THE LEGAL
SUBJECTION OF MEN
BY
E. BELFORT BAX.
(New Edition By
arrangement with the Twentieth Century
Press, Limited.)
______________
THE NEW AGE PRESS,
140, FLEET STREET LONDON E.C.
1908.
CONTENTS.
______
PAGE
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION ...
...
...
... V
PREFACE
... ...
...
...
...
... VII
THE LEGEND ...
...
...
...
...
1
THE FACTS ...
...
...
...
...
... 3
MATRIMONIAL PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN
...
...
5
NON-MATRIMONIAL PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN
...
... 33
THE CRIMINAL LAW
... ...
...
...
33
ANALYSIS OF CASES ...
...
...
...
... 44
THE CIVIL LAW
...
... ...
... ...
51
THE ACTUAL EXERCISE OF WOMEN'S SEX PRIVILEGES
... 56
MUSCULAR INFERIORITY AND SEX PRIVILEGE
...
61
A SEX NOBLESSE ...
...
...
...
... 62
SOCIALISTS AND FEMINISTS
...
...
...
63
"THE OPPRESSED WOMAN''
...
...
...
... 64
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
____
I HAVE been usually credited with
being the chief
author of the following brochure. Such, however, is
not the case. "The Legal Subjection of Men" is in
great part the work of an Irish barrister and LL.D. of
Dublin, who died
a few years ago. That portions here
and there are from my pen is true, but for the bulk
of the pamphlet I am not directly responsible, as any
expert in literary style will probably detect. I mention
the circumstance
in writing the few words of preface
for the new edition asked of me by the publishers, not
with a view to any disclaimer, but simply in the interests
of literary truth and accuracy. For though, as stated,
only myself directly responsible for short sections, I
none the less, in the main, heartily endorse the whole.
The present edition has been carefully corrected and
the Law brought up to date, though the illustrative
cases necessarily remain as in the original edition.
There have been few agitations in history which have
been characterised by such hard lying and shameless
[V]
perversion of fact as the so-called "Woman's Move-
ment." Unfortunately, continually-reiterated assertions
in direct contravention with the real state of the case
have only too well succeeded. The public mind has
been bull-dozed into assuming the reverse of what
actually obtains
to represent the truth, and has sym-
pathised and given effect to its sympathies on the basis
of these false representations. I need scarcely say that
the advocates of
"Woman's Rights" and female suf-
frage, whose whole credit is based upon the tissue of
falsehood it is the mission of this little work to expose,
have done their best to boycott and ignore the exposure.
All honour then to the Twentieth Century Press for
originally publishing, and to the New Age Press for
having the courage to risk offending certain sections
of "advanced" opinion by reprinting, the following
unvarnished statement of Law and fact.
VI
E. BELFORT BAX.
PREFACE
____
I T seemed to the authors of the
following pamphlet
that the time had fairly come for confronting the false
assumptions underlying the conventional whining cant
of the Feminist advocate with a plain and unvarnished
statement of Law
and fact.
The "Woman's rights" (?) agitator has succeeded by
a system of sheer impudent, brazen, "bluff," alternately
of the whimpering and the shrieking order, in inducing
a credulous public to believe that in some mysterious
way the female sex is groaning under the weight of the
tyranny of him whom they are pleased to term "man
the brute." The facts show these individuals to be right
in one point and
only one, namely, that sex-injustice
and sex-inequality exist; for it so happens that the facts
further show the
said injustice and inequality to exist
wholly and solely in favour of women as against men.
In short, they disclose a state of things in which,
down to the minutest detail of law and administration, civil
and criminal, women are iniquitously privileged at the the
expense
of men. As it is, many an unhappy male victim of
modern sex-prerogative would doubtless be only
delighted to be allowed to partake of a little of the
oppression under
which he is told unfortunate Woman
is groaning, but
from any share in which he sees himself
to his detriment
excluded. Mr. Hardcastle [1] found his
guest's new-fashioned shyness bore a strong resemblance
to old-fashioned
impudence, and our male victim of
pro-feminist laws and tribunals may well he excused
for failing to distinguish between this new-fashioned
oppression and old-fashioned domination.
In conclusion, we would advise the Feminist guild
ignore our pamphlet with its tale of infamy. It is their
only chance of gulling their sentimental dupes any
longer. Let the latter once know of our sketch, and
their game is up. For those who have read it, and a
retain the vestiges of open mind on the subject, the
maundering [grumbling] farce of "down-trodden woman
and the brute man" will be played out.
[ 1 A character in "She Stoops To Conquer"
by Oliver
Goldsmith, 1773.]
THE LEGAL SUBJECTION OF MEN.
_______
I. THE LEGEND.
JOHN STUART MILL
is dead! but his eloquent wail
of the subjection of women is never let die--it rings in
our ears every day. It is solemn, it is pathetic; it
overflows with the chivalric sentiment which Mill
professes to repudiate as out of date, like the clanship
and hospitality of the wandering Arab, but which
nevertheless, is
so strongly developed in the average
male. It has become the gospel of women's pretended
wrongs, and has caused the ingenuous youth of Oxford
and Cambridge to
blush for their fellow males. The
only objection that the lawyers of the present year
of grace can raise to it is that it is really the reverse of
legal truth.
But even apart from the late John Stuart Mill, for
considerably more than a generation past--indeed, one
may say, more or less from the beginning of the present
century--mankind, in this and some other countries,
has had sedulously instilled into its mind the notion that
the female sex is labouring under a grievous oppression
at the hands of the tyrant male. In the present day this
opinion has acquired the character of an axiom which
few people think
of disputing. Every occurrence bearing
upon the social or economical relation of the sexes is
judged in the light of this fixed idea. The press in
general voices the view of public opinion with the result
that the assumption in question is continually being
reiterated. The moral of the injustice exercised by man
upon woman is insisted upon with all the devices of
rhetoric, and every chance occurrence is eagerly seized
upon and pressed
into the service to point the moral and
adorn the tale of the favourite theory.
No one, as far as we are aware, has seriously set
him or herself to proving the theory to have any
foundation at all. Starting with the assumption, the
state of things it implies has been deplored, people
have tried to explain it, to suggest remedies for it,
but tested it has never been. We all know the story
of King Charles II. and the Royal Society; how
the Merry Monarch, shortly after the institution of
that learned body, propounded a problem for its
solution, to wit, why a dead fish weighed more
than a live one? Many were the explanations sug-
gested, till at length one bold man proposed that they
should come back
to first principles, and have a dead
fish and a live fish respectively placed in the scales before
them. The proposition was received with horror, one
member alleging that to doubt the fact amounted to
nothing less than high treason. After much difficulty,
however, the bold man got his way; the matter was put
to the test, when, to the utter discomfiture of the loyal
members, the alleged fact which they were seeking to
explain evinced itself as but a figment of the Royal
fancy.
We propose in the following paragraphs to consider
whether the matter does not stand similarly only very
much "more so" as regards the conventional notion of
the legal and social disabilities of women. In the
present paper we
shall merely confine ourselves to the
legal aspects of
the question.
It will not, we think, take us long to convince our-
selves that the allegations on this subject which the
present generation, at least, has had dinned into its ears
from all sides since its infancy, are even on a less favour-
able footing as regards accuracy. Charles II. thought
the dead fish weighed heavier than the live one. The
event only proved that they weighed the same--not
that
2
the live one weighed heavier than the dead one. Our
modern women's righters bewail the alleged legal op-
pression of women by men. The facts show not that
neither sex is oppressed as such, but, on the contrary,
they disclose a legalised oppression of men by women.
II.
THE FACTS.
We
will in the first place give a short statement of the
law of husband and wife, with a view to discovering on
which side of the equation does the weight of privilege
lie, regarding the marriage contract as it at present
exists in this country.
Let us clearly understand what are the exact limita-
tions, and what the extraordinary extent of these sex
privileges conferred by law. Rich men are, on account
of their wealth,
in a more enviable position towards
any litigant in the Law Courts than are poor men.
The privilege here is of wealth. But rich women are
enormously better off in the matter of legal privilege
than are rich men, and poor women are similarly
privileged by law as against men of their own class.
THE LETTER OF THE LAW.
This privilege conferred on women arises in an
extraordinary number of cases, for the express letter of
the law discriminates in the sharpest possible manner
between men and women in the matter of legal right
and duty, of civil law advantage and criminal law
exemption.
But
the letter of the law is supplemented by the bias
of tribunals and
by the bias of the press, and of public
opinion, of which opinion, after all, the action of the
tribunals is but
the reflection. Who interprets, enacts.
The unfair incidence of the law, bad enough by itself, is
rendered crushing by the made-up minds of judge and
jury.
3
BIAS OF
TRIBUNALS.
The
settled bias of the tribunals in favour of the
woman complainant, actuating magistrates, judge and
jury, operates in two ways. In the first place a woman
has only to complain against a man, and the tribunal
is already convinced of the justice of her claim. The
tribunal is only
impartial if the complaint is by one
woman against another. In the next place, no adequate
repression of crime or other injury by a woman against
a man is even attempted.
BIAS OF
PRESS AND PUBLIC OPINION.
This tendency of the tribunals is confirmed and
rendered irresistiBle by the action of the press and public
opinion. All injuries to a woman are chronicled with
flaring headlines. Injuries by women to men are
laughed at, or worse still, passed over in silence.
The
origin of this bias is a subject of deep interest, but
not one capable of being discussed within brief limits.
It is, of course, to be found in the history of England for
some centuries past--practically since the Reformation
--in so far as difference in the intensity of the sentiment
differentiates England from other European peoples. It
is to be found in the history of Europe and the race for
many centuries before the period of the great European
upheaval of the 16th century. It is enough for the
present to note that the pro-feminist prejudice exists
and is transmuted into positive rules of law, and legal
administration by the action of public opinion and the
press, Parliament, judges and juries, and crystallised
into statutory enactment by an active pro-feminist
propaganda of sex-conscious women's righters.
If anyone thinks the latter factor unimportant, it
may
be sufficient to
remind him of the statutory innovation
4
involving the most flagrant injustice, inasmuch as
flagrant inequality, viz.:--
1. Summary Court for Separation. Open to women
alone, except in
the case of drunkenness (cf. Licensing
Act, 1902).
2. Action for Slander. Open to women alone.
3. Duty of Husband to maintain his wife--notwith-
standing her adultery.--This last a triumph of feminine
privileges enacted in 1895!
It is impossible in any distribution of the main out-
lines of sex-privilege to avoid occasionally overlapping.
One arrangement of the topics will be convenient. Let
us consider women's privileges under the head of Matri-
monial Law, and the Civil Law generally, and, further,
of the Criminal Law.
These privileges arise indirectly from the action of
the legislature,
but mainly from that of the Courts, and
consist of: first, the deliberate introduction of new rules
of law and procedure, and, secondly, the retention of
some old-world privileges of women, logical enough
when women were dependent, but under modern con-
ditions engines of tyranny against men.
MATRIMONIAL PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN.
1.
BREACH OF PROMISE OF
MARRIAGE.
The law of George III., punishing by damages--
usually vindictive damages--violation of breach of
promise of marriage. The women's privilege to commit
perjury plays a great part in this process. A woman
swears a man promised to marry her. Judge and jury
hold this statement false, and mark the result. No one
suggests that she should be indicted for perjury. On
the contrary, the grateful male litigant, happy to
escape, settles £3,000 on her (Gore v . Lord Sudley, 10
June, 1896).
5
Furthermore, by custom of the tribunals creating the
Common Law, this
action is confined in its benefits to
woman. A man suing in a like case is laughed out of
Court. This may or may not be a just privilege con-
ferred on women--that of breaking their promise free of
legal penalty, but it is obviously a privilege conferred by
the practice of the Courts on women as such. The rules
of law invalidating contracts obtained by fraud, duress,
or undue influence, have no effect as against a woman
inducing a man, by subtle device or threats of scandal,
to marry her. An experienced woman of 30 can entrap
a boy of 22 into
such a promise; the Court takes no
notice of the invalidity from point of view of fair play.
But a man suing a woman of any age would be laughed
out of Court.
2. PRIVILEGE TO DEFRAUD UNDER
COVER OF PROMISE
OF MARRIAGE.
This
is, of course, a minor privilege compared with
that of exacting
damages for breach of promise. But
it is a real privilege, nevertheless. A man gives valuable
property--jewellery, furniture, or money--to a woman
under an agreement to marry, fraudulently entered into
on her part, inasmuch as she has no power to carry out
her promise, being already married or preferring some-
one else. The man, in practice (whatever theory may
be) is not assisted to recover the property, and the
magistrate rebukes him for "unmanly" behaviour!
Contrast the other side. A woman makes a loan to a
man whom she knows to he married. He receives a
sentence of five years penal servitude.
