prepared, on occasion, to argue the question, while
maintaining the impropriety, the foolishness, the
"unwomanliness" of setting fire to empty houses,
cutting up golf links, destroying correspondence,
smashing windows and the like. But of fiery in-
dignation, of lurid advocacy of barbaric punish-
ments, or of ferocity in general, we have not a
trace. On the contrary, a certain willingness to
admit and even to emphasise the disinterestedness
144
of these female criminals is observable. As regards
this last point, we must again insist on what was
pointed out on a previous page, that the disinter-
estedness and unselfishness of many a male bomb-
throwing anarchist who has come in for the
righteous bourgeois' sternest indignation, are, at
least, as unquestionable as those of the female
house-burners and window-smashers. Moreover
the anarchist, however wrong-headed he may have
been in his action, as once before remarked, it must
not be forgotten, had at least for the goal of his
endeavours, not merely the acquirement of a vote,
but the revolution which he conceived would abolish
human misery and raise humanity to a higher level.
In this strange phenomenon, therefore, in which
the indignation of the bourgeois at the wanton
and wilful violation of the sacredness of his idol,
is reduced to mild remonstrance and its punitive
action to a playful pretence, we have a crucial
instance of the extraordinary influence of Feminism
over the modern mind. That the propertied classes
should take arson and wilful destruction of property
in general, with such comparative equanimity be-
cause the culprits are women, acting in the assumed
interest of a cause that aims at increasing the
influence of women in the State, is the most
striking illustration we can have of the power of
Feminism. We have here a double phenomenon,
the unreasoning hatred of man as a sex, by men,
145
and their equally unreasoning indulgence towards
the other sex. As we indicated above, not only is
the sense of
esprit de corps entirely absent among
modern men as regards their own sex, while
strongly present in modern women, but this
negative characteristic has become positive on the
other side. Thus the modern sex problem presents
us with a reversal of the ordinary sociological law of
the solidarity of those possessing common interests.
It remains to consider the psychological explana-
tion of this fact. Why should men so conspicuously
prefer the interests of women before those of
their own sex? That this is the case with
modern man the history of the legislation of
the last fifty years shows, and the undoubted
fact may be found further illustrated in the
newspaper reports of well-nigh every trial, whether
at civil or criminal law, quite apart from the
ordinary "chivalric" acts of men in the detail of
social life. This question of sex, therefore, as
before said, forms the solitary exception to the
general law of the
esprit de corps of those possessing
common characteristics and interests. It cannot be
adequately explained by a reference to the evolu-
tion of sex functions and relations from primitive
man onwards, since it is at least in the extreme
form we see it to-day, a comparatively recent
social phenomenon. The theory of the sacro-
sanctity of women by virtue of their sex, quite
146
apart from their character and conduct as indi-
viduals, scarcely dates back farther than a century,
even from its beginnings. The earlier chivalry,
where it obtained at all, applied only to the
woman who presented what were conceived of
as the ideal moral feminine characteristics in some
appreciable degree. The mere physical fact of sex
was never for a moment regarded as of itself
sufficient to entitle the woman to any special
homage, consideration, or immunity, over and
above the man. No one suggested that the female
criminal was less guilty or more excusable than
the male criminal. No one believed that a woman
had a vested right to rob or swindle a man because
she had had sexual relations with him. This notion
of the mere fact of sex--of femality--as of itself
constituting a title to special privileges and im-
munities, apart from any other consideration, is a
product of very recent times. In treating this
question, in so far as it bears on the criminal law,
it is important to distinguish carefully between the
softening of the whole system of punishment due
to the general development of humanitarian ten-
dencies and the special discrimination made in fa-
vour of the female sex. These two things are very
often inadequately distinguished from one another.
Punishment may have become more humane where
men are concerned, it may have advanced up to
a certain point in this direction, but its character
147
is not essentially changed. As regards women,
however, the whole conception of criminal punish-
ment and penal discipline has altered. Sex privilege
has been now definitely established as a principle.
