New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future

by Mrs. George Corbett

Again. Adultery alone on the part of a wife was quite sufficient ground for a divorce in favour of the husband, but a wife must have a husband who, in addition to being persistently and openly unfaithful, cruelly ill-treated her, and took a cowardly advantage of the superiority of strength he had attained through having systematically deprived woman of every health-giving recreation, before the law, made by men for the benefit of men, would afford her relief from her daily tortures.

It is on record that a judge, when a woman was being tried for the presumed murder of her husband, dwelt with such horror upon the most dreadful fact that she had been unfaithful to her husband, and proved so conclusively that a woman who could be unfaithful was capable of every crime under the sun, that the jury, remembering that their interests as husbands must be protected, sentenced the woman to be hanged, although medical witnesses showed that she could not be a murderess, seeing that the cause of her husband’s death was a drug of which he was proved to have been a systematic partaker.

From this it will be argued that purity of living held high rank with the English. But this was by no means the case, for in the same decade the rebellion and protests of women were naturally aroused by the foulest and most disgusting legislation that ever disgraced the land. This was the State regulation of vice, whereby the most respectable women were liable to be subjected to brutal indignities, in order that no precaution might be neglected which would ensure for men complete immunity from the consequences of systematic libertinism and immorality.

This may sound paradoxical, but it is not the less sickening in its shameful reality, and serves to show the hollowness and insincerity of masculine legislators.

It is small wonder that these and other crying evils brought forth the fruits they did. Systematic injustice roused the antipathy of women who, besides having sense enough to argue their own case, had sufficient moral courage to brave the animadversion which was levelled at them by the arrogant idiots of the one sex, and the unreasoning imbeciles of the other.

Hence the expressions which we come across at times, which to modern New Amazonians unacquainted with history are unintelligible, but which had their own bitter meaning at the time they were in use. “Bluestocking” was a term of opprobrium levelled at women who strove to improve their moral and intellectual status by means of study. A “Woman’s Rights’ Advocate” was described as an individual who was the fit butt for the laughter and derision of the rest of the community.

To be strong-minded was a wonderful claim to respect in a man. Men were fond of speaking of women as the “weak-minded,” and, therefore, inferior sex, and yet the moment a woman proved herself to be not weak-minded but strong-minded, she was regarded as an anomaly, and sneered at as a being who had unsexed herself. To be “only a woman” was equivalent in the minds of many male egotists to being only “something better than his dog, and something dearer than his horse,” and yet, no sooner did she prove herself gifted with abilities hitherto cherished as exclusively masculine, and, therefore, infinitely superior to womanly attributes, than she was said to have become “masculine,” and regarded as an object of horror. To be a woman was to be one unit of a despised race, and yet to “unsex” herself was one of the most opprobrious faults of which a woman could be guilty!

Could anything be more idiotic or paradoxical? And is it to be wondered at that it became necessary for men to prove their vaunted superiority? And that they were gradually impelled, from sheer fear of the future, to grant the demands of the sex which was rapidly learning to estimate itself at its true value?

No struggle recorded in history can compare with the fight against oppression which was now carried on by the brave and noble ancestresses of whom we have such good reason to be proud. Many and disheartening were the defeats they endured, but gloriously triumphant was their final victory, of which our existence as an independent nation was the outcome.

Universal Suffrage! Wonderful was the jubilation when it became an accomplished fact. And wonderful were its effects upon the nation. All the anomalies above described were wiped away, and women showed themselves so much more just, and so much more capable of governing than men, that they invariably enacted none but strictly fair and impartial regulations.