The Fraud of Feminism 10

The Fraud of Feminism 10

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 responsible 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 nevertheless procurable without let

or hindrance. Is it possible to believe that this would be the case

if men 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 pretend 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 noteworthy remarks on this,

remarks which, whether we 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 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, however, 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 singular fact is that men, and men even of otherwise

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,” commenting 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 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 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 keeping 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 irrelevancy 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

_ægis_, 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 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 committed 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 manipulated 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 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 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 correspondent 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 misbehaviour. “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 return, 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