Now a complete investigation of the psychology
of this curious phenomenon we have been con-
sidering--namely, the hatred so common with men
for their fellow-men as a sex--is a task which has
never yet been properly taken in hand. Its obverse
side is to be seen on all hands in the conferring
and confirming of sex prerogative on women. Not
very long ago, as we have seen, one of its most
striking manifestations came strongly under public
notice--namely, the "rule of the sea," by which
women, by virtue of their sex, can claim to be saved
from a sinking ship before men. The fact that the
laws and practices in which this man-hatred and
woman-preference find expression are contrary to
every elementary sense of justice, in many cases
conflict with public policy, and can obviously be
seen to be purely arbitrary, matters not. The
majority of men feel no
sense of the injustice
although they may admit the fact of the injustice,
when categorically questioned. They are prepared
when it comes to the point to let public policy go
by the board rather than entrench upon the sacred
privilege and immunity of the female; while as to
the arbitrary and unreasoning nature of the afore-
said laws and practices, not being troubled with a
148
logical conscience, this does not affect them. I must
confess to being unequal to the task of accurately
fathoming the psychological condition of the average
man who hates man in general and loves woman in
general to the extent of going contrary to so many
apparently basal tendencies of human nature as we
know it otherwise. The reply, of course, will be
an appeal to the power of the sexual instinct. But
this, I must again repeat, will not explain the rise,
or, if not the rise, at least the marked expansion
of the sentiment in question during the last three
generations or thereabouts. Even apart from this,
while I am well aware of the power of sexual love
to effect anything in the mind of man as regards its
individual object, I submit it is difficult to conceive
how it can influence so strongly men's attitude
towards women they have not seen, or, even where
they have seen them, when there is no question of
sexual attraction, or, again, as regards the collec-
tivity of women--the abstract category, Woman
(in general).
We have already dealt with the Anti-man cam-
paign in the Press, especially in modern novels and
plays. This, as we have remarked, often takes the
form of direct abuse of husbands and lovers and
the attempt to make them look ridiculous as a
foil to the brilliant qualities of wives and sweet-
hearts. But we sometimes find the mere laudation
of woman herself, apart from any direct anti-
149
manism, assume the character of an intellectual
emetic [vomit inducer]. A much-admired
contemporary novelist, depicting a wedding
ceremony in fashionable society circles, describes the
feelings of his hero, a young man disgusted with the
hollowness and vanity of "Society" and all its ways,
as follows:--"The bride was opposite him now, and
by an instinct of common chivalry he turned away
his eyes; it seemed to him a shame to look at that
downcast head above the silver mystery of her
perfect raiment; the modest head full, doubtless,
of devotion and pure yearnings; the stately head
where no such thought as 'How am I looking
this day of all days, before all London?' had ever
entered: the proud head, where no such fear as,
'How am I carrying it off?' could surely be
besmirching.... He saw below the surface of
this drama played before his eyes; and set his face,
as a man might who found himself assisting at a
sacrifice." Now, I ask, can it be believed that the
writer of the above flamboyant feminist fustian
is a novelist and playwright of established reputation
who undoubtedly has done good work. The
obvious criticism must surely strike every reader
that it is somewhat strange that this divinely innocent
creature he glorifies should arise straight out of a
milieu
[environment] which is shown up as the em-
bodiment of hollowness and conventional superficiality.
If men can lay the butter on thick in their laudation
150
of womanhood, female idolaters of their own sex
can fairly outbid them. At the time of writing there
has just come under my notice a dithyramb [wildly
enthusiastic piece] in the journal,
The Clarion , by
Miss Winnifred Blatchford, on the sacrosanct
perfections of womanhood in general, especially as
exemplified in the suicidal exploits of the late lamented
Emily Wilding Davidson
[1] of Epsom fame, and
a
diatribe on the purity, beauty and unapproachable
glory of woman. According to this lady, the glory of
womanhood seems to extend to every part of the
female organism, but, we are told, is especially
manifested in the hair (oozing into the roots
apparently). Evidently there is something especially
sacred in woman's hair! This prose ode to Woman,
as exemplified in Emily Davidson, culminates in the
invocation: "Will the day ever come when a
woman's life will be rated higher . . . than that of
a jockey?" Poor jockey! We will trust not, though
present appearances do indicate a strong tendency to
regard a woman as possessing the prerogatives of
the sacred cow of Indian or ancient Egyptian fame!
It is impossible to read or hear any discussion
on, say, the marriage laws, without it being
apparent that the female side of the question
is the one element of the problem which is
considered worthy of attention. The undoubted
iniquity of our existing marriage laws is always
spoken of as an injustice to the woman and the
[1] Suffragette who attempted to stop the Derby
and was crushed by a horse. Whether she intended
suicide is debated.
151
changes in the direction of greater freedom which
are advocated as a relief to the wife bound to
a bad or otherwise unendurable husband. That the
converse case may happen, that that reviled and
despised thing, a husband, may also have reason
to desire relief from a wife whose angelic qualities
and vast superiority to his own vile male self he
fails to appreciate, never seems to enter into the
calculation at all.
