Another instance, this time of direct special pleading to prove a woman guilty of an atrocious crime to be an “injured innocent.” It is taken from an eminent Swiss alienist in his work on Sex. Dr Forel maintains a thesis which may or may not be true to the effect that the natural maternal instinct is either absent or materially weakened in the case of a woman who has given birth to a child begotten by rape, or under circumstances bordering upon rape, and indeed more or less in all cases where the woman is an unwilling participant in the sexual act. By way of illustration of this theory he cites the case of a barmaid in St Gallen who was seduced by her employer under such circumstances as those above mentioned; a child resulted, who was put
out to nurse at an institution until five years of age, when it was handed over to the care of the mother. Now what does the woman do? Within a few hours of receiving the little boy into her keeping she took him to a lonely place and deliberately strangled him, in consequence of which she was tried and condemned. Now Dr Forel, in his Feminist zeal, feels it incumbent upon him to try to whitewash this female monster by urging, on the basis of this theory, the excuse that under the circumstances of its conception one could not expect the mother to have the ordinary instincts of maternity as regards her child. The worthy doctor is apparently so blinded by his Feminist prejudices that (quite apart from the correctness or otherwise of his theory) he is oblivious of the absurd irrelevancy of his argument. What, we may justly ask, has the maternal instinct, or its absence, to do with the guilt of the murderess of a helpless child committed to her care? Who or what the child was is immaterial! That a humane and otherwise clear-headed man like Dr Forel could take a wretch of this description under his ægis, and still more that in doing so he should serve up such utterly illogical balderdash by way of argument, is only one more instance of how the most sane-thinking men are rendered fatuous by the glamour of Sentimental Feminism.
In the present chapter we have given a few
typical instances of the practice which constitutes one of the most conspicuous features of Modern Feminism and of the public opinion which it has engendered. We hear and read, ad nauseam, of excuses, and condonation, for every crime committed by a woman, while a crime of precisely similar a character and under precisely similar circumstances, where a man is the perpetrator, meets with nothing but virulent execration from that truculent ass, British public opinion, as manipulated by the Feminist fraternity, male and female. This state of public opinion reacts, of course, upon the tribunals and has the result that women are practically free to commit any offence they please, with always a splendid sporting chance of getting acquitted altogether, and a practical certainty that even if convicted they will receive farcical sentences, or, should the sentence be in any degree adequate to the offence, that such sentence will not be carried out. The way in which criminal law is made a jest and a mockery as regards female prisoners, the treatment of criminal suffragettes, is there in evidence. The excuse of health being endangered by their going without their breakfasts has resulted in the release after a few days of women guilty of the vilest crimes—e.g. the attempt to set fire to the theatre at Dublin. It may be well to recall the outrageous facts of modern female immunity and free defiance of the
law as illustrated by one quotation of a description of the merry time of the window-smashers of March 1912 in Holloway prison given by a correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. The correspondent of that journal describes his visit to the aforesaid prison, where he said there appeared to have been no punishment of any kind for any sort of misbehaviour. “All over the place,” he writes, “is noise—women calling to women everywhere, and the officials seem powerless to preserve even the semblance of discipline. A suffragist will call out her name while in a cell, and another one who knows her will answer, giving her name in return, and a conversation will then be carried on between the two. This chattering obtains all day and far into the night. The ‘officials’ as the wardresses prefer themselves called, have already given the prison the name of ‘the monkey-house.’ Certain it is that the prisoners are treated with all deference, the reason being perhaps that the number of officials is insufficient to establish proper order. While I was waiting yesterday one lady drove up in a carriage and pair, in which were two policemen and several bundles of clothes, to enter upon her sentence and this is the note which seems to dominate the whole of the prison. Seventy-six of the prisoners are supposed to be serving sentences with hard labour, but none of them are wearing prison clothes, and in only one
or two instances have any tasks of any description been given, those generally being a little sewing or knitting.” Again a member of the Women’s Freedom League at a meeting on 19th May 1912 boasted that the suffragettes had a wing of their own at Holloway. “They had nice hot water pipes and all the latest improvements and were able to climb up to the window and exchange sentiments with their friends.” She had saved money and enjoyed herself very much!!
Here we have a picture of the way the modern authorities of the law recognise the “injured innocence” of female delinquents who claim the right wantonly to destroy property. Our present society, based as it is on private property-holding, and which usually punished with the utmost severity any breach of the sanctity of private property, waives its claims where women are concerned. Similarly arson under circumstances directly endangering human life, for which the law prescribes the maximum sentence of penal servitude for life, is considered adequately punished by a week or two’s imprisonment when those convicted of the crime are of the female sex. Oh, but they were acting from political motives! Good, and have not terrorist anarchists, Fenians and Irish dynamiters of the Land League days also acted from political motives? The terrorist anarchist, foolish and indefensible though his tactics may be, believes
honestly enough that he is paving the way for the abolition of poverty, misery and social injustice, a far more vital thing than the franchise! The Irish Fenians and dynamiters pursued a similar policy and there is no reason to doubt their honest belief that it would further the cause of the freedom and national independence of Ireland. Yet were these “political” offenders dealt with otherwise than as ordinary criminals when convicted of acts qualified by the law as felonies? And their acts, moreover, whatever we may think of them otherwise, were, in most cases at least, politically logical from their own point of view, and not senseless injuries to unoffending persons, as those of the present-day female seekers after the suffrage.