Kitabı oku: «The Fraud of Feminism», sayfa 5

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 establish proper order. While I was waiting yesterday one lady drove up in a carriage and pair, 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 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 endangering 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 indefensible though his tactics may be, believes honestly enough that he is paving the way for the abolition of poverty, misery and social injustice, 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 freedom and national independence of Ireland. Yet were these “political” offenders dealt with otherwise 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.

CHAPTER V
THE “CHIVALRY” FAKE

The 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 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 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 associated with it. Boys, men whose muscular strength is below the average, domestic animals, etc., might all claim this special protection as a plea of 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 exception 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 weakness, 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 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, 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 cruelties being perpetrated upon male convicts in our gaols, while it shudders with horror at the notion of female convicts 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, 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, 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 connotation, 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 scarecrow 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.⁵

I have said that even that subsidiary element in the old original notion of chivalry which is now 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 without 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 forlorn women which the members of the Knights’ guild among other such services, many of them taking precedence of this one, were supposed to perform.

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 Sentimental 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 in its practical effects until a sufficient minority of sensible men will have the moral courage to beard 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 a 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 assumption 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 play, then the whole plaidoyer 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, 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 development 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 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 indeed 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. According 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 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 constitutional. 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 immunity claimed by Modern Feminists of the sentimental school, the distinction is altogether lost sight of between weakness as such and aggressive weakness. Now I submit there is a very considerable 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 weakness, and on the consideration extended to it, in order to become tyrannical and oppressive. Weakness 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.