That no satisfactory formulation of the psychology
of the movement of Feminism has yet been offered
is undoubtedly true. For the moment, I take it, all
we can do is co-ordinate the fact as a case of what
we may term social hypnotism, of those waves
of feeling uninfluenced by reason which are a
phenomenon so common in history--witchcraft
manias, flagellant fanaticisms, religious "revivals,"
and similar social upheavals. The belief that woman
is oppressed by man, and that the need for remedy-
ing that oppression at all costs is urgent, partly, at
least, doubtless belongs to this order of phenomena.
That this feeling is widespread and held in various
degrees of intensity by large numbers of persons,
men no less than women, is not to be denied. That
it is of the nature of a hypnotic wave of sentiment,
uninfluenced by reason, is shown by the fact that
argument does not seem to touch it. You may show
conclusively that facts are opposed to the assump-
tion; that, so far from women being oppressed, the
152
very contrary is the case; that the existing law
and its administration is in no essential respect
whatever unfavourable to women, but, on the
contrary, is, as a whole, grossly unfair to men--it is
all to no purpose. Your remonstrances, in the main,
fall on deaf ears, or, shall we say, they fall off the
mind coated with Feminist sentiment as water falls
from the proverbial duck's back. The facts are
ignored and the sentiment prevails; the same old
catchwords, the same lies and threadbare fallacies
are repeated. The fact that they have been shown
to be false counts for nothing. The hypnotic wave
of sentiment sweeps reason aside and compels men
to believe that woman is oppressed and man the
oppressor, and believe it they will. If facts are
against the
idée fixe of the hypnotic suggestion, so
much the worse for the facts. Thus far the Feminist
dogma of the oppression of the female sex.
As regards the obverse side of this Sentimental
Feminism which issues in ferocious sex-laws directed
against men for offences against women--laws enact-
ing barbarous tortures, such as the "cat," and which
are ordered with gusto in all their severity in our
criminal courts--this probably is largely traceable to
the influence of Sadic lusts. An agitation such as that
which led to the passing of the White Slave Traffic
Act, so-called, of 1812, is started, an agitation engin-
eered largely by the inverted libidinousness of social
purity mongers, and on the crest of this agitation
153
the votaries of Sadic cruelty have their innings.
The foolish Sentimental Feminist at large, whose
indignation against wicked man is fanned to fury
by bogus tales and his judgment captured by repre-
sentations of the severities requisite to stamp out
the evil he is assured is so widespread, lends his
fatuous support to the measures proposed. The
judicial Bench is, of course, delighted at the in-
crease of power given it over the prisoner in the
dock, and should any of the
puisnes [1]
happen to
have Sadic proclivities they are as happy as
horses in clover and the "cat" flourishes like a
green bay tree.
Let us now turn to the question of the psy-
chology of Political Feminism. Political Feminism,
as regards its immediate demand of female suffrage,
is based directly on the modern conception of
democracy. This is its avowed basis. With modern
notions of universal suffrage it is declared that the
exclusion of women from the franchise is logically
incompatible. If you include in the parliamentary
voting lists all sorts and conditions of men, it is
said, it is plainly a violation of the principle of
democracy to exclude more than one half of the
adult population from the polls. As Mill used to
say in his advocacy of female suffrage, so long as
the franchise was restricted to a very small section
of the population, there may have been nothing
noteworthy in the exclusion of women. But now
[1] A pun is apparently meant as puisne can mean
both puny and unskilled as well as junior in rank as
an associate judge.
154
that the mass of men are entitled to the vote and
the avowed aim of democracy is to extend it to
all men, the refusal to extend it still further to
women is an anomaly and a manifest inconsistency.
But in this, Mill, and others who have used his
argument, omitted to consider one very vital point.
The extensions of the suffrage, such as have been
demanded and in part obtained by democracy up
to the present agitation, have always referred to
the removal of class barriers, wealth barriers, race
barriers, etc.--in a word, social barriers--but never
to the removal of barriers based on deep-lying
organic difference--
i.e. barriers determining not
sociological but biological distinctions. The case
of sex is unique in this connection, and this fact
vitiates any analogy between the extension of
suffrage to women and its extension to fresh social
strata such as democracy has hitherto had in view,
terminating in the manhood suffrage which is the
ultimate goal of all political democrats. Now sex
constitutes an organic or biological difference, just
as a species constitutes another and (of course)
a stronger biological difference. Hence I contend
the mere fact of this difference rules out the bare
appeal to the principle of democracy
per se as an
argument in favour of the extension of the suffrage
to women. There is, I submit, no parity between
the principle and practice of democracy as hitherto
understood, and the new extension proposed to be
155
given to the franchise by the inclusion of women
within its pale. And yet there is no question but
that the apparent but delusive demand of logical
consistency in this question, has influenced and
still influences many an honest democrat in his
attitude in this matter.