3. MAINTENANCE.
As against her husband, the law confers on a woman
who has married him the unilateral privilege of main-
tenance. The earlier law made this privilege dependent
on her obedience, cohabitation with her husband, and
6
her observance of outwardly decent behaviour. The
present law has set her free from all these restraints.
Since 1857 the Secular Court, which then assumed juris-
diction in matrimonial matters, has given up all attempt
to enforce obedience, but the most violent methods, in-
cluding imprisonment and sequestration of the property
of the husband are employed to enforce her claim to
maintenance. By a recent Statute (the Act of 1884) the
process of imprisonment to make a wife obey an order
to return to her
husband was abolished. By the famous
decision in the Jackson Case the husband was prohibited
from himself using force to compel her to return. But
the deserted wife by magisterial order can get her desert-
ing husband sent
to gaol [jail]. And neither legislature nor
the Courts, which took away her duties of obedience and
cohabitation, ever dreamt of depriving her of her
privilege of being maintained by the man whom she can
flout and insult
with impunity. As a successful lady
litigant (May, 1896) remarked to her husband, "There
is no law which compels me to obey or honour you, but
there is a law that you must keep me." This woman
tersely sums up the position.
In the case of a man of property the Courts will
expropriate him for the benefit of his wife. In the
case of a wage-earner the Courts from police magistrates
to Supreme Court
will decree him to be her earning
slave, bound to work for her or go to prison. A wife,
no matter if rolling in wealth, is not obliged to contribute
a penny to her husband's support, even if he be incapaci-
tated from work through disease or accident. The sole
exception which the law makes in derision is that if he be
actually in such
destitution as to go to the workhouse,
then the wealthy
wife is obliged to pay, not to her hus-
band, but the local authorities, the cost of his main-
tenance at the exiguous scale usual in such cases.
Even
a wife who, against her husband's wish, leaves
his house after assaulting and insulting him can
obtain
7
against him an order for restitution of conjugal rights.
This is a mere preliminary to form a basis for a claim for
sequestration of
his property for her maintenance. The
Act of 1884 forbids the Court to order imprisonment for
refusal to obey an order of restitution of conjugal rights,
but enables such
a refusal to be made a ground for
confiscation of the husband's property in favour of the
wife. No reciprocity here. Imprisonment before 1884
affected both husband and wife. Sequestration of
property, the husband alone. Now imprisonment is
abolished for the wife, and so the wife goes scot free,
while the husband is as much bound as ever in person
and in property.
This iniquitous statutory rule is made use of by
women who have no wish whatever to return to their
husbands. After overbearing ill-usage and desertion of
the husband for years, the wife applies to the Court for
an order for restitution, well knowing that her unfortu-
nate victim will
not obey the order. Then the robbery
of his property is completed by a second order in Court.
But no disobedience to a like order on her part
enables
her property to be confiscated, or herself to be sent to
prison.
4. DISPOSITION OF PROPERTY FREE
FROM CONTROL OF
HUSBAND.
By the Married Women's Property Acts a woman has
complete control
over all property acquired or inherited
by her in any way, free from any claim on the part of
her husband. With cynical injustice she is left in
possession of all her old claims on her husband's
property, and the latest charter of female privilege, the
Statute of 1895,
gives her claims regardless even of her
adultery.
8
This matter deserves more attention than it usually
receives. Let us consider the topics in order:--
(a) Source of Women's Property.
The piteous tales of artistic working women, of wives
robbed by their worthless husbands, from the Mrs.
Morton of fact to the Miss Trotwood [1] of
fiction, formed
the foundation of the claim for a revision of the law.
Liberty for women to retain their own earnings.
Obvious equity here!
But the bulk of women's property, in 99 out of every
100 cases, is not earned by them at all. It arises from
gift or inheritance from parents, relatives, or even the
despised husband. Whenever there is any earning in
the matter it is
notoriously earning by some mere man
or other. Nevertheless, under the operation of the law,
property is steadily being concentrated into women's
hands. "Once Stridhan [Woman's property] always Stridhan."
[ 1 Mrs. Morton
figures to be Hannah Morton, a successful
shopkeeper in Hastings, England. Miss Trotwood is
a character
in "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens.
]
(b) Control through Life.
The wife has absolute and unfettered control over her
own property, man-earned though it be, and her person.
This is the new style. But the gaoler and the broad arrow
[government mark
of ownership] make the husband,
her earning slave, to be insulted and jeered with
impunity.
This is the old style with a difference. "All yours is mine,
and all mine's my own." Mere man is not worth considering
when the material aggrandizement of women is concerned !
(c) Control at
death.
By the Married Women's Property Acts, a woman
has complete power of leaving her property away from
her husband, by will, even though in his prosperity he
gave it to her. The husband can be prevented from
doing so, by the
wife's suing him for maintenance, when
his property, or
as much of it as judges think fit, is
settled on her, and can no longer he disposed of by his
9
will. Conveyancers aver that the steady tendency
for a woman to leave property acquired sfromome man
always to a woman. A silent revolution in succession is
being accomplished. But the man is left under his old
burdens of supporting his wife.
(d) Bankrupting Husband for
Money Lent.
A wife is privileged to recover judgment against, and
bankrupt her husband for any money she may have lent
him, and this privilege is no dead letter.
A husband does not lend, but gives money to his wife.
If he were to attempt by legal documents to turn it into
a loan, he would
discover once again that what is sauce
for the goose, is by no means sauce for the gander.
There is no case
on record of a husband daring to sue
his wife for a loan.
5. DISPOSITION OF PROPERTY FREE
FROM CONTROL
OF
CREDITORS.
Not merely as against the husband, but against her
creditors, the married woman is in a position of enviable
privilege.
A married woman, even when separated
from her husband, and released from all duties towards
him or her children, retains her privilege of having her
property exempt from seizure for debt.
Technicalities would be tedious, but the following is
the practical working of the law. In legal phraseology,
if a married woman enters into a contract, and if (an
important if) there is no restraint against anticipation
in her settlement, then her property, or some of it, may
be attached. As to the restraint against anticipating
income, this clause, introduced by Lord Chancellor
Thurlow to protect an interesting relative of his against
her husband, is practically to be found in every settle-
ment, being now useful against the creditor, although
no longer needed
against the husband.
10
6. VICARIOUS RESPONSIBILITY OF HUSBAND
TOWARDS
THIRD PERSONS
FOR HIS WIFE'S MISCONDUCT.
The husband is liable, and his wife is not, for all
the
civil wrongs (torts) she may commit. He has no control
over her, but serves as her whipping-boy. This, though
she publicly defames and insults him in every way, and
has deserted him.
As Sir Frank Lockwood put it, one has the deep
consolation of knowing that if Mrs. Jackson utters
slanders Mr. Jackson can be sued.
Under the older English law, when the wife was
"sous la verge de son marrye" (the canon law
sub
virga viri [under the rod of the man/husband ] ),
the rule was reasonable enough. Now, however,
it is only an illustration of the pro-feminist bias of the
Courts. Every moth-eaten scrap of privilege, which is
in favour of the
woman, they retain.
All privileges of the husband, no matter how firmly
established, they deny as having ever existed. Look at
the astounding declaration of Lord Halsbury in the
Jackson case, that the husband never had the right in
English law to restrain his wife ! ! !
7. IMPUNITY FOR CRIMES COMMITTED
IN HUSBAND'S
PRESENCE.
THE "DOCTRINE OF COERCION
"
Again, a pious archæology animates the judges when
the woman is to be benefited. Notwithstanding the
revolutionary changes in the law, another old-world
privilege of the
"woman under the rod" is reserved for
the dominating female of to-day. If her husband is
present when she
is committing a crime, a married
woman is presumed by an intelligent administration of
justice to have acted under his coercion. This is some-
times amusing, when, as often happens, the woman is
the instigator
of the crime.
11
This precious privilege is nominally confined to
cases
of minor importance, and in special is supposed not to
affect murder. In practice it affects all crimes, and is
no dead letter, as illustrative cases can show.
8. FACILITIES FOR DIVORCE.
No man can obtain a divorce except by a terribly
expensive process in the High Court at a minimum
charge of forty pounds. This means a denial of justice
to the vast bulk
of the male population. Any woman, by
the asking for it, can get a summary separation and
confiscation of her husband's property, and an order for
her maintenance out af his earnings from the nearest
police court. Recent Statutes confer this privilege.
This process, which costs only a few shillings, the
husband has to pay for.
But divorce or no divorce, the wife's property,
where-
ever acquired, cannot he touched. There is no question
here of interfering with her "earnings" though she be
an opera singer with £40,000 a year. Similarly with
her capitalised property, which, though man-acquired,
as usual, cannot
be touched.
If her property, as well as her husband's, has been
handed over to the trustees of her marriage settlement
the Court has some power to make orders as to the
income of that property, but in practice uses it only for
the benefit of the children.
No matter how flagrant her conduct the wildest dream
never suggested that the wife's "earnings" (as artist,
opera singer, or
what not) no matter how exorbitant,
should ever be touched for the benefit even of her
children. That a portion should be sequestrated for the
maintenance of the husband--even though a husband is
incapacitated by
disease or accident--of course would
be a barbarous suggestion, hardly to be discussed out-
side Bedlam [famous insane asylum.]
12
But precisely analogous orders as to the hard-earned
and miserably stinted wages of the male earner are
made with scandalous levity in the Police Court every
day. A working man, earning eighteen or twenty shil-
lings a week, is
calmly ordered to provide twelve shil-
lings a week for
life for the keep of a clamorous and
malignant shrew.
The denial to the working man of the same facilities
for summary separation, through the police court,
granted to every
brawling wife who chooses to ask for
it, simply means
that the man is in a state of legal
subjection to his wife. The wife has but to scream and
appeal to the nearest policeman, and prison, separation,
custody of children, and maintenance, are decreed as
matters of course.
A woman can habitually repudiate her duties, neglect
her children, pawn her husband's and children's clothes,
waylay her husband at his work, and disgrace him be-
fore his friends, procure his dismissal, assault him, and
there is no remedy open to the working man. To tell
him that he can appeal to the Divorce Court at a cost of
forty pounds, is
a piece of savage and scornful irony.
He might as well
be told that he can, if he has the
money, promote a
private Act of Parliament, at the cost
of some thousand
pounds.
If goaded by intolerable misery, he so far forgets
himself as to strike his torturer, he is sent to gaol, with
his condemnation
headed ''A cowardly brute.''
The special facilities for women to obtain divorce,
separation confiscation of the husband's property, do
not end with the
provision of a cheap and expeditious
Court for women alone. If the woman elects to go to
the Divorce Division of the High Court, the path is
made similarly smooth for her. Her unfortunate hus-
band, who may afterwards be held to be quite guiltless
of the lying charges brought against him, is ordered
to
13
find money for her solicitors, and has to pay in advance!!
He must also pay her alimony pendente lite
[during the
litigation]. Then when he is dragged to Court by a
heartless and vindictive woman, he finds the scales still
more heavily weighted against him. The rules might be
formulated somewhat in this way:--
1. Every woman's statement complaining of her
hus-
band is assumed to he true until he conclusively proves
it to be false. The onus probandi [burden of proof] is on
him and the difficulty he has to face is that of proving a negative.
2. The slightest harshness or even
carelessness of
speech or behaviour, no matter under what provocation
(the records of years being searched to find one) is
absolutely final
proof of "cruelty" if committed by the
husband. No amount of insolence and brutality--short
of actual attempt to maim--is cruelty in a wife. Any-
thing she does is a pardonable exhibition of feminine
temper.
3. The husband and his witnesses are
prosecuted for
perjury on the slightest inaccuracy being discerned in
their narration of facts. Deliberate perjury is passed
over if committed by the wife, her paramour, or her
witnesses.
4. No charge, no matter of what infamous crime,
falsely made by a wife against a husband, is a ground
for his refusing
to take her back. If he should refuse
the Court confiscates for her benefit as such of his
property or earnings as they think fit.
One result of these instructive rules of practice is
to be
found in the number of undefended divorce suits. It is
a common saying of the legal profession that multitudes
of husbands allow judgments to go against them by
default, as they
are quite conscious that no man not
of absolutely angelic character--unless he be himself
a lawyer--has any chances before a prejudiced pro-
feminist judge and jury.
14
9. ENDOWMENT OF ADULTERESS OUT OF
DAMAGES.
Here we
come upon a marvellous specimen of judicial
legislation, wherein Parliament has not been troubled.
In case of a husband succeeding under the Act of 1895
he will have difficulty in future in getting a divorce from
his wife by reason of adultery. He is entitled to
damages from the
co-respondent for the injury to him,
done in breaking
up his home, and exposing him to
mental suffering
and material loss. The damages are
supposed to he paid to the husband on this basis--that
they were in compensation for his loss. They are still
assessed on this
basis, but at the end of the nineteenth
century we find the judges creating a legal fiction.
Influenced by the wave of feminist sentimentality, the
judges have actually seized on these damages as a fund
for endowing the
adulteress.
