She Stands Accused | Page 8

those means whereby
women preserve the effect of attractiveness, she must seek assuagement
of her sex-torment with men less and less fastidious.
But it is useless and canting to say that peccant women are worse than
men. If we are kind we say so merely because we are more
apprehensive for them. Safe women, with but rare exceptions, are

notably callous about their sisters astray, and the ``we'' I have used
must be taken generally to signify men. We see the danger for erring
women, danger economic and physical. Thinking in terms of the phrase
that ``a woman's place is the home,'' we wonder what will become of
them. We wonder anxiously what man, braver or less fastidious than
ourselves, will accept the burden of rescuing them, give them the
sanctuary of a home. We see them as helpless, pitiable beings. We are
shocked to see them fall so low.
There is something of this rather maudlin mentality, generally speaking,
in our way of regarding women criminals. To think, we say, that a
WOMAN should do such things!
But why should we be more shocked by the commission of a crime by
a woman than by a man--even the cruellest of crimes? Take the male
and female in feral creation, and there is nothing to choose between
them in the matter of cruelty. The lion and the lioness both live by
murder, and until gravidity makes her slow for the chase the breeding
female is by all accounts the more dangerous. The she-bear will just as
readily eat up a colony of grubs or despoil the husbandry of the bees as
will her mate. If, then, the human animal drops the restraints imposed
by law, reverting thereby to the theft, murder, and cunning of savagery,
why should it be shocking that the female should equal the male in
callousness? Why should it be shocking should she even surpass the
male? It is quite possible that, since for physiological reasons she is
nearer to instinctive motivation than the male, she cannot help being
more ruthless once deterrent inhibition has been sloughed. But is she in
fact more dangerous, more deadly as a criminal, than the male?
Lombroso--vide Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry in his essay on Anna
Zwanziger--tells us that some of the methods of torture employed by
criminal women are so horrible that they cannot be described without
outraging the laws of decency. Less squeamish than Lombroso or Mr
Barry, I gather aloud that the tortures have to do with the organs of
generation. But male savages in African and American Indian tribes
have a punishment for adulterous women which will match anything in
that line women have ever achieved, and men in England itself have
wreaked perverted vengeance on women in ways indescribable too.
Though it may be granted that pain inflicted through the genitals is
particularly sickening, pain is pain all over the body, and must reach

what might be called saturation-point wherever inflicted. And as
regards the invention of sickening punishment we need go no farther
afield in search for ingenuity than the list of English kings. Dirty Jamie
the Sixth of Scotland and First of England, under mask of retributive
justice, could exercise a vein of cruelty that might have turned a Red
Indian green with envy. Moreover, doesn't our word expressing cruelty
for cruelty's sake derive from the name of a man--the Marquis de Sade?
I am persuaded that the reason why so many women murderers have
made use of poison in their killings is primarily a simple one, a matter
of physique. The average murderess, determined on the elimination of,
for example, a husband, must be aware that in physical encounter she
would have no chance. Then, again, there is in women an almost inborn
aversion to the use of weapons. Once in a way, where the murderess
was of Amazonian type, physical means have been employed for the
slaying.
In this regard Kate Webster, who in 1879 at Richmond murdered and
dismembered Mrs Julia Thomas, springs to mind. She was, from all
accounts, an exceedingly virile young woman, strong as a pony, and
with a devil of a temper. Mr Elliot O'Donnell, dealing with her in his
essay in the ``Notable British Trials'' series, seems to be rather at a loss,
considering her lack of physical beauty, to account for her
attractiveness to men and to her own sex. But there is no need to
account for it. Such a thing is no phenomenon.
I myself, sitting in a taberna in a small Spanish port, was once pestered
by a couple of British seamen to interpret for them in their approaches
to the daughter of the house. This woman, who had a voice like a raven,
seemed able to give quick and snappy answers to the