But although the recognition of the difference
of sex as being an organic difference and therefore
radically other than social differences of caste,
class, wealth, or even race, undoubtedly invalidates
the appeal to the democrat on the ground of
consistency, to accept the principle of female
suffrage, yet it does not necessarily dispose of
the question. It merely leaves the ground free for
the problem as to whether the organic distinction
implied in sex does or does not involve correspond-
ing intellectual and moral differences in the female
sex which it is proposed to enfranchise; and
furthermore whether such differences, if they
exist, involve general inferiority, or at least an
unfitness
ad hoc for the exercise of political
functions. These questions we have, I think,
sufficiently discussed already in the present work.
The fact of the existence of exceptionally able
women in various departments, does undoubtedly
mislead many men in their judgment as to the
capacity of the average woman to "think politic-
ally," or otherwise to show herself the effective
equal of the average man, morally and intellectually.
156
The reasons for answering this question in the
negative we have already briefly indicated in the
course of our investigations. This renders it un-
necessary to discuss the matter any further here.
In dealing with the psychological aspects of the
Feminist Movement, the intellectual conditions
which paved the way for its acceptance, it is worth
while recalling two or three typical instances of
the class of "argument" to be heard on occasion
from the female advocates for the suffrage. Thus,
when the census was taken in 1911 and the
Women's Political and Social Union conceived,
as they thought, the brilliant idea of annoying the
authorities and vitiating the results of the census
by refusing to allow themselves to be enrolled,
one of the leaders, when interviewed on the point,
gave her reason for her refusal to be included, in
the following terms:--"I am not a citizen"
(meaning that she did not possess the franchise)
"and I am not going to pretend to be one." The
silliness of this observation is, of course, obvious,
seeing that the franchise or even citizenship has
nothing whatever to do with the census, which
includes infants, besides criminals, lunatics, imbe-
ciles, etc. Again, in a manifesto of the Women's
Political and Social Union defending window-
smashing and other "militant" outrages, it was
pointed out that the coal strike had caused more
injury than the window-smashing and yet the
157
strikers were not prosecuted as the window-
smashers were--in other words, the exercise of
the basal personal right of the free man to with-
hold his labour save under the conditions agreed
to by him, is paralleled with criminal outrage
against person and property! Again, some three
or four years ago, when the Women's Suffrage
Bill had passed the Commons, on its being
announced by the Government that for the re-
mainder of the Session no further facilities could
be given for private members' Bills, save for those
of a non-contentious character, one of these sapient
females urged in the Press that, seeing that there
were persons to be found in both the orthodox
political camps who were in favour of female
suffrage, therefore the Bill in question must be
regarded as of a non-contentious character! Once
more, a lady, writing a few months ago to one
of the weekly journals, remarked that though
deliberate window-breaking, destruction of letters,
and arson, might be illegal acts, yet that the
punishing of them by imprisonment with hard
labour, they being political offences, was also an
illegal act, with the conclusion that the "militants"
and the authorities, both alike having committed
illegal acts, were "quits [even]"! These choice
specimens of suffragettes' logic are given as throwing
a significant light on the mental condition of women
in the suffragette movement, and indirectly on
158
female psychology generally. One would pre-
sumably suppose that the women who put them
forward must have failed to see the exhibition
they were making of themselves. That any human
being out of an asylum, could have sunk to the
depth of fatuous inconsequent idiocy they indicate
would seem scarcely credible. Is the order of
imbecility which the above and many similar
utterances reflect, confined to suffragette intelli-
gence alone, or does it point to radical inferiority
of intellectual fibre, not in degree merely, but in
kind, in the mental constitution of the human
female generally! Certainly it is hard to think
that any man, however low his intelligence, would
be capable of making a fool of himself precisely
in the way these women are continually doing
in their attempts to defend their cause and their
tactics.
In the foregoing pages we have endeavoured
to trace some of the leading strands of thought
going to make up the Modern Feminist Movement.
Sentimental Feminism clearly has its roots in
sexual feeling, and in the tradition of chivalry,
albeit the notion of chivalry has essentially changed
in the course of its evolution. For the rest, Senti-
mental Feminism, with its double character of
man-antipathy and woman-sympathy, as we see it
to-day, has assumed the character of one of those
psychopathic social phenomena which have so
159
often recurred in history. It can only be explained,
like the latter, as an hypnotic wave passing over
society.