The way
this insidious device was introduced was as
follows:--It not
unfrequently happened that a husband
assented of his own free will to the damages, which in
law were his own
property, being settled on the children
of the marriage. Sometimes he included his late wife
in that dedication of the fund. This was generous of
him, as the woman had obviously forfeited her claims on
him. Now, however, the judge, without consulting
parliament, has deprived the injured husband of the
merit of generosity. Without the husband's consent, in
fact, notwithstanding his opposition, the judge will
hand over the damages, which in strict law are the
husband's, to such trustees as they think fit, and trans-
form the fund into an endowment for the adulteress who
has prudently selected a rich man as co-respondent.
To understand the iniquity of this proceeding, let us
take the opposite case. In some American States the
wife's trade union has procured the passing of a law
that enables a wife to sue for damages for her husband's
seduction.
What would be thought of the American
Courts if they seized on the damages so secured and
15
settled them as a provision on the delinquent husband?
or (to add a grotesque completeness to the parallel)
settle them on the husband and his children by his fair
seducer?
Yet a similar piece of monstrous injustice--to men,
though not to women--is the law of England to-day.
Our pro-feminist
judges are presumably indifferent to
the fact that the subsidy of the adulteress in this way
can have but one
result, namely, to "encourager les
autres [to encourage the others]."
10. CUSTODY OF CHILDREN.
It has always in England been laid down as a funda-
mental law based
on public policy, that the custody of
children and their education is a duty incumbent on the
father. It
is said to be so fundamental that he is not
permitted to waive his exercise of the right by pre-
nuptial contract. (See the Agar v. Ellis Case.)
This rule of the Common Law of England is of course
in harmony with the policy of all Europe and Christen-
dom, as well as with the historic conditions of the
European social organisation, if not with the primal
instincts of the
race.
Nevertheless, fundamental and necessary as the rule
may be, the pro-feminist magistrates and judges of
England are bent
apparently on ignoring it with a light
heart. They have not merely retained the old rule that
the custody of infants of tender years remains with the
mother until the
child attains the age of seven. But
they go much further than that. As a matter of course,
and without considering in the least the interests of the
child, or of society at large, they hand over the custody
and education of
all the children to the litigant wife,
whenever she establishes--an easy thing to do--a flimsy
and often farcical case of technical "cruelty."
The victim husband has the privilege of maintaining
the children as well as herself out of his property
or
16
earnings, and has the added consolation of knowing
that they will brought up to detest him.
Even in the extreme case where a deserting wife takes
with her the children of the marriage, there is practically
no redress for the husband if in narrow circumstances.
The police courts will not interfere. The divorce court,
as already stated, is expensive to the point of prohibi-
tion. In any case the husband has to face a tribunal
already prejudiced in favour of the female, and the
attendant scandal of a process will probably have no
other result than to injure his children and their future
prospects in life.
II. I
MPUNITY FOR OFFENCES A
GAINST HUSBAND.
The wife
in England enjoys either absolute immunity
or liability to merely nominal punishment for all offences
against her husband committed during marriage. Con-
trast with this the rule as regards offences by the
husband towards the wife. Gaol and public obloquy
are his portion.
This matter will be referred to again in considering
the criminal law
privileges of women in general (married
or unmarried) as
regards trial, sentence, remission of
punishment, and gaol-treatment. It may here he noted
that feminine exemption, as specially regards Matri-
monial Law, is established in one of the following
ways:--Either by
1. The text of the law expressly, which
discriminates
between wife's offences and husband's, punishing the
latter and leaving unpunished the wife. For instance,
in cases of desertion; or by
2.
The administrators of the law who have established
a rule of practice discriminating in favour of the woman,
although nominally the law is the same for both. For
instance, in cases of cruelty, perjury, and bigamy ;or by
the fact that
17
3. Whenever a pecuniary fine is imposed,
nominally
on the wife, the husband is the vicarious sufferer. He
has to pay.
With this preface let us consider the law and
practice
as regards a wife's offences against the husband, in the
order of their frequency.
(a) Impunity for
Insolence and Insult.
The most
elaborate cruelty in the way of insolence
and insult is unpunishable by the law when committed
by the wife. The husband remains bound to support
his torturer, who
may publicly waylay and insult him,
harass him at his
work, procure his dismissal, libel him
by postcards sent
to his workshop, or to his club. If he
he a rich man, he
can get some tardy redress in the way
of palliation; but he remains liable to divorce and expro-
priation at his wife's behest. The rod, the cucking
school, [1] the indictment as a scold at the
assizes were the
methods adopted by the Law of England and sanctioned
by the Canon Law,
until the present century, to repress
such outrages. Now the feminine noblesse can torture
their slaves with
impunity.
If the husband retaliates, the magistrate's order
promptly consigns
him to gaol and the prisoners' lash.
[ 1 Cucking stool:
"An instrument of punishment no longer in use,
consisting of a chair in which the offender was
tied and exposed to
public derision or ducked in water." American Heritage Dictionary.
]
(b) Impunity for Neglect.
The wife
may repudiate every one of her duties, may
utterly neglect her household, her children, and her
husband. No
remedy either in the police court or the
divorce court for
the husband.
If the husband neglect the wife in this connection--
"neglect" is a very elastic word--consequences ensue
of which the chief are-
(1) The prompt police court separation order,
and confiscation of property and wages of hus-
band (enforced by
imprisonment).
18
(2) This so-called neglect of the husband enables
the wife to commit adultery with impunity, yet still
she has her claim
to maintenance. (Act of 1895.)
Neglect on the part of the wife is no legal offence
at
all. Neglect on the part of the husband has been con-
strued to mean anything of which the wife likes to
complain. For example, an actor who is obliged to
remain late at the theatre comes home late. This is held
to be "neglect," with the usual penal consequences.
What between the upper millstone of "cruelty" and the
nether millstone of "neglect" the unfortunate husband
can now be condemned alike, if he does something, or if
he does nothing--anything the wife chooses to call so
being construed as either "cruelty" or "neglect."
(c) Impunity for Libel and Slander of Husband.
No lying
charge, no matter how gross, by word or
writing is punishable if committed by the wife against
the husband. She is free to slander and libel him before
servants and strangers, solicitors and pressmen; accuse him
of every crime known to the Old Bailey [Central Criminal Court]
calendar, and write postcards to his club or to his employer and
[no] penal consequences ensue as long as she lives in his
house. Her husband cannot leave her without incurring
punishment.
If the husband, not to say slanders, but speaks dis-
respectfully to his wife before servants or strangers, she
is quite entitled
to leave his house at once, and claim the
usual separation and confiscation order, and deprive him
of the custody of
the children whom he is bound to
support.
(d) Impunity for Waylaying and Procuring Dismissal.
A vindictive wife who courts publicity and scandal
has
the average respectable man--unless he be an angel or
a lawyer--at her absolute mercy. If he be a man of the
middle-classes, she can waylay him at his office and
19
destroy his business connection. She can call at his
club and secure his expulsion. If he be a working man
she can interview
his employer and secure his prompt
dismissal. She can render him a laughing-stock to all
his acquaintances, and at the same time achieve his
financial ruin. The law and its administrators stand
idly by. No
remedy for the helpless male. The "poor
woman" (they are always that) must have been ill-
used; there is no
such thing as savage vindictiveness
and recklessness in the female.
(e) Impunity for Violence and
Assault.
If a man
under any provocation, no matter how
galling--insolence or violence--strikes a woman, he is
sent to hard labour, divorced, and his property con-
fiscated, or his earnings hypothecated--and all this
through the prompt instrumentality of the police-court.
A woman may assault, stab, set fire to her husband, and
he has no remedy,
except to summon her to the police-
court, where, if she be fined, he is compelled to pay the
fine, and as likely as not is laughed at. If her crime be
revoltingly atrocious, she is perhaps sent to prison--for
one-twentieth part of the time awarded to a male
offender for a like offence. On her being released, her
husband, unless he be a rich man, is bound to take her
back, and, rich or poor, support her. The prompt and
inexpensive police-court divorce is not for him.
A humane
police magistrate actually had to stoop to
make terms with a
cruel and murderous criminal. A
wife strikes a felon blow at her husband, renders him
insensible, and he has to be removed to the hospital.
His face is badly
scarred, six stitches having to be put
into the wounds. The magistrate, wishing to prevent
murder, binds her
over to come up for judgment, if
called upon, on condition that she kindly consents to
sign a separation
deed, permitting her unfortunate hus-
20
hand slave to live apart from her. The slave of course
has to support her all the same. ( Morning Advertiser,
2nd June, 1896. Thames Police Court.)
(f) Impunity for Adultery.
The latest charter of women's privileges--the Act
of 1895--enables a woman to commit adultery with
Impunity--provided she can allege her husband neg-
lected her. As "neglect" usually means that she
drove him to the public-house or to his club by over-
bearing violence and insolence, the present law means
that if a woman has a fancy for adultery, all she need do
is to pick a quarrel with her husband about anything she
likes, then she can indulge in desertion and adultery
with impunity, and claim the usual divorce and confis-
cation from a sympathising tribunal.
It is singular that the law on this very offence
should
be perpetually cited by women's righters as her chief
grievance, next to the absence of the Parliamentary
franchise--and as
the standing illustration of the "cruel
inequality and injustice as between the woman and the
man" of the English law of divorce. If a woman, we
are told, commits
adultery, a man can obtain absolute
divorce, but if a
woman sues she must prove cruelty as
well.
Now as to the earlier law, this was the rule, and
something could be said to defend it. It is obvious that
if a woman commits adultery she may introduce a
bastard child to her husband's family, and saddle him
with a pecuniary burden and them with an onerous
relationship which it is unjust should be borne by them
[which would be unjust if borne by them]. If a
husband has illicit relations, he does not bring home
his bastard offspring. But since 1857 the secular court
has practically abolished the discriminations. Let the
wife prove illicit relations by the husband, and she has
always had her divorce for the asking. The reason
is simple. The Courts
will hold, to oblige a wife, that
21
anything is cruelty if committed by a husband. It is
cruelty to come home late from his club; it is cruelty to
spend an evening with friends without her company.
It is cruelty to hold her hands if she tries to strike or to
bite him.
However,
these refinements are no longer necessary
to the pro-feminist tribunals of England. The last
charter of feminine privilege (the Act of 1895) has set
the balance of express law the other way. Now a wife
can commit adultery with impunity--if induced by the
"neglect" of her husband. No such excuse for the
husband.
(g) Impunity for Desertion.
A woman can have her husband arrested and sent to
gaol if he leaves
her, even though her own violence and
cruelty led to his flight. The husband gets no assist-
ance from the law
if his wife deserts him.
The method in which this privilege has been worked
out was simple enough. It consisted in abolishing all
the husband's control over the wife's actions and
property, and, on
the other hand, retaining all the wife's
power of legal compulsion on the husband, with added
powers.
These changes have practically come in during the
period since 1857, when a secular court for divorce was
established. Under the earlier law, prior to, and long
after the Reformation, ecclesiastical censure restrained
the deserting wife. But the secular common law also
lent its aid to the husband. He could prevent her by
force from leaving his house, and could bring her back
if she had escaped. More, he had an action for
"harbouring" against any of her relations or strangers
who assisted her in straying away--as late as George
III. a husband's action for damages on this ground was
successful.
22
An exception to the general rule, and even this was
of
doubtful validity, was introduced under Henry VIII. A
wife could be assisted to leave her husband's house if
she were journeying to the Bishop's Court to seek a
separation.
But the latest feminist rulings of the judges have
quite
swept away such fine distinctions as those of 1857.
(1) By their fiction of "cruelty"--anything a
husband does being "cruelty"--they have enabled
any woman who likes to leave on a pretended
excuse.
(2) By procuring the passing of an Act (Lord
Chancellor Cairns' Act, 1884) the Courts got rid of
their theoretical
duty of ordering a wife to be
imprisoned for refusing to obey an order of
restitution of conjugal rights. Nothing in the way
of compulsion by restraint of person or property is
to be applied to the wife. But by a cynical stroke
this Act provides
that if a husband refuses to obey,
his property is to be confiscated. And, more out-
rageous than all,
the wife's power to procure the
arrest and imprisonment of the husband by the
magistrate's Court is left untouched.
A case in which the wife of a clergyman caused her
husband to be arrested on board a ship going to
America, and sentenced to hard labour by alleging his
desertion, deserves special notice. True that the clergy-
man, having means, could appeal to a higher Court and
have the iniquitous sentence quashed. But the working
man would have had to serve his allotted term in the
prison cell. And no one has ever suggested that this
wife should be punished. (See the case of the Rev.
Peter MacDonald Neilson, June, 1894.)
The notorious Jackson case furnished another pic-
ture. Here a woman is upheld by the Court of Appeal
in deserting her husband and condemning him to life-
23
long celibacy. He has absolutely no remedy against
her. If she
commits any civil injury against any one, he
can be sued. If he should live with any other woman,
Mrs. Jackson can get a portion of the property confis-
cated and settled
on herself. She is not obliged to ask
for a divorce, she can still keep him bound by limiting
her demand to a judicial separation.
