The reasons for answering this question in the negative we have already briefly indicated in the course of our investigations. This renders it unnecessary to discuss the matter any further here.
In dealing with the psychological aspects of the Feminist Movement, the intellectual conditions which paved the way for its acceptance, it is worth while recalling two or three typical instances of the class of “argument” to be heard on occasion from the female advocates for the suffrage. Thus, when the census was taken in 1911 and the Women’s Political and Social Union conceived, as they thought, the brilliant idea of annoying the authorities and vitiating the results of the census by refusing to allow themselves to be enrolled, one of the leaders, when interviewed on the point, gave her reason for her refusal to be included, in the following terms:—“I am not a citizen” (meaning that she did not possess the franchise) “and I am not going to pretend to be one.” The silliness of this observation is, of course, obvious, seeing that the franchise or even citizenship has nothing whatever to do with the census, which includes infants, besides criminals, lunatics, imbeciles, etc. Again, in a manifesto of the Women’s Political and Social Union defending window-smashing and other “militant” outrages, it was pointed out that the coal strike had caused more injury than the window-smashing and yet the
strikers were not prosecuted as the window-smashers were—in other words, the exercise of the basal personal right of the free man to withhold his labour save under the conditions agreed to by him, is paralleled with criminal outrage against person and property! Again, some three or four years ago, when the Women’s Suffrage Bill had passed the Commons, on its being announced by the Government that for the remainder of the Session no further facilities could be given for private members’ Bills, save for those of a non-contentious character, one of these sapient females urged in the Press that, seeing that there were persons to be found in both the orthodox political camps who were in favour of female suffrage, therefore the Bill in question must be regarded as of a non-contentious character! Once more, a lady, writing a few months ago to one of the weekly journals, remarked that though deliberate window-breaking, destruction of letters, and arson, might be illegal acts, yet that the punishing of them by imprisonment with hard labour, they being political offences, was also an illegal act, with the conclusion that the “militants” and the authorities, both alike having committed illegal acts, were “quits”! These choice specimens of suffragettes’ logic are given as throwing a significant light on the mental condition of women in the suffragette movement, and indirectly on
female psychology generally. One would presumably suppose that the women who put them forward must have failed to see the exhibition they were making of themselves. That any human being out of an asylum, could have sunk to the depth of fatuous inconsequent idiocy they indicate would seem scarcely credible. Is the order of imbecility which the above and many similar utterances reflect, confined to suffragette intelligence alone, or does it point to radical inferiority of intellectual fibre, not in degree merely, but in kind, in the mental constitution of the human female generally? Certainly it is hard to think that any man, however low his intelligence, would be capable of making a fool of himself precisely in the way these women are continually doing in their attempts to defend their cause and their tactics.
In the foregoing pages we have endeavoured to trace some of the leading strands of thought going to make up the Modern Feminist Movement. Sentimental Feminism clearly has its roots in sexual feeling, and in the tradition of chivalry, albeit the notion of chivalry has essentially changed in the course of its evolution. For the rest, Sentimental Feminism, with its double character of man-antipathy and woman-sympathy, as we see it to-day, has assumed the character of one of those psychopathic social phenomena which have so
often recurred in history. It can only be explained, like the latter, as an hypnotic wave passing over society.
As for Political Feminism, we have shown that this largely has its root in a fallacious application of the notion of democracy, partaking largely of the logical fallacy known technically as a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter. This logical fallacy of Political Feminism is, of course, reinforced and urged forward by Sentimental Feminism. As coming under the head of the psychology of the movement, we have also called attention to some curious phenomena of logical imbecility, noticeable in the utterances of educated women in the suffragette agitation.