As for Political Feminism, we have shown that
this largely has its root in a fallacious application
of the notion of democracy, partaking largely of
the logical fallacy known technically as
a dicto
secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter [general-
izing from atypical cases]. This logical fallacy of
Political Feminism is, of course, reinforced and
urged forward by Sentimental Feminism. As
coming under the head of the psychology of the
movement, we have also called attention to some
curious phenomena of logical imbecility, noticeable
in the utterances of educated women in the
suffragette agitation.
160
CHAPTER VIII
THE INDICTMENT
F
EMINISM, or, as it is sometimes called, the eman-
cipation of woman, as we know it in the present
day, may be justifiably indicted as a gigantic fraud
--a fraud in its general aim and a fraud alike in its
methods of controversy and in its practical tactics.
It is through and through disingenuous and
dishonest. Modern Feminism has always professed
to be a movement for political and social equality
between the sexes. The claim for this equalising
of position and rights in modern society is logically
based upon the assumption of an essential equality
in natural ability between the sexes. As to this,
we have indicated in the preceding pages on broad
lines, the grounds for regarding the foregoing
assumption as false. But quite apart from this
question, I contend the fraudulent nature of the
present movement can readily be seen by showing it
to be not merely based on false grounds, but directly
and consciously fraudulent in its pretensions.
It uniformly professes to aim at the placing of
the sexes on a footing of social and political
161
equality. A very little inquiry into its concrete
demands suffices to show that its aim, so far
from being equality, is the very reverse--viz. to
bring about, with the aid of men themselves, as
embodied in the forces of the State, a female
ascendancy and a consolidation and extension of
already existing female privileges. That this is so
may be seen in general by the constant conjunction
of Political and Sentimental Feminism in the same
persons. It may be seen more particularly in
detail, in the specific demands of Feminists. These
demands, as formulated by suffragists as a reason
why the vote is essential to the interests of
women, amount to little if anything else than
proposals for laws to enslave and browbeat men
and to admit women to virtual if not actual im-
munity for all offences committed against men. It
its enough to consult any suggestions for a woman's
"charter" in order to confirm what is here said.
Such proposals invaribly suggest the sacrificing of
man at every turn to woman.
l
1 This is arrived at by the clever trick of appealing
to the
modern theory of the equal mental capacity of the sexes when
it is a question of political and economic rights and advantages
for women, and of counterappealing to the traditional sentiment
based on the belief in the inferiority of the female sex, when
it is a question of legal and administrative privilege and
consideration. The Feminist thus succeeds by his dexterity
in the usually difficult feat of "getting it both ways" for his
fair clients.
162
In the early eighties of the last century appeared
a skit in the form of a novel from the pen of the
late Sir Walter Besant, entitled "The Revolt of
Man," depicting the oppression of man under a
Feminist regime, an oppression which ended in
a revolt and the re-establishment of male supremacy.
The ideas underlying this
jeu d'esprit [
light, humorous
work] of
the subjection of men would seem to be
seriously
entertained by the female leaders of the
present woman's
movement. It is many years ago
now since a
minister holding one of the highest positions
in the present
Cabinet made the remark to me:--"The
real object, you know, for which these women want
the vote is simply to get rascally laws passed
against men!" Subsequent Feminist agitation has
abundantly proved the truth of this observation.
An illustration of the practical results of the
modern woman's movement is to be seen in the
infamous White Slave Traffic Act of 1912 rushed
through Parliament as a piece of panic legislation
by dint of a campaign of sheer hard lying. The
atrocity of this act has been sufficiently dealt with
in a previous chapter.
1
1 There is one fortunate thing as regards these savage
laws
aimed at the suppression of certain crimes, and that is, as it
would seem, they are never effective in achieving their purpose.
As Mr Tighe Hopkins remarks, apropos of the torture of the
"cat" ("Wards of the State," p. 203):--"The attempt to
correct crime with crime has everywhere repaid us in the old
properly disastrous way." It would indeed be regrettable if it
163
could be shown that penal laws of this kind were successful.
Far better is it that the crimes of isolated individuals should
continue than that crimes such as the cold-blooded infliction
of torture and death committed at the behest of the State, as
supposed to represent the whole of society, should attain their
object, even though the object be the suppression of crimes
of another kind perpetrated by the aforesaid individuals within
society. The successful repression of crimes committed by
individuals, by a crime committed by State authority, can only
act as an encouragement to the State to continue its course
of inflicting punishment which is itself a crime.