The criticisms which some lawyers have made on this
decision are wide
of the mark. It was quite in harmony
with the later current of authority, though in violent
conflict with the
settled Common Law of last century.
Tie the man and let the woman free, is the prevalent
judicial theory of to-day.
Though the judges could obtain the passing of Lord
Chancellor Cairns' Act, 1884, freeing the wife from
imprisonment for desertion, there has been no sugges-
tion of promoting
an Act to enable a man in Mr.
Jackson's position to obtain a divorce.
So enamoured have they become with the new doctrine
of feminine predominance in the relation of marriage,
that the judges of the House of Lords have actually
extended to Scotland their theory of tying the man and
letting the woman
free. For over three centuries the
law of Scotland has provided that desertion for four
years on the part
of either spouse is ground for absolute
divorce, with right of second marriage. For all that
long period the Act has been found most salutary in
effect. Now
the judges in the House of Lords, in the
year 1894, have practically repealed it. They have
refused to grant a Scotch litigant divorce, although his
wife has deserted
him for over four years, and at the
same time abducted his child. They allege, as the
ground for this astonishing "new readings" of the law,
that the husband did not really want her to return. As
this can be alleged in every case in which a husband
does not slavishly implore a shrew to come back, the
result is that when a vindictive woman wants to
prevent
24
the man remarrying, she can successfully resist his claim
for divorce. This salutary Act of Scots Parliament has
been offered up as a whole burnt offering on the altar of
the dominant female.
(h)
Impunity to Commit Bigamy.
We now come to a flagrant instance where the law
professes to apply impartially to masculine and feminine
offenders. But the feminist administrators of the law
have created an undisputed feminine privilege. Long
terms of penal servitude await the male bigamist. The
female is privileged to indulge in this form of deceit and
theft with impunity.
For, be it noted, it is almost invariably a desire to
obtain economic advantage that impels the woman to
this particular crime, the essence of which, of course, is
the deceit practised on the innocent party. In the cases
where there is no
economic motive and where no deceit
is practised on the second spouse (to use the con-
venient terms of the Scottish Law) no punishment is
ever inflicted on
the woman, and perhaps none is speci-
ally required. The possession of the "marriage lines"
is sought for as a social advantage, though based on
the deception of a public official.
But in striking contrast to this practice, the man
who
contracts a second, i.e. , illegal, alliance, even though he
goes through the marriage ceremony solely to please his
second partner, and although she is in no way deceived
as to his status,
may, even though in addition he has
been deserted by his first wife, he arrested and sent to
prison at the bidding of the woman who deserts him.
This, however, is not the full extent of the
privilege.
Men who, from passion, or for whatever motive, deceive
the second partner, are severely punished. That is to
say, a woman already deserting her husband, may
entangle a man into an alliance with her which he
25
believes to be honourable and legal: may make him the
father of her children, and hamper him with the life-long
obligation to support these unhappy offspring: may thus
brand her own children with the stamp of illegitimacy,
may squander his earnings for years, may finish the tale
of her favours by
involving him in a suit in the divorce
court as a co-respondent, and in a prosecution in the
criminal courts as an unwilling witness against his chil-
dren's mother, and may do all this with absolute freedom
from legal penalty. Let a man attempt to improve his
financial position, nay, let him, even at a pecuniary
loss to himself, exercise the least similar deceit on any
woman, and the Criminal Courts descend on him with
swift retribution.
The following article in a leading London daily news-
paper is instructive:--
''The sentence of seven years penal servitude passed
by the Common Sergeant yesterday upon Charles Baker,
who has for many years successfully practised bigamy
as a profession, is not one day too long. Mr. Baker
is evidently a person of irresistible fascination to ladies,
and but for the rare courage of one of his victims,
who had him tracked through both hemispheres, he
might in time have bigamously married the residue of
our unmarried women possessing suitable dowers.
Quite another sort of bigamist was the cause of an
application to Mr. Lane at the South Western Police
Court. This
was a young woman, who having married
yesterday's applicant, while her first husband was still
living, was strangely purged of her offence by Mr.
Justice Hawkins after a day's imprisonment, on condi-
tion that she returned--not to her legitimate spouse, but
to the young man who irregularly succeeded him. This
she did, but not for long, as the same young man had to
complain yesterday, that she had, in turn, deserted him,
for an old gentleman she used to go after before. The
applicant, like a
sensible young man, seemed able to
26
support this with
philosophy, but what did raise his ire
was her threat to
prosecute him if he did not maintain
her, against which he sought--and naturally obtained--
protection.
The fickle young woman is evidently still
unconversant with
the rules of the game. Perhaps when
she has tried as many husbands as Mr. Baker has
married wives, she will know better. Really it is
getting time to mete out equal treatment to masculine
and feminine offenders."-- Daily Chronicle , May 21,
1896.
(i) Impunity for False Charges
on Oath.
No crime is too abominable to be imputed by a wife,
with absolute impunity, against a husband. More pre-
cise details need
not be given, as recent instances will
occur to the public mind of notorious and infamous ill-
usage of a husband in this way by a heartless and vin-
dictive woman. But the Public Prosecutor is silent
when the false accusation is brought by one of the
privileged sex. Prosecutions of women for perjury in
a divorce suit are unknown.
And, be it observed, this privilege extends to all
female friends or
hirelings of the wife. These persons
are allowed to accuse, with elaborately-prepared details
of corroboration,
the husband of the woman litigant of
committing adultery with themselves. They are never
punished. An obliging maiden sister--to help her
married sister to
procure divorce and confiscation of
property against a troublesome husband--swears that
the husband committed adultery with herself, the wife's
sister! The
judge and jury find this story a concocted
lie. The infamous perjurer is not punished--is not even
prosecuted.
Obliging maid servants every day come
forward to allege
their own or some other woman's
"immoral relations" with the victim husband. No one
ever dreams of prosecuting them. It would be waste
of time and money--as no jury would convict.
27
(k) Impunity for Perjured Denials of Guilt.
Women, it
is notorious, every day perjure themselves
in divorce suits,
by denying that they committed adultery
when their guilt is manifest. They are never prose-
cuted. The administrators of the law show by their
practice--though not in articulate words--that they hold
such perjury a venial fault, if not, indeed, a justifiable
means of self-defence in the case of holy, inviolate
woman.
This privilege, like the analogous one of bringing
lying charges against a husband, extends to the wife's
friends and hirelings. Let a husband untruly deny his
illicit connection with a woman if his wife is the accuser.
The Public Prosecutor intervenes, as a case decided in
June, 1896, shows
clearly enough, when the male went
to penal servitude.
Yet, be it observed, it is only the man's denying
with
the object of protecting himself against his wife that is
punished. If the man he not a husband, but a co-
respondent: if he
deny the truth with the laudable
object of protecting a wife (who happens to be an
adulteress--but that does not strip her of her privilege)
then his perjury is pardonable and chivalrous. The
co-respondent is safe under the shadow of the wife. In
fact he must lie. And this brings us to the next head
of privilege.
(l) Impunity for Treacherous Confession of Guilt.
Here we have a most striking rule--No woman is
supposed to be a cowardly traitor if she turns "wife's
evidence" against
a man, and truly alleges that he had
illicit relations
with herself. She is assisting justice,
promoting morality, showing true repentance by open
confession, and aiding in the women's trade union
object of keeping
down man, the slave! Her treachery
to her accomplice
is condoned.
28
But a man who would dare to turn "husband's
evidence" against
a wife, cannot be found within the
four seas. The reason stares one in the face. Such a
witness would not
he welcomed as a servant of justice,
and a repentant sinner. No! he would be esteemed by
judge, jury, press and public to be a loathsome reptile,
unfit for human society. A howl of execration would
drive him from the land. Such a depth of morbid senti-
ment has been reached that even if a man charged with
immoral relations
with a wife, refuses or omits--pre-
sumably through religious or conscientious motives--
to come forward and perjure himself on her behalf, an
indignant press comments on his conduct, and tells him
he has not acted as a gentleman.
(m) Impunity to
Procure Adultery.
A wife seeking divorce and confiscation of her
husband's property can exercise all her privileges of
violence, insolence, and, under her recent charter, of
adultery, without
inconvenience, but she can in addition
make him guilty as well as herself, with the trivial
difference that he will be punished. A wife can get
female detectives
to send female seducers in her hus-
hand's path, and can then produce her hirelings in the
box with conclusive proofs of the husband's and their
own guilt.
If the attempt be made on the husband's side there is
swift retribution. In the first place as the adultery was
committed with his own connivance she is quite absolved
from legal responsibility. But more follows. At this
moment, such witnesses on a husband's side can be sent
to prison for successful conspiracy to procure the
adultery of a wire. The wife herself wins her suit.
12. IMPUNITY TO
MURDER HUSBAND.
Exactly as in the case of bigamy, the law on murder
and homicide are nominally the same for men as for
29
women. But if a wife by poisoning or violence, kills
her husband, the administrators of the law show in
practice what can
be done by twisting a text. The
matter will again
be referred to under the Criminal
Law, but provisionally the rules may be reduced to form
somewhat as follows:--
(1) The least excuse is sufficient to reduce
the
crime from murder
to manslaughter.
(2) All the wife's statements against her
husband
are assumed to be
true until they are proved to be
false.
(3) The proof of the actual deed of crime must
be
much more conclusive than in the case of a man.
(4)
If the verdict be [by] a mere chance one of murder,
a sympathetic judge announces he will forward to
the proper quarter the sympathetic jury's recom-
mendation to mercy. This recommendation is acted
on by the Home Secretary as a matter of course in
the case of a woman.
(5)
If the verdict is, as it usually is, one of man-
slaughter, a shamefully inadequate or possibly a
merely nominal sentence is imposed.
(a) Poisoning.
This peculiarly treacherous crime is a legitimate
mode
of self-defence if practised by a wife on her husband.
(b) Violence.
A wife is
still "weak woman" when armed with a
poker, a metal pot, a vitriol bottle, a petroleum can, or a
revolver. If these lethal substances killed her husband
it must have been
by accident. In any case he had
taken her "for better or worse," and had to put up with
the consequences. Why did he cross her temper?
Besides, even if she were ill-tempered, why did he not
make a better selection when marrying? The
elimina-
30
tion of thoughtless males is rather useful on the whole
to the progress of the race.
The decisions to which this line of argument, con-
scious or sub-conscious, leads judges and juries,
shamefully neglectful of their public trust, may be seen
from the appended
cases, selected haphazard from a
newspaper file.
(c) Poisoning a Husband.
Mrs. Maybrick was tried at Liverpool Assizes for
poisoning her husband. She read a written statement
by herself (Mr. Justice Stephens ordered that she be
not permitted to communicate with her lawyers before
writing it) to the effect that she administered the poison
to her husband at
his own request. The judge and
jury accepted her
statement that she administered the
poison, but disbelieved her statement that it was at his
own request, and,
wonderful to relate, she was convicted
of murder, but the Home Secretary commuted her
sentence; and after undergoing a few years' imprison
ment she is now at large.
(d) Setting a
Husband on Fire.
Mary O'Reardon, August 1st, 1894, poured oil over
her husband, and deliberately set him on fire with a
lighted paper. Sentenced at the Central Criminal Court
to six years' penal servitude.
The offence was plainly wilful murder. The man
had
shortly before attempted to commit suicide--being
driven to the attempt by her ill-usage.
(e) Setting a Husband on Fire.
Catherine
Chilton (Durham Assizes, Nov. 24th, 1894)
threw a lighted lamp at her husband. Sentenced to
twelve months' hard labour for manslaughter. The
judge described it as a wanton and wicked act, and
said it was a mercy for the prisoner that the jury had
reduced the original charge to one of manslaughter.
31
(f) Stabbing a Husband.
Annie Hibberd, August, 1894, stabbed her husband
twice, remarking,
"Revenge is sweet.'' Found guilty
of manslaughter at the Central Criminal Court, and
sentenced to six years' penal servitude.
(g) Driving a Waggon over a
Husband.
Jane Payne, August 18th, 1894, thrust her husband
off a waggon, and
then deliberately backed the horses,
driving the wheels over him twice. Both legs fractured.
He died a few hours afterwards. Found guilty of man-
slaughter.
(h) Setting a Husband and
Child on Fire.
Jane Ann Trelawney Baker ([age] 32) pleaded guilty to
manslaughter of her husband and child by throwing a
lighted lamp at the former. She was sentenced to three
days' imprisonment, which meant her immediate release,
and on leaving the dock remarked, amid the sympathy
of the Court, that she was a childless widow, alone in
the world ! ! !--Central Criminal Court, December 14th,
1893.
(i) Killing a Husband by Throwing a Knife at Him.