Other results of the inequality between the
sexes so effectively urged by present-day Feminism,
may be seen in the conduct of magistrates, judges
and juries, in our courts civil and criminal. This has
been already animadverted upon in the course of
the present work, and illustrative cases given, as also
in previous writings of the present author to which
allusion has already been made. It is not too much
to say that a man has practically no chance in the
present day in a court of law, civil or criminal, of
obtaining justice where a woman is in the case.
The savage vindictiveness exhibited towards men, as
displayed in the eagerness of judges to obtain, and
the readiness of juries to return, convictions against
men accused of crimes against women, on evidence
which, in many cases, would not be good enough
(to use the common phrase) to hang a dog on, with
the inevitable ferocious sentence following convic-
tion, may be witnessed on almost every occasion
when such cases are up for trial. I have spoken of
164
the eagerness of judges to obtain convictions. As
an illustration of this sort of thing, the following
may be given:--In the trial of a man for the
murder of a woman, before Mr Justice Bucknill,
which took place some time ago, it came out in
evidence that the woman had violently and ob-
scenely abused and threatened the man immediately
before, in the presence of other persons. The jury
were so impressed with the evidence of unusually
strong provocation that they hesitated whether it
was not sufficient to reduce the crime to that of
manslaughter, and, unable to agree offhand on a
verdict of murder, asked the judge for further
guidance. Their deliberations were, however, cut
short by the judge, who remarked on the hesitation
they had in arriving at their verdict, finally adding:
"Only think, gentlemen, how you would view it had
this been your own wife or sister who was cruelly
done to death!" With the habitual obsequiousness
of a British jury towards the occupant of the Bench,
the gentlemen in question swallowed complacently
the insult thrown at their wives and sisters in
putting them in the same category with a foul
strumpet, and promptly did what the judge obviously
wanted of them--to wit, brought in a verdict
of wilful murder. The cases on the obverse side,
where the judge, by similar sentimental appeal,
aims at procuring the acquittal of female prisoners
notoriously guilty on the evidence, that palladium
165
of rogues, the English law of libel, precludes me
from referring to individually. As regards the dis-
parity in punishment, however, we have an apt and
recent illustration in the execution of the youth of
nineteen, convicted on doubtful evidence of the
murder of his sweetheart, and the reprieve of
the woman convicted on her own admission of the
murder of her paramour by soaking him in paraffin
during his sleep and setting him alight!
Another effect of the influence of Sentimental
Feminism, is seen in crimes of the "unwritten law"
description, the
crime passionel [crime of passion]
of the French. The most atrocious and dastardly murders
and other crimes of violence are condoned and even
glorified if they can but be covered by the excuse that
they are dictated by a desire to avenge a woman's
"honour" or to enable her to obtain the object of
her wishes. The incident in Sir J. M. Barrie's play
of the lady who murders a man by throwing him
out of a railway carriage over a dispute respecting
the opening of a window, and gets acquitted on the
excuse that her little girl had got a cold, represents
a not exaggerated picture of "modern justice"--
for women only! The outrageous application of
the principles, if such you may call them, of Senti-
mental Feminism in this country in the case of the
suffragettes, has made English justice and penal
administration the laughing-stock of the world.
But the way in which the crimes of the suffragettes
166
have been dealt with, is after all only a slight
exaggeration of the immunity from all the severer
penalties of the law enjoyed by female convicts
generally. This has been carried in the case of
suffragette criminals to the utmost limits of absur-
dity. In fact, the deference exhibited towards these
deliberate perpetrators of crimes of wanton destruc-
tion is sometimes comic, as in the case of the
Richmond magistrate who rebuked the policeman-
witness in an arson charge for omitting the
"Miss" in referring to one of the female prisoners
in the dock: as well as in the "high character"
usually attributed to the perpetrators of these
deeds of outrage and violence even by certain
functionaries of Church and State. They did not
speak in this strain morebetoken [to indicate further],
when mere male anarchists or Fenians were involved
in difficulties with the law due to overzeal for their cause!