At the Central Criminal Court, October 24th, 1894, a
married woman surrendered to answer an indictment
charging her with
the manslaughter of her husband.
The defence was that the prisoner did not fling the knife
with the intention of killing her husband. She threw
the knife in a moment of great mental irritation, and it
unfortunately struck the deceased. The jury could not
agree to a verdict and were discharged. The case was
put back until the following week for counsel in the
meantime to consider if it were necessary to proceed
further with the case. Mr. Justice Wright, in allowing
the prisoner out on a recognizance, told her that she
need not attend unless she received notice to do so. The
32
judge, it should be added, who throughout the trial
appeared favourable to the prisoner, disallowed various
questions of the prosecution as to the previous relations
with the husband,
and cut short the medical evidence,
saying that he did not like to see the time of the Court
wasted with cases
such as these, or words to that effect.
Of course not! Mere husband killing, alter all--what
is that? In
the opposite case, that of killing a wife by
the husband, how often have judges been careful to
point out to the jury that any unlawful assault, if death
happened to result from it, was, in the eyes of the law,
wilful murder!
NON-MATRIMONIAL PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN
As already been stated, the division of our subject
into the Matrimonial, Civil, and Criminal and Non-
Matrimonial Privileges of Women, although obviously
convenient, necessitates some over-lapping. This, how-
ever, is unavoidable, as, for many reasons, it is well to
keep the promised
or actual wife's privileges against her
husband and others clear from those of other women.
But women in general have many and serious privi-
leges besides those affecting the matrimonial or quasi-
matrimonial relations.
THE CRIMINAL LAW.
The express
wording of the law--and, much more,
the tacit warping
of the Criminal Law in favour of
women by the bias
of judge, jury, and the press--has
created a regular
system of conferring privileges on
women as against men, or against the community in
general :--
1. As regards Trial.
2. As
regards Sentence.
3. As regards Prison Treatment.
4. As regards Pardon.
33
The only exceptions to these privileges are:--
(a) If the offence has
been committed by one
woman
against another.
(b) If the offence is by
a baby farmer [caretaker], committed
against other women's babies.
The reasons
for these exceptions are, of course,
obvious, and need
not be dwelt upon here.
1. TRIAL AND SENTENCE.
The rules are substantially the same as those
affecting
wives in particular, already enumerated.
(a) The least
excuse is sufficient to exonerate any
woman from penal consequences.
(b) All the women's
statements against
a man are
assumed to be true until they are proved to
be false.
(c) The proof of
the actual deed of crime must be
much
more conclusive than in the case of a man.
(d) The jury almost
invariably recommends to
mercy on the rare occasions when they convict.
(e) A shamefully
inadequate or even a nominal
sentence Is imposed.
2. LIST OF
CRIMES.
The list of
the wife's exemptions from punishment for
crimes against her husband may nearly all be repeated
as enjoyed, though possibly in a somewhat less degree,
by all women (other men's wives or not) against a man,
or against the community at large. (1) In cases of
drunkenness this offence against the safety of the com-
munity is visited
on the woman with a trifling fine. The
matter is looked on rather as a joke than an offence.
(2) In cases of libel and slander, a criminal prosecution
against a woman is practically unknown. A nominal
penalty, such as a promise not to repeat the offence, is
the usual ending to such a prosecution. (3) Crimes
of
34
assault and violence generally are almost as privileged
in the case of an
ordinary woman as of a wife against
a husband. (4) Murder is similarly reduced to man-
slaughter, no matter who the woman may be, provided
the victim is a man. (5) Waylaying, injuring business,
or procuring dismissal, is similarly a pastime to be in-
dulged in by any vindictive woman with absolute
impunity. (6) Perjury is similarly a perquisite of the
female litigant--whether perjury of the defensive or
offensive type. (7) Turning wife's evidence after seduc-
tion of husband is, of course, open to all women without
punishment.
(8) Conspiracy to procure the husband's
seduction, as has
already been stated, goes unpunished
if committed on the wife's side.
The class of offences more peculiarly effected by
women ill general, apart from wives, are due either to
revenge or a desire to extort money. Violence, culmin-
ating in murder, has been sufficiently dealt with in con-
sidering the wife's privilege. Economic motive is
displayed in crimes of Fraud, Libel and Slander, Way-
laying, Seduction
and Perjury, to levy blackmail--
though sometimes libel and slander, waylaying, and
perjury are due to motives of revenge.
Sometimes the law expressly discriminates between
men and women; for instance, in the case of seduction:
sometimes the administrators, for instance, in the case
of fraud and perjury.
(a) Fraud.
Generally speaking, fraud by a woman against a
man, by which he is deprived of all or a portion of his
property, is not punishable--if the woman has been in
intimate relations with him; it is her payment. If she
be his wife fraud
on her part is unnecessary, since the
law expropriates him at her least request. Other women
have an impunity to commit fraud.
In case the
man has not been in intimate relations,
then the woman's offence is, if punished at all,
visited
35
by a tenth part of the sentence which would be inflicted
if a man were the
offender.
(b) Libel and
Slander.
Cases are innumerable of men being sentenced to long
terms of imprisonment for libel. No case is ever heard
of a woman being similarly sentenced.
The following are typical cases:--
At the Essex Assizes, February 2nd, 1895, before
Mr. Justice Mathew, Agnes Ellen Royce, a boarding-
house keeper, pleaded guilty to demanding L 300
Dr. Edwin Worts, of Colchester, by menaces and
threats. Mr. Avory, on behalf of the prisoner, stated
that the letters and telegram in which she threatened
the doctor were written while she was in a hysterical
condition, and he
suggested that she should be bound
over under the First Offenders Act. Mr. C. F. Gill, who
prosecuted, said that the prisoner accused the doctor of
having ruined her, and made many serious allegations
against him. No doubt she was labouring under very
great excitement when she made these charges. She
was discharged under the First Offenders Act.
"Catharine Matilda Gordon, forty-six, described as
having no occupation, and living at Mardon's Croft,
Moseley, near Birmingham, was charged on remand,
before Mr. Newton, at Malhorough Street Police Court,
on Saturday, with
unlawfully and maliciously publishing
a defamatory libel concerning Mr Thomas James
Hooper, on March 27th last, at the Badminton Club,
Piccadilly.
The accused was not legally represented.
The prosecutor is
a solicitor, and acts as Clerk to the
Justices of the Peace at Biggleswade. Mr. William
Vyse, an independent gentleman and member of the
Badminton Club, living at Wickham Road, Brockley,
deposed that on or about the 27th of March last he
received from prisoner the postcard produced. Mrs.
Gordon: 'I wish very much to apologise publicly, and
36
to withdraw everything I have said about Mr. Hooper.'
Mr. Hooper, in reply to the magistrate, said he regretted
to say that he could not believe Mrs. Gordon, as he had
received similar promises in writing which had been
broken; in fact, since the summons, which was issued
before the warrant was taken out. She had written to
him enclosing a letter from her solicitors recommending
her to withdraw. Mr. Newton said that a woman who
sent postcards of
the nature referred to did the cruellest
act imaginable. The prisoner had done a most wicked
act, and had endeavoured to blacken the character of
the prosecutor, apparently without any reason whatever.
Probably there was not a single word of truth in her
statements.
To the prosecutor: 'Do you think, Mr.
Hooper, alter this caution, you may give her another
chance?' Mr. Hooper: ' I think so, sir.' Mrs. Gordon
having assured the magistrate that she would not repeat
her conduct, Mr. Newton bound her over in her recog-
nisances in the sum of £20 to be of good behaviour in
the future."-- Daily Chronicle , May 4th, 1896.
(c) Waylaying, Injuring Business, and Procuring
Dismissal .
This method of extortion is practically open to all
women, wives or not. Medical men are peculiarly
subject to this infliction, and even solicitors do not
escape. But
persons in humbler station are not exempt.
The case of a police constable hanged for the murder of
a woman some years ago brought the practice vividly,
although temporarily, before the public mind. The
woman had for years waylaid him, called at the police
commissioner's office, obtained the suspension of the
constable, and boasted of her intention of procuring his
dismissal. The man had no remedy. In a fit of passion
he killed the woman, when waylaying him at midnight
on his beat, and was hanged for the crime. (Case of
Constable Cook, June, 1894)
37
(d) Murder.
The rule of the Common Law which prescribes
hanging as the punishment for murder is practically
abolished for females who murder men.
The best illustration of the extent of the women's
privilege to murder men will be found in the considera-
tion of the number of cases in which women have been
hanged during the
last quarter of a century for the
offence when, by a mere chance, they were convicted.
As has been stated, a woman who kills a man is usually
acquitted. If she be convicted, it is almost invariably
of manslaughter, not murder. If she be by some off-
chance convicted of murder, an agitation for her release
is usually started. So the murderess escapes the
gallows, except once or twice in a quarter of a century.
(e) Seduction.
The woman's privilege of seduction is twofold--in the
Criminal Courts and in the Civil Courts. In the
Criminal Courts there is no punishment of an abandoned
woman in society,
or out of it, who corrupts the morals
of a minor.
Even when disease is the result, there is
no case on record
of a prosecution, not to speak of
punishment.
A contrary rule prevails in France. So
far has this revolting sex privilege been pushed that a
boy of 14 can he convicted for committing an act to
which he was incited by a girl just under 16, although,
as is well known,
a girl of that age is often a woman,
while a boy of 14
is usually a child.
This, however,
does not exhaust the women's privi-
lege of seduction. Not merely a female minor, but
female adults are
protected by exceptional law. Any
person who, by false representations, procures immoral
relations with a woman not of known immoral character
--though the woman be 35 and the male culprit 14--is
liable to imprisonment with hard labour for two
years.
38
All lying representations on the part of a woman are
permissible, though her sole motive for procuring the
connection is to obtain a hold over the man by which
to blackmail him.
When this statute was passed in 1887 it was said
to be directed merely against criminal conspiracies of
persons who, for purposes of gain, induced daughters
of the people to have illicit relations with immoral rich
men. A judge has thoughtfully extended the statute to
the undreamt-of case of a man inducing a woman of
mature age to have connection with himself--not with a
third party. The whip of the blackmailer has thus been
humanely turned into a whip of scorpions. (R. v.
King, Monmouth Summer Assizes, 1890.)
As an instance
of the utter absence of the most
elementary sense of impartial justice in the men and
women who "run" this pro-feminist agitation, the
following may be taken:--One of.the latest suggestions
of this worthy crew is an enactment by which men who
shall infect their wives with any venereal disease (which
they may, of course, have contracted before marriage)
should be made liable to severe penal consequences.
Now, we make no remark on the justice or injustice per
se of this proposed extension of the criminal code.
But
it is not proposed to make it an offence in the wife; and
it comes from the
very people who are loudest in
bawling at the wicked violation of the rights of holy
womanhood involved in the Contagious Diseases Acts,
by which it is sought (not to punish women for infecting
men, oh, dear, no!) but simply to prevent the spread of
infection by women who make a trade of the sale of
their bodies by compelling them to submit to examina-
tion, and, if necessary, medical treatment.
No cases can, of course, he cited from the records of
the Criminal Courts of the adult woman's privilege of
seduction, for the sufficient reason that the law does not
regard it as an offence.
39
But the minor woman's privilege is abundantly illus-
trated because it
is an offence for a male to allow himself
to be seduced by her. One wretch was produced as
witness against several boys younger than herself whom
she had induced to commit the offence. The Court of
Appeal held that she could not be punished, but her
victims were consigned to prison. (Central Criminal
Court and Court for Crown Cases Reserved, June,
1894.)
FALSE CHARGES ON OATH (EXTORTION OR
REVENGE).
It is not merely wives who are privileged to make
false charges on oath, and to commit and to suborn [incite]
perjury. An
extensive trade in such charges is pursued
by an increasing number of women, encouraged by the
absolute impunity
which attends their profitable crimes.
Revenge for slighted claims plays a real though a very
minor part in the
manufacture of these accusations.
Potiphar's wife has no monopoly of her methods of
vengeance.
These cowardly criminals know that the worst they
have to fear is the charitable conclusion that they are
''poor hysterical
women.''
Within the last
few years there has been a large
growth of enactments rendering legally punishable
various offences against women and girls, and the zeal
of the legislature for their protection has found an echo
in the energy of the courts in the conviction of the
accused. It
is in such cases as these that injustice is
readily wrought by sex-bias. There are no charges so
easy to bring and
so difficult to refute as accusations of
sexual crime. So well is this recognised that the most
innocent man would gladly pay any sum rather than face
such a charge. The only defence is the proof of a nega-
tive, always difficult and sometimes impossible, even to
40
sexual crime.
the most innocent. A moral and well-spent life, a high
character, the esteem of friends alike wither before this
blasting charge; they even add fuel to it. This is shown
by the extraordinary remark of one of our judges: "A
good character only means that a man has not yet been
found out."