The whole movement, it is quite evident,
depends for its success, largely, at least, on the
apathy of men. The bulk of men undoubtedly do
not sympathise with the pretensions of the Feminist
agitation, but the bulk of men are indifferent one
way or the other. They do not take the Feminist
Movement seriously. The bare notion of women,
as such, being a danger to men as such, strikes
them as absurd. They do not realise that the
question is not of the physical strength of women
as women, but of the whole forces of the State
167
being at the disposal of women to set in motion
to gratify their whims and passions. The idea of
a sex war in which women take the field against
men, such as represents the inwardness of the
whole Feminist Movement of to-day, seems to them
ridiculous. The feeling at the root of most men's
good-humoured patronage of, or indifference to,
Modern Feminist claims, is roughly expressed in
a remark of the late William Morris in replying to
some animadversions of mine on the subject:--
"What does it matter? A man ought to be always
able to deal with a woman if necessary. Why, I
could tackle a half dozen women at once for that
matter!" This is a common attitude of mind on
the subject among otherwise sane and sensible
men. The absurdity of it is manifest when one
considers that the issue of man versus woman as
units of physical strength respectively, is purely
irrelevant. It is not a question of the man tackling
the woman or any number of women. It is the
question of the whole force of the State tackling
the man
in favour of the woman. The prevalent
idea in many men's minds seems to be that of the
State drawing a ring-fence around the disputant
man and woman and letting them fight the matter
out between themselves, which, to speak the
language of the great geometer of antiquity--
"is absurd."
Modern Feminism, tacking itself on to an older
168
tradition which it travesties beyond all recognition,
has succeeded in affecting modern public opinion
with an overpowering sense of the sacrosanctity
of human femality as such. It is not content with
respect for the ideal of
good womanhood but it
would fain place on a pedestal the mere fact of
femalehood in itself. This is illustrated in a thou-
sand ways. Thus while public opinion tolerates
the most bestial and infamous forms of corporal
punishment for men in gaols, it will regard the
slight chastisement by the medical head of an
institution for mental cases, of a girl who is
admittedly obstinate and refractory rather than
mentally afflicted in the ordinary sense of the term,
as "degrading."
Again, in order to sustain its favourite thesis,
the intellectual equality of woman with man, it
resorts, whenever a plausible case presents itself,
to its usual policy of the falsification of fact. Take
the instance of Madame Curie. When radium was
first discovered in the laboratory of the late Pro-
fessor Curie we were told that the latter had made
the discovery, it being at the same time mentioned
that he possessed in his wife a valuable aid in his
laboratory work. We were afterwards told that
the discovery of radium was the joint work of
both, the implication being that the honours were
equally divided. Now, Feminist influence has
succeeded in getting Madame Curie spoken of
169
as herself the discoverer of radium! I venture
to affirm that there is no evidence whatever for
assuming that radium would ever have seen the
light had the late Professor Curie not himself
experimented in his laboratory, not to speak of
his predecessor Becquerel.
We have seen that Feminists are, in this country,
at least, zealous in championing the Puritan view
of sexual morality. Many of them, in the vehemence
of their Anti-man crusade, look forward with relish
to the opportunity they anticipate will be afforded
them when women get the vote, of passing laws
rigorously enforcing asceticism on men by means
of severe penal enactments. All forms of indulgence
(by men), sexual or otherwise, uncongenial to the
puritanic mind, would be equally placed under the
ban of the criminal law! Anyone desirous of
testing the truth of the above statement has only
to read the suffragette papers and other expositions
of the gospel of Feminism as held by its most
devoted advocates.
One point should not be lost sight of, and that
is the attitude of the Press. Almost all journals
are ready to publish any argument in favour of the
suffrage or of the other claims of the movement on
behalf of women. In defiance of this fact, a
prominent Feminist prelate some time ago, in a
letter to
The Times, alleged among the other so-
called grievances of women at the present day,
170
and apparently as in some sort a condonation of
"militancy," that the Press was closed to women
anxious to air their grievances! A statement more
directly the reverse of the truth could hardly have
been made. Open any paper of general circulation--
say any of the morning dailies--and you will find
letters galore advocating the Feminist side of the
question! According to my own observation, they
are in the proportion of something like three or
four in favour to one against. The fact is useless
denying that this sex-agitation has every favour
shown it by current "public opinion," including
even that of its opponents. Female "militants"
of the suffrage have pleas urged in condonation
of their criminal acts, such as their alleged
"high character," which would be laughed at, in
the case of men--and yet they whine at being
boycotted.
The readiness, and almost eagerness, with which
certain sections of British public opinion are ready
to view favourably anything urged on behalf of
female suffrage, is aptly illustrated by the well-
known argument we so often hear when the
existence of "militancy" is pointed out as a reason
for withholding the suffrage--the argument, namely,
as to the unfairness of refusing the franchise to
numbers of peaceable and law-abiding women who
are asking for it, because a relatively small section
of women resort to criminal methods of emphasising
171
their demand. Now let us examine the real inter-
pretation of the facts. It is quite true that the
majority of the women agitating for the suffrage
at the present day are themselves non-militants.