To the intrinsic difficulty of defence presented by
the
very nature of the alleged offence, the poverty of the
man accused often
adds a terrible aggravation. The
rich man can protect himself by all the resources of legal
defence; the poor
man is left to the mercy of the wolves
by his poverty; which, although it may protect him from
blackmail, yet gives him no security against malignant
spite--perhaps the most fruitful source of false accusa-
tions. England, unlike continental countries, provides
no legal defence for accused persons. This is serious
enough in ordinary cases, but, in any trial in which a
woman is concerned, it amounts to a refusal to a man of
the commonest conditions of fairplay. The public pro-
secution of alleged offences against women devolves on
the Treasury--in other words, on the skilled advocates
of the Crown, with the resources of the English tax-
payer at their disposal in the preparation of cases and
the procuring of witnesses. The accused is left unde-
fended, to contend alone against the prejudice of juries.
Public opinion and the press, which so ably voices it, are
arrayed against him. It is not, therefore, a matter for
surprise that to be accused by a woman means, practic-
ally, in the vast
majority of cases, to be condemned.
The necessity for careful inquiries into the
character
and antecedents of witnesses is nowhere so great as in
cases of offences
against women and girls. Charges so
easy to make, so difficult to refute, ought to be regarded
with the greatest
suspicion, and not be accepted with
ready credulity. The bona fides [good faith] of all
witnesses,
the character of the accuser ought to he carefully scrutinised.
To the undefended
prisoner this is impossible. And even
41
if the prisoner is defended, sentimental juries are deaf.
Even where the character of the accuser is good, she
may very well happen to be a woman of highly hysterical
temperament. The eminent French scientist, M.
Brouardel, says of this type of woman: "She is
essentially a liar, that is the true criterion of the
hysterical woman. Such a one has been known to keep
at bay for several years law courts, doctors, her own
family, with a rampart built of lies upon lies." Accu-
sations of sexual
offences are readily forced by such
women, and unless
the juries can be convinced of the
irresponsible character of their statements, the liberty
and honour of the
most innocent man may be destroyed.
That distinguished judge, the late Baron Huddleston,
in his charge to the jury on one occasion, referring to
the Criminal Law Amendment Acts, stated that in his
opinion, after an
extensive experience of the Acts, men
stood far more in
need of protection against women
than women against men.
The total oppression inflicted by charges of sexual
crime must not be
measured by the cases which come
into Court.
It is a commonplace of the legal profession
that for one such
case ten are settled out of Court. In
other words, a system of blackmail of the worst type
finds its direct incentive and opportunity in the present
state of legal administration.
The following selection of a few of the cases arising
in the years 1894
and 1895 gives some idea of the wide-
spread evils of the present system. It must not be
thought for a moment that because these cases have
resulted in acquittals no reform is necessary. In view of
the law of
libel only cases where the accusations have
failed can
be cited, but every criminal lawyer knows that
failure occurs in only a small minority of cases. It
must
also be borne in mind that such charges entail social
infamy unless triumphantly rebutted; a mere
will not suffice.
42
1.--Dr. Patrick Lyons Blewith (West Ham) was charged
with a
serious assault on Bessie Page (age 16). On cross-examination she
said she "did not
consent, but never murmured," "too frightened."
Did not even tell
the other people in the outer waiting-room.
Acquittal. July 8th, 1894
2.--Alfred Lee, a vestryman, was charged on remand
at Bow
Street, with indecent behaviour in a public thoroughfare and in the
presence of three
females. From the report of the officer who made
enquiries it appeared that the witnesses bore very indifferent
characters
[were impartial]. Three gentlemen deposed to the high moral
reputation
of the accused, who was discharged. April 24th, 1895.
3.--Sarah Adams (West London) at night met R. B.
Pearson in
the street, and picked his pocket. When he attempted to retake the
money she screamed and made "accusations'' against him. She
got one month. August 19th, 1894.
4.--Joseph Barker (52)," coster [produce seller],
was charged by his
daughter Eliza (age
14) with indecently assaulting her. Medical evidence
revealed no trace
of assault. The prisoner denied the accusation,
but was nevertheless committed for trial (Islington). April 29th,
1894. The Grand Jury threw out the bill [charge].
5.--William Hughes and his son, colliers [coal
workers] at
Pontypridd,
were accused of having violated Maggie, aged 12, daughter of the elder
prisoner. The child swore she had been put up to make the charge
by Ellen Haines, the prisoner's housekeeper, and the doctors found
no medical evidence. The case was dismissed. April 8th,
1894.
6.--Dr. Thos. D.
Griffiths, of Swansea, was accused by Mrs.
Gwynne-Vaughan of
committing adultery with her, also of perform-
ing upon her an illegal operation and inducing abortion. All
charges
proved false. April 8th and 15th, 1894
7.--Thos. Moore (44), manager to a tea merchant, was
charged
with disgraceful conduct to a young girl. He alleged that she
began first by kissing him and poking him in the ribs. He was
acquitted. May 27th, 1894.
8.--Walter Hill was charged at the Old Bailey with
indecent
assault by Louisa
Smart, and Ellen Windram was charged with
aiding and abetting him. Hill and Windram were also
charged
43
with conspiring to incite Maria Wakefield, a married woman, to
commit adultery. The jury stopped the case and acquitted the
prisoners. It is to be noted that Mrs. Smart was prosecutrix about
the same time in another indecent assault case, and that Ada
Wakefield was prosecutrix in a similar case against her uncle which
was dismissed. September, 1894.
In a paper read before the Birmingham and Midland
Counties Branch of the British Medical Association, on
November 9th, 1893, the eminent surgeon, Dr. Lawson
Tait, F.R.C.S., thus sums up a large number of cases
brought under his
notice by the police authorities:--
ANALYSIS OF CASES.
"In this way I have now reported in all upon nearly
a hundred
cases, and I have
advised prosecution in only six, and in all of these
have convictions been obtained. It has, of course, been left to
the
police to prosecute as they chose on my report in twenty-two cases,
and they have refrained from the prosecution in all but seven cases,
and of these the bills were ignored in two cases by grand juries, in
four light sentences were passed summarily or at sessions for com-
mon assaults, and
in one case punishment, probably well deserved,
was obtained on a
charge of wounding another person. In the
remainder, about sixty-six, I have advised that no effort at prosecu-
tion should be entertained for a moment, and the police have
aquiesced in my advice. I say, concerning the number of the last
class, 'about sixty-six,' because a number of the cases involved
charges concerning two children, so that reckoning from the number
of plaintiffs there would be a larger number of cases than if the
statistics were taken from a list of defendants, and one case in
particular will show how curiously important this may be."
In a further analysis he says:--
"Excluding the special groups I have already alluded
to, and a
few others, to be
excepted for various but not important reasons, I
find I am left with a list of nearly fifty, in which there was not the
slightest surgical evidence of an assault of any kind having been
committed; and from the fact that only in some five or six was
the
44
question of a charge on the reduced count even entertained, it must
be clear that the
amount of manufactured charges of this kind is
most alarmingly large. In twenty-six cases there was evidence
quite satisfactory that the charges were trumped up from evil motive
and in twenty-one
the evidence was all in favour of accidental in-
ducements, the children having been seen to be fondled by men of
suspicious appearance The first fact that strikes one about these
cases is that the
average age of the first group of children was
within a small fraction of twelve years, whilst the average age of
the second group is only seven years. A second material fact
is that whilst the second group contains a considerable proportion
of children of respectable and even well-to-do people, the former
group is entirely
composed of children of the lowest class of the
population."
B LACKMAIL.
HE
further states:--
"There are at least twenty cases on my list where no
assault was
committed, nor could have any been, consistently with the story
and the appearances found, in which blackmailing was deliberately
attempted; and I regret to say in many it was successful. One of
the most outrageous was a charge of completely successful assault
on a girl of fifteen, alleged to have been accomplished at 11 a.m. on
one of the iron spiral staircases in the Municipal Art Gallery.
The
complainant described the place and gave the date and hour with
a precision which
was remarkable, as also was her description of
what took place. She described accurately the attendant, whom
she charged by name. Only two things were against her--she was
uninjured, and the attendance books of the institution showed
conclusively that
the defendant had not been at the gallery that
day."
"WANDERING SERVANTS"
AND FEMALE VIGILANCE
COMMITTEES.
THE following passage from his paper
throws some
light on the origin of many of these charges:--
"The charges in a very large proportion of cases
were distinctly
based on motives sometimes of the most extraordinary kind, and
in 45
the great bulk these motives were malevolent. The 'wandering
servant' motive is one of the least harmful, and accounts for a
small number. To those who do not understand the phrase I may
explain that it simply means that a girl who may have been quite
innocently dawdling about till past the hour of return rigidly
enforced by a strict mistress, does not go home, but wanders about
all night or sleeps in an outhouse. She is either found by the
police or goes back home in the morning and concocts on the way a
story of rape, particularised by the most minute details, not one of
which is corroborated on examination, nor can the police find a
scrap of evidence
in support of her story. Yet she becomes the
interesting prey of some Vigilance Committee, and it is more by
good luck than by
good guiding, as the Scotch say, that she does
not pick out and name some unfortunate man for the gratification
of the prurient curiosity of the fussy women who have taken up her
case. In one of these cases brought to me the interesting wanderer
by misfortune, selected as her victim the husband of the chairwoman
of her committee,
and thus trouble came upon her and the committee
was dissolved."
FORCING A MAN TO MARRY.
IN
the following cases the facts are instructive as
showing the use to which such charges may be put:--
"In one of the cases I regret having advised a
prosecution, though
technically I was
quite right in doing so and bound to do it; but
now I have no doubt whatever that the assault was arranged and
encouraged, and but for an untimely interruption something more
would have followed. The charge preferred was laid solely for the
purpose of bringing an unwilling bridegroom to the altar. This
effect it had, for on the prosecutrix declaring in the witness-box that
if he would keep his engagement and marry her she would with-
draw the charge, a sympathetic judge advised him to take the offer,
which he unwillingly did under pressure of receiving a nominal
sentence. The subsequent history of this couple has convinced me
the whole thing was a plant on the unfortunate man."
SPECULATIVE
ATTORNEYS AND MILLINERS [
TRIFLERS.]
IN
some of the cases he examined the question of age
was important:--
46
"In a very few of these cases prosecution was not
advised and
not undertaken by
the police on the question of either real or
apparent age. The wording of the Criminal Law Amendment Act
is made to supply
a few of the omissions of the old law concerning
rape, and in raising the age under which the consent of the female
participator is not recognised, the Act puts the dangerous weapon
into the hands of
that person of showing that she des not appear
to be sixteen. This is a fertile source of blackmailing, because a
girl of fifteen and a half has only to get a man to have connection
with her, or to attempt it, and he is at her mercy. If he will pay
up his defence is
easily arranged by the speculative attorney who
is always at the back door of such cases. He has only to plead
that he had a discussion with the girl about her age, that he reason-
ably believed she
was over sixteen, and a little skilful millinery
displayed in the witness-box settles the release of the defendant.
But if he won't pay up then the milliner can make the prosecutrix
look much under sixteen, and a heavy sentence is the result. To
give an opinion on the part of a skilled expert that a girl is or is not
under fourteen, the usual molimenal [puberty] age, is a matter of
infinite
ease compared to giving an opinion that the girl is or is not under
sixteen. Maturity has been reached, and the changes at fifteen and
sixteen are far less than at thirteen and fourteen, a very important
fact which has been forgotten."
T
HE MOTIVE OF MALICE.
THE following passages show that
spite is often as
potent a motive in these charges as blackmail:--
"There is another and still more dangerous element
in these
cases, and that is the malice of persons, always women, who prac-
tically get up the cases or provoke them, and with this may be
placed a few subsidiary influences which may well be classed with
this. A few
examples of some of them will be given in detail.
"Two children were brought to me (case 56), aged
fourteen and
eleven and a-half
respectively, living in the same set of back houses
in a well-known and fairly respectable street, the elder girl looking
much older than her ascertained age. The person against whom
the charge was made was the father of the older girl, and she made
the charge that she found her father indecently assaulting
the
47
younger girl. She told the neighbours and the neighbours brought
in the police. The younger girl proved to be quite uninjured, but
it speedily came out that the elder girl was her own father's
regular mistress for more than two years. The girl who was the
cause of this action was one of the most virulent little minxes I
ever saw, and she
made no secret of her reason for splitting [ratting]
on her father being the fact that she found him taking up with another
girl. I have included this little wretch as one of the habitual
prostitutes, but I do not believe she comes under the definition.
She does afford, however, a perfect example of how the great bulk
of these charges are brought about."
FEMALE REVENGE ON FATHER
OR HUSBAND.
THE following shows that a similar
horrible charge
may be brought against an innocent man:--
"Two little wretches, of ten and twelve, who had
been thrashed
by their father for stealing, promptly turned round on him with a
charge of having 'seduced' them both, giving here an interesting
example of female
revenge of the direst kind, attempted at an
unusually early age. The charge had not the slightest foundation,
and they admitted
as much when they found they were not
believed. Stepmothers give frequent examples of the same abomin-
able attempts to punish their husbands by trumping up such
charges, and in three instances mothers used even their own
children as the instruments of their diabolical designs."
PREJUDICE
AGAINST ACCUSED.
As to the prejudice accusations of sexual crime
incite,
Dr. Lawson Tait says:--
"Matters are such
under this unrighteous combination that how-
ever men may laugh at it and make jokes, they do not willingly
travel with single unknown female companions in railway carriages.
They know very well that for a man to have the finger of a woman
pointed at him with a charge of a sexual offence is to secure that
man's extinction,
no matter what the verdict of a jury may be. In
1881 (Lond. Med. Gazette ) a case was tried in which a girl, to
shield 48
herself against her equal share of guilt, charged her partner in it
with the crime of
rape. The jury could hardly be got to acquit
the innocent man even though the prosecutrix had to admit that
she never called out, her mother sleeping in the next room, because
she was afraid her cries would waken the old lady."
The following indicates strongly one of the disadvan-
tages the undefended prisoner labours under:--
DANGER OF RULE ALLOWING UNDEFENDED
PRISONER TO GIVE
EVIDENCE.
"This new arrangement by which a defendantis
allowed to go
into the box and give evidence on his own behalf is most mis-
chievous when a poor prisoner is undefended. His poverty involves
ignorance, of necessity, and in the hands of a prosecuting barrister
his slightest slip in cross-examination will be made to tell against
him mercilessly. That is the case if he elects to be sworn.
If, on
the contrary, he declines, either from ignorance or fear, the jury
invariably reckons the fact against him.
"I sat through a case quite lately and saw a poor
ignorant
wretch who, being
undefended, did not understand the purport of
the invitation, neglected this opportunity. The judge charged
clearly in his favour--indeed, there was hardly any evidence
against him. But the jury brought him in guilty, and in talking
the matter over with one of them after I learned that they were
much impressed by
the fact that he did not give evidence."
In considering the results arrived at by Dr. Lawson
Tait we must bear
in mind that the series of charges he
analysed had all been brought under the notice of the
police. The
vast number of charges compromised for
money, without any appeal to the police, must be added
to form any fair estimate of the situation.
The foregoing catalogue as regards specific crimes is
striking enough, but it does not quite exhaust the
criminal law privileges of women. As regards punish-
ment, prison treatment and pardon, there are come
additional immunities.
49
1. PRIVILEGE AS TO PUNISHMENT.
(a) Flogging.
The sacro-sanct hide of female fiends must not he
touched with the lash. Consequently, a wretch who
tortures for years innocent children--like the Montague
wild beast--must not be flogged. The female garrotter
must not be flogged.
By express enactment no one hut a male call he
sentenced to corporal punishment.
(b) Hanging.
As has already been shown the punishment of hanging
has been practically abolished for women who murder
mere men. If they murder some other woman or babies
of some other woman it is quite a different thing. They
are, however, exempt from hangings if they murder their
own babies.
(c) Duration of Imprisonment.
In every case the duration of the term of imprison-
ment passed on a female offender is, as everyone knows,
enormously less than the punishment imposed on a man
for a similar or a lesser offence.
2. PRIVILEGE AS TO PRISON TREATMENT.
(a) Flogging.
Under no circumstances can a female prisoner he
flogged for breaches of prison discipline. Men and
boys can be, and are, flogged like dogs for the most
trivial disrespect to the governor and other officials.
(b) Less Rigid Discipline.
In one of the convict prisons a strike of female
prisoners was announced against some disciplinary
regulation to which they objected. The obnoxious
regulation was rescinded. If they had been men they
would have been flogged into submission. (Riot at
Wormwood Scrubbs,
1894.)
50
(c) Lighter Labour.
This is quite apart from the fact that they are
assigned
much less toilsome forms of labour.
3. PRIVILEGE AS REGARDS
PARDON.
The comparative facility with which remission or
commutation of sentence on female criminals can be
procured is known
to every solicitor conversant with
Criminal Law Procedure--not merely in cases of infan-
ticide--but in all cases of crimes of violence, the chances
of pardon are immeasurably greater than in the case
of a male.
THE CIVIL LAW.
As every litigant who has to contend with a woman
knows to his cost, feminine privilege is not confined to
matrimonial matters, nor to the Criminal Courts. The
purse of the male
is hit in the Civil Courts quite as
heavily as his person in the exercise of the criminal
privileges of the
female sex. Anyone who has any
relations, even of the most innocent character, with a
woman, from a tenant or a trader who contracts with
her to a casual guest at a friend's house who makes her
acquaintance in a
social way, may have occasion to
discover that absence of intimacy does not necessarily
shield him from unpleasant consequences.
The chief privileges of women in the Civil Courts are
as follows (they cannot be paralleled [equalled] by those
of a peer or a
member of the House of Commons):--
1. Freedom from Arrest for Debt if
Married.
2. Property Of Married Woman
Exempt from
Seizure.
3. Privilege to Commit Breaches of Contract.
4. Privilege to Defraud.
5. Privilege to Seduce.
6. Privilege to Commit Adultery.
7. Privilege to Insult.
8. Privilege to Assault.
51
9. Privilege to Waylay.
10. Privilege to Libel and Slander.
1.
FREEDOM FROM ARREST FOR DEBT.
The process of imprisonment for debt (nominally for
contempt of Court
in not paying an instalment of a debt)
is retained in England under the Debtors Acts, 1869
and 1882. But not in the case of the married female[.]
No married woman is to be punished for non-payment
of debt, and the Court is incapable of being contemned
by a married woman. This superiority to Common
Law standard, for
the mere male, yet again marks out
the woman as a member of an inviolable noblesse.
A woman can obtain goods and not be compelled to
pay for them, may
use all her arts of persuading the
chivalrous trader--but no compulsory power of im-
prisonment need disturb her. This may or may not be
a good rule, if applied as in certain American States, to
both men and women. But when reserved to women,
it is an obvious sex privilege.
2
. PROPERTY EXEMPT FROM
SEIZURE.
A married woman, as already pointed out, although
rolling in wealth
and owning tens of thousands a year,
even when separated and released from all duty to her
husband and children, retains her privilege of having
her property exempt from seizure for debt. Some very
amusing cases--amusing that is to all except the male
litigant--of rich
women refusing to pay traders and
solicitors will be present to the public mind. When a
rich woman develops a taste for litigation, the wisdom
of the legislature has found no way of protecting the
defendant from ruinous costs. Even if she quarrels
with her solicitor, he is powerless to protect himself
against being mulcted in costs--perhaps a happy stroke
of poetic justice, as lawyers have largely created these
oppressive sex-privileges of women. (See the many
ramifications of the Cathcart Case.)
52
3. BREACH OF C
ONTRACT.
The absence of any compulsory power over a
woman's person or
a married woman's property and the
bias of the courts amounts practically to a licence for
her to break any contract at pleasure. This is quite
apart from the peculiar privilege of women to waste
a man's time and money in a pretended engagement,
possibly to lure on a more wealthy lover--and to he
exempt from penalty. Their privilege to commit per-
jury and slander with impunity plays a great part in
the decision of any case in which a woman's contract
is concerned. All stock brokers, insurance agents, soli-
citors, and bankers, and business men generally, know
how hopeless, as a rule, is any prospect of getting a
contract enforced
against a woman. As a rule it is best
to compromise or submit to injustice rather than try it
out with an adversary privileged to use loaded dice.
4. P
RIVILEGE TO DEFRAUD.
Precisely as in the Criminal Law, there is no real
remedy against any fraud not of extraordinary magni-
tude and clearness of proof, perpetrated by a woman on
a man.
A notorious female blackmailer brings lying accusa-
tions, suing on breach of promise of marriage, against
a prominent Conservative member of Parliament. She
loses her suit as
she has to admit on cross-examination
that she a few months previously, had extorted £5,000
from another victim of a similar suit, which was hushed
up. But her
victim could not get back his £5,000--
and no one suggested civil or criminal process against
her.
5. PRIVILEGE TO SEDUCE.
The feminine privilege of seduction extends also to
the civil Courts. No civil action lies against any woman
of full age or the seduction of a minor, not even if her
doings be a device to entrap him by threats of
scandal
53
into marriage, and the attainment of title and fortune
by her inducements to lead him astray.
The male minor in France has some protection.
The
consent of cooler
heads is required to his marriage.
In England he has
no protection from the terrible
consequences of succumbing to the wiles of a female
seducer.
Contrast the law of England on the seduction of the
female, minor or adult. Vindictive damages are to be
had for the asking from the indignant jury. Legal
fictions of "loss
of service" by parents, are laid under
requisition to prevent the operation of the maxim '' volenti
non fit injuria [No injury is done to a consenting party]. ''
6. PRIVILEGE
TO COMMIT A
DULTERY.
No action, civil or criminal, lies against a woman
who
induces a married
man to have illicit relations with her.
She may succeed in stripping the man of all his fortune,
blackmail him for
years, break up his home, cause him
to be deprived of
the custody of his children, and cap
the climax of her
crimes by appearing as a willing wit-
ness for his wife
in the Courts. No penalty awaits her.
A man who seduces or is seduced by a wife has the
satisfaction of being held up to public odium as a
traitorous scoundrel, and at the same time of paying
enormous costs and damages--the latter being settled
on the delinquent
wife.
7. PRIVILEGE TO
INSULT.
For some mysterious reason a woman is supposed
to be incapable of insulting a man. She may use most
insolent language
in a public assembly, waylay him at
his office, or place of business, and adopt any other
method of annoyance that malignity can devise, and the
law refuses to protect him, and sends him to hard
labour if he is goaded into retort.
Jeremy Bentham proposed a century ago that women
insulting other citizens should be punished by being
54
exposed to public
ridicule in a pillory. But we are now
a long way off from the adoption of such a remedy as
that.
The sturdier Englishmen of former times restrained
feminine provocation to violence by the summary
methods of the cucking school and the indictment at the
assizes of the "common scold [shrew]," not to mention
the domestic discipline of the husband.
8. PRIVILEGE TO
ASSAULT.
In a similar mysterious way a woman is supposed
incapable of assaulting a man--at least in such a way
as to deserve, not to say criminal punishment but even
the exaction of pecuniary recompense. It is true that a
woman with a weapon can cause grievous bodily harm.
But the mere man has to put up with the consequences
of such displays of feminine independence, inasmuch as
the privilege holds good in civil as well as in criminal
law.
9. PRIVILEGE TO
WAYLAY.
In civil as well as criminal Courts this offence in
women is unpunished. Let a man protect himself is the
general rule on the subject. But as he is punished if
he attempts to protect himself, he has simply to submit
to the outrage.
10. PRIVILEGE
TO LIBEL AND SLANDER.
To bring unfounded charges against any man--not
against a fellow women--is now a well-established legal
privilege of the fair sex. However, originally it was
restrained in earlier days by legal process and domestic
discipline.
Exactly as in breaches of contract, it is
usually wise to submit to the injustice.
But the rising wave of pro-feminist sentiment has
reached a curious
height of late years. A woman can
accuse a man of sexual irregularities with absolute
impunity. But it is not to be supposed that he is to
have a like privilege. A special statute (Slander
of
55
Women Act) passed
a few years ago, makes such
slander of a woman actionable. But she retains her
privilege of slandering a man. If this be not a statutory
sex-privilege words must have lost their meaning.
The grim irony of
making a man responsible for his
wife's slanders, and other misdeeds--although the law
has deprived him of all control over her person or
property, has been already referred to.
THE ACTUAL EXERCISE OF WOMEN'S SEX
PRIVILEGES.
The most curious of all concomitants of the legal
sub-
jection of men in
England arise, first, that many men
are not conscious
of the real state of the law, and
secondly, that a very loud-voiced minority of women,
reinforced by sycophantic males, represent the law as
being the apotheosis of unjust sex-privileges on the
part of men.
The last phenomonen is, no
doubt, in great part one
cause of the first, but other causes for men's uncon-
sciousness contribute.
A survival of the days when the physical force of the
man was allowed by the State to play a part in his
quarrels with women, survive in the public delusion that
it is impossible for man to be oppressed by women.
How can men be legally oppressed by women? Are
not men, if worthy of the name, able to defend them-
selves? This objection, once categorically stated, is
seen to be ridiculous. A legal defence is not a matter
of strength or courage, but of skill. Even a skilled
defence is a poor
protection before a biased tribunal.
But lastly, the whole question of muscular strength is
absurdly and outrageously irrelevant. The bravest and
strongest man is as weak as a child before the over-
whelming force of
the State. Any woman can at will
summon to her aid
a power no man can resist. And
behind this force
of law rests the equally irresistible
56
force of public opinion. All this, under the present
dispensation, is arrayed against the man accused by a
woman. The woman accuser wields the whole power
of the Courts and
the community, backed up by the
press and public opinion. Her physical strength is an
irrelevant matter, her real force lies in the state of
public opinion before which the man becomes helpless.