But what is and has been their attitude towards their
militant sisters? Have they ever repudiated the
criminal tactics of the latter with the decision and
even indignation one might reasonably have ex-
pected had they really regarded the campaign of
violence and wanton outrage with strong disappro-
bation, not to say abhorrence? The answer must
be a decided negative. At the very most they
mildly rebuke the unwisdom of militant methods,
blessing them, as it were, with faint blame, while,
as a general rule, they will not go even so far as
this, but are content, while graciously deigning
to tell you that, although their own methods are
not those of militancy, yet that they and the
militants are alike working for the same end,
notwithstanding they may differ as to the most
effective methods of attaining it. The non-militant
woman suffragist is always careful never to appear
an
anti-militant. Everyone can see that had the
bulk of the so-called "peaceable and law-abiding"
suffragists, to whose claims we are enjoined to
give ear, honestly and resolutely set their faces
against, and vigorously denounced, the criminal
campaign, refusing to have anything to do with
it or its authors, the campaign in question would
172
have come to an end long ago. But no! this would
not have suited the book of the "peaceable and law-
abiding" advocates of woman's suffrage. Their aim
has been, and is still, to run with the "militant"
hare and hunt with the "peaceable and law-
abiding" hounds. While themselves abstaining from
any unlawful act they are perfectly willing and
desirous that they and their movement shall reap
all the advantages of advertisement and otherwise
that may accrue from the militant policy. That the
above is a true state of the case as regards the
"peaceful and law-abiding" elements in the suffra-
gist movement, which we are assured so largely
outnumber the militant section, one would think
must be plain to everyone, however obtuse, who
has followed with attention the course of the present
agitation. And yet there are fools of the male sex
who consider seriously this preposterous plea of
the injustice of refusing to concede the suffrage to
a large number of "peaceable and law-abiding"
women who are demanding it, because of the action
of a small body of violent females--with whom,
bien
entendu, the aforesaid large body of "peaceable and
law-abiding" women (while keeping themselves
carefully aloof from active participation in militancy),
do not pretend to conceal their sympathy!
The whole modern woman's movement is based,
in a measure, at least, on an assumption which is
absolutely unfounded--to wit, that man has
173
systematically oppressed woman in the past, that
the natural tendency of evil-minded man is always
to oppress woman, or, to put it from the other side,
that woman is the victim of man's egoism! The
unsoundness of this view ought to be apparent to
every unbiassed student of history, anthropology,
and physiology. The Feminist prefers to see
evidence of male oppression in the place woman
has occupied in social and political life, rather than
the natural consequence of her organic constitution,
her secondary sexual characteristics, and the natural
average inferiority which flows therefrom. As
regards the personal relations between men and
women, an impartial view of the case must in-
evitably lead to the conclusion that whatever else
man in general may have on his conscience, no
reasonable reproach lies to his score as regards his
treatment of woman. The patience, forbearance,
and kindliness, with which, from Socrates down-
wards, men as a rule have encountered the whims,
the tempers, and the tantrums of their often un-
worthy womankind is indeed a marvel. But it is
a still greater marvel that Modern Feminism in
this, as in other things, should have succeeded in
hocussing [deceiving] public opinion into the de-
lusion that the exact opposite of the truth represents
the real state of the case. This, however, is a marvel
which runs through the history of the controversial
exploits of the whole Feminist Movement.
174
In the foregoing pages we have striven to
unmask the shameless imposture which, in the
main, this movement represents. We have tracked
down one dishonest argument after another. We
have pointed out how the thinnest and hollowest
of subterfuges are allowed to pass muster, and
even to become current coin, by dint of unrefuted
reiteration. The Feminist trick of reversing the
facts of the case, as, for example, the assertion that
man-made law and its administration is unjust to
women, and then raising a howl of indignation at
the position of affairs they picture, such being, of
course, the diametrical opposite of the real facts--
all this has been exposed. In conclusion I can only
express the hope that honest, straightforward men
who have been bitten by Feminist wiles will take
pause and reconsider their position. Whatever
sentiment or sympathy they may have with the
aims of the movement intrinsically, it ought to be
not too much to expect them to view with con-
tempt and abhorrence the mass of disingenuous
falsehood and transparent subterfuge, which the
votaries of Feminism systematically seek to palm
off upon a public opinion--only too easily gullible
in this matter--as true fact and valid argument.
175
Prepared by Thomas Pollock aka Spartacus,
Editor of
The Men's Tribune
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