The power of the autocrat lies not in his physical
strength, but in his ability to summon at a beck the
resources of the State. The Czar of Russia is, and the
Emperor Nero was, physically no stronger than the
merest beggar. Catherine of Russia was physically
weaker than the lowest of her grenadiers.
1. The law is not generally known by the
vulgar,
and lawyers, unless paid, are not usually accustomed
to be expansive to the public at large on the subject of
their information. Ignorance by the public of the law
promotes litigation, and lawyers individually are not
particularly oppressed by or frightened at the legal
privileges of women. The technical skill of the lawyer
and his powerful trade union usually enables him to get
the best of the woman who contends with him in the
law courts.
Similarly, in former days, the lawyer took
care to guard himself from being hurt by the feudal
privileges of the
noble, which weighed so heavily on the
rest of the community.
2. Most women in England are still under the
in-
fluence of the earlier polity of the Church and of
Christendom. They do not dispute the duty of female
subordination, and do not in fact as yet think of exer-
cising the more flagrant of these new-fangled legal sex-
privileges.
The utmost pitch of domination that the
majority have reached to is a noticeable increase in the
display of overbearing manners towards their husbands,
and other male dependents, and the palpable conscious-
ness that the threat of a ''public scene'' will bring the
scene-hating Englishman to his knees.
57
3. A large minority of women influenced by
kindness
and self-respect and all amiable qualities, do not exercise
any of these iniquitous sex-privileges at all.
If an insignificant minority of women are oppressed
by individual men, it is merely because, from any
reason, economic or other, the woman does not for a
considerable time, choose to go to the Police Courts.
When a fact of this kind comes to be published, it is
trumpeted forth in the press--the press which carefully
excludes stories of male slavery--with the object of
producing a false
impression as to the side on which the
balance of injustice is to he found.
4. The more flagrant of these privileges are in
practice resorted
to chiefly by the more profligate of
the female sex. Happily every man does not fall a
victim. But
those who do find it convenient to keep
concealed the story of their wrongs. Their friends
might believe in their innocence, but their enemies or
the public at large would not. The man injured by a
woman has no sex-conscious "man's party" to appeal
to. Every brawling wife and shrieking termagant or
cold-blooded blackmailer has a sex-conscious propa-
ganda ready to
her hand.
It is therefore all the more important to remember
that these privileges conferred by the law of England on
the woman against
the man, are no dead letter. They
are actually enforced with rigour that increases every
day. Judge,
jury, counsel and press vie with each other
in driving the iron into the soul of the unfortunate man
who is forced to contend with a woman in the law
courts. Such an extreme of squalid unrighteousness
has been reached that it has become a commonplace of
the legal profession that no justice is to be had in the
Courts against a woman--unless in some case of out-
rageous atrocity,
and not always even then.
The origin of this singular
phenomenon--a revival of
barbaric gynœocracy among the English-speaking
58
people in the British Islands, America and the British
Colonies is a subject of the deepest interest, but not one
lending itself to
cursory treatment. A photograph of
the outer surface--a picture of the facts of the law is
all that has been
attempted here.
To confine our attention to the strictly necessary,
it
will suffice to remind the reader that the ordinary
motives which induce the more selfish members of any
privileged class to use a privilege, exist in the case of
women. Many
slave-owners were as indulgent as St. Clair,
but many were like [Simon] Legree ["Uncle Tom's Cabin"].
The chief impelling motives appear to be:--
1. A desire for economic advantage to get money
without trouble; to exploit the labour of the male slave,
enthralled by the
law--this works quite as well to impel
a woman as well as a man to use an unjust power. It is the
predatory instinct present in pirates, robbers and
criminals of all classes.
2. A desire to domineer and oppress.
This impulse
as distinguished from ordinary revengefulness is, some
think, stronger in women than in men. No one will
deny its existence in both men and women, whatever
be its special cause.
3. Malignity and vindictiveness.
Inordinate revenge
for real or fancied wrongs, disproportioned vindictive-
ness for the chance slights of a complex social life may
he safely reckoned on to actuate the bitterer section of a
female noblesse as well as a male one. If power does not
corrupt, at least
it gives room for corruption to spread.
Modern life among English speaking people, while
releasing women from male guidance, has, by individu-
alising women, multiplied the occasions of conflict
between members of the two sexes. Different ideals
and tests of action (women judge men by one standard
and men judge women by another), the result of natural
divergencies, as well as of education, absence of sex-
illusion on the female side and its presence on the male
side, add to these occasions.
59
4. Many women who, of
their own accord, being still
under the influence of the earlier policy of Christendom,
would not think of exercising the force of public opinion,
or the privileges
of a one-sided law against their hus-
bands or other men, are influenced to do so in various
ways. The incessant clamour of a hysterical press
leads them to suppose that in any quarrel with a man,
the man must be wrong, the woman never can be wrong.
The shrieks of the "new woman" propaganda suggest
to women that in making most infamous use of her
weapons she is upholding the cause of her "sisters."
Furthermore the new mammon-worship which has in-
fected all modern
English life has produced among the
average middle class woman an unspoken theory--that
the sole duty of man is to make money for his wife.
The revolutionary theory of
equality, dating from
1789--is applied only on one side, and it is assumed as
an axiom that a wife is kept and has a right to do
precisely as she pleases. At the same time it is taken
as quite self-evident that she is emancipated from any
duty of obedience
or even civility to him. Added to the
conclusions of the feminist spirit of domination, the
final position is
that the man is to submit to all inso-
lences and outrages without redress.
This conception of the relative positions of men and
women is urged in
a thousand different ways on any
woman who has a quarrel with her husband, and must
inevitably influence the average woman.
5. Many women, themselves ignorant of the
modern
law, are instigated by lawyers to bring suits, relying on
their iniquitous legal privileges. Not merely are men's
reputations, lives and fortunes thus endangered, but in
this way the present state of.the law has become a
powerful solvent of the historic basis of the family rela-
tions of Christendom, by encouraging disputes between
wives and husbands. Sir Walter Phillimore in a
recent
60
speech has pointed out what a part is played by solicitors
in the promotion of divorce suits.
The essential thing, therefore, to remember is that
the
the subjection of
women in England, if it ever existed,
has gone, and long gone. It is succeeded by a state of
sordid subjection
of the man to a biased public opinion,
to a hysterical press, and to sentimental administrators
of a corrupted law.
There are, however, some signs that the legal subjec-
tion of men in England is not destined to live for ever.
The law, after all, is the shadow of public opinion.
MUSCULAR INFERIORITY AND SEX-
PRIVILEGE.
We must once more refer, on
account of its wide-
spreading popularity, to the cheap sneer by which some
small but ''gallant" wits may endeavour to turn the
edge of the foregoing observations, namely, the attempt
to play of the muscular inferiority of women to men as
an answer to any allegation of oppression exercised on
behalf of the so-called weaker sex. When looked at
fairly in the face, the point in question will he seen so
preposterously absurd as to be hardly worth answering.
But, nevertheless, absurd as it is, it undoubtedly plays
a part, half unconsciously, in the apathy of most men
on the question of female privilege. Because men are
muscularly stronger than women, it is felt by many,
and the feeling is supported by the class of cheap wit-
ticism above referred to, that therefore it is im-
possible for men to be seriously oppressed by
women. A moment's reflection suffices to show that
the question of muscular strength or weakness is
absolutely immaterial to the issue. It would be just as
reasonable to suppose that because the Czar of Russia
and his high officials were less muscularly developed
than the average Russian peasant, that the possibility
of the Russian peasant being seriously oppressed by the
Czar or his government was a proposition to be
laughed
61
at. The weakest and most frail woman, backed by the
whole power of the State, may easily annihilate by the
State forces summoned by her scream, a legion of
Sarnsons or Hercules.
A
SEX NOBLESSE.
From all we have said, it will now be evident, one
would think, to the most prejudiced reader that modern
English Law, following obsequiously a deluded or
apathetic stage of public opinion, has solved the problem
of the division of rights and duties between the sexes,
by conceding to woman all rights, and imposing on man
all duties.
It would not be difficult to show, were it worth
while ,
that even the disabilities of women in past times have
been grossly exaggerated by apostles of the feminist
cultus who have, of course, taken a brief to prove the
wickedness of "horrid man" to the poor downtrodden
female. Such disabilities as really obtained were for the
most part the necessary outcome of women's position as
non-combatants in
a rude fighting age, and certainly did
not originate, as
is generally represented, in any deep-
laid scheme of male devising. In return for a certain
formal subjection, in some respects, they obtained not
only the blessing
of protection, then an important
matter, but valuable privileges in other directions. An
impartial student
of history must admit that, however
badly men have treated their fellow-men, they have
always treated women with comparative generosity.
The change from feudal to modern capitalist conditions,
as regards the position of women, is characterised,
however, not only
by, at one and the same time, the
abolition of every vestige of subordination or disability,
but, in addition to that, by the extension of the old
compensating privileges, which were the counterpart of
the former, and by the further heaping up on the top
of these of new privileges, the result having finally
saddled us with the institution of that sex-noblesse
the
62
leading features of which we have sketched out in the
foregoing pages.
SOCIALISTS AND FEMINISTS
Certain Socialist writers are
fond of describing the
Social-Democratic
State of the future as implying the
"emancipation of the proletarian and the woman." As
regards the latter point, however, if emancipation is
taken to include domination, we have not to wait so
long. The highest development of modern capitalism,
as exemplified in
the English-speaking countries, has
placed man to all
intents and purposes, legally under
the heel of woman. So far as the relations of the sexes
are concerned, it
would be the task of Socialism to
emancipate man from this position, if sex-equality be
the goal aimed at. The first step on the road towards
such equality would necessarily consist in the abolition
of modern female privilege.
THE SUFFRAGE.
It is absurd for feminist advocates to trot out their
threadbare grievance of the want of the suffrage as a
serious disability in the face of all the privileges we
have been discussing.. It may be right, or it may he
wrong, for women to have the suffrage. Respecting
this we say nothing here. But, whether right or wrong,
we deny that the lack of it, by an otherwise privileged
class, constitutes a grievance. Electoral disqualifica-
tions are often attendant on special privilege. The
Royal Family of this realm, with all their branches, are
debarred from the
exercise of both the passive and the
active franchise. And yet no one pleads that, say, the
prince of Wales, is, in consequence, a cruelly oppressed
personage. Similarly the clergy of the Established
Church are debarred at least from the passive franchise
(i.e., they may not sit in Parliament), and yet we have
never heard it contended that on this account they are a
solely hard-done-by section of the community. Where
women have parliament, law courts, police
magistrates,
63
judges as their obsequious humble servants, what more
could they expect
to obtain, even if they had the
suffrage?
"THE OPPRESSED WOMAN."
As regards the occasional cases of the ill-treatment
of
women by men, especially wife assaults and such like,
these may by traced largely to the infamous state of the
law we have described. Where the law practically
refuses justice to one section of the community against
another, it is only "human nature" (if we may employ
that much-abused phrase) that occasionally members of
the section to which justice is refused should be found
to take the matter into their own hands, and attempt
to redress the balance, by acts, amounting sometimes to
brutality. It were surely more reasonable, rather than
to expend indignation and ferocity on the individual
offender, to seek
out and remedy the underlying cause
of the offence. Give men reasonable justice as against
women, cease to trample underfoot every principle of
equity and fair play at the behest of feminine shrieks,
and the excuse, or at least, palliation which now
un-
doubtedly for any
sporadic brutality on the part
of men, and especially husbands, of which women may
be the victims, would be done away with. Whilst the
law remains as it
is women deserve scant pity if they
do on rare occasions get the worst of it in their dealings
with men.
In the foregoing pages we have
set forth the respec-
tive legal position of the sexes as it now stands. Our
aim in doing so has been, by spreading knowledge of
the facts of the case, to prevent uninformed though
otherwise fair-minded persons from falling a prey to the
maudlin rant of demagogic charlatans (male and
female), ignorant of law and as destitute of the capacity
of independent judgment on any subject as they are of
any impartial sense of justice, who so frequently deliver
themselves in press and on platform on the subject
the "wrongs of woman."
64
The above work was prepared by Thomas Pollock aka Spartacus, Editor of The Men's Tribune ,
www.menstribune.com.
While the work is substantially as it appears in the original book I
have made some minor alterations such as; putting page
numbers on the right margin as opposed to the top of the page, removing
a redundant title page, blank pages, and extra spacing
between letters and words, changing pages that were in a smaller type
to the standard 12 point type, changing Roman number
"I" to "1" except where a two character or more numbering
sequence was all in Romans, moving words down a line where a
bracketed insertion of mine caused the line to move out
too far, etc.