Enemies of Women

(The Origins in Outline of Anglo-Saxon Feminism)

by
Anthony M. Ludovici

Carroll & Nicholson Limited

London
1948

"From the bottom of our hearts we, who wish woman well,
warn her to be on her guard against the Feminists; for she has
no deadlier foe than they." — Dr. Fritz Wittels (Die Sexuelle
Not, Chap. V.)

"Remarquez-le bien, il n'est pas de pire ennemi de la femme

que la féministe." — Théodore Joran (La Trouée Féministe,
Chap. I.)

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter I Page 1
The Influence of the prevailing European, or White Man's
Philosophy.

Chapter II Page 31
The Influence of the Masculine Accent over our Civilization: i.e.,
the Civilization of the White Man.

Chapter III Page 47

The Influence of Man: (a) Those men whose average state is one
of partial or complete sex starvation. (b) The influence of men
who know nothing about women's nature. (c) The influence of
fathers of daughters, especially in England. (d) The influence of
the degeneracy of the male on the progress of Feminism. (e) The
influence of the townsman who makes his wife his mistress.

Chapter IV Page 91
 The Influence of Women in Promoting Feminism: (a) The
influence of the Virago. (b) The influence of the normal Anglo-
Saxon woman. (c) The influence of the old spinster. (d) The
influence of the superior female agitator.

Chapter V Page 135

The Influence of Urban Civilization in Promoting Feminism.

Chapter VI Page 144

The Influence of Economic Conditions in a Growing Nation that
Cannot Spread. Industrialism.

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Appendix I Page 175

The Author's Divergence from Nietzsche.

Appendix II Page 184

"The Martyrdom of Man."

Appendix III Page 199

Replies by Feminists to my Contentions.

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Introduction

It is important not to confound Anti-Feminists with Misogynists, or women haters. Some of the
early Church Fathers, John Knox, Schopenhauer and Strindberg, for instance, were Misogynists.
They disliked and scorned women as such and found little to say in their favour. But men like
Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche and myself are Anti-Feminists. We bear no hostility to women nor
do we denigrate them gratuitously. We merely assail and resist that Movement which has
endured with more or less prominence and success ever since Hellenic days, and has aimed at
driving women from domesticity and the home into industry, public life and, in fact, every male
sphere.
Anti-Feminism differs from Misogyny in that, while the former is friendly to normal
women, the latter attacks all women. Anti-Feminists see in Feminism a conspiracy against the
normally functioning woman; a Movement favourable to a minority of masculinoid females ill-
endowed for motherhood, and tending to lure women favourably endowed for motherhood along
paths where their psycho-physical needs cannot be satisfied.
In several of my books, for example in Lysistrata, The Night Hoers, Abortion, The Future of
Woman, and The Truth About Childbirth, I have been able to show the suffering and havoc
caused among normal women by the Feminist policy, and have collected a mass of data and
statistics, little known and generally

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hidden from the public, about these matters.
How did Anglo-Saxon Feminism arise?
It has many and various roots but the principal are:—
(1) The Prevailing European, or White Man's Philosophy.
(2) The Masculine Accent over our Civilisation.
(3) The Influence of Men: (a) of those whose average state is one of sex starvation; (b) of
those who do not know anything about women's nature; (c) of those who are fathers of girls; (d)
of those who are degenerate; (e) of those who make their wives their mistresses.
(4) The Influence of Women: (a) The Virago; (b) The Normal Woman disillusioned by
Marriage; (c) The Old Spinster; (d) The Superior Female Agitator.
(5) Urban Civilisation.
(6) Economic Conditions in a Growing Nation that cannot spread. Industrialism.
I shall now deal with these in the above order.

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Chapter I
(1) The Influence of the Prevailing European, or White Man's Philosophy.

The philosophy of the white man in his present distribution that is, almost all over
Europe, North and South America, and such places as he has colonised, owes its
origin chiefly to the Greeks of the late Hellenic period.
In the 5th century B.C. when, according to Edward Freeman and Findlay,
Greece was already in a state of decline, 1 it was the Greeks who laid the
foundations of our current beliefs and our general outlook. And the focus of this
influence was Athens.
A very beautiful City, recently rebuilt, and admired by every neighbouring
nation, above all by the Athenians themselves, it was inhabited by a people of
great artistic gifts and tastes, who were lovers of beauty, and who were so wholly
given up to homosexuality that even some of their women practised it.
Decadent as these people were at the end of the 5th century B.C. they had
certain traditional beliefs which still lent health to their outlook.
For instance, they would never have granted that men and women could be
valued on the strength of their so-called "psychological," or invisible, aspects, as
apart from their visible or bodily aspects. Man was a whole, his invisible and
visible aspects were one. To estimate the worth of a human being solely from his

1 THE CHIEF PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY. (London, 1886; p. 21).

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invisible aspects was a practice not only unknown to them, but also one they
would have regarded as ridiculous.
And here they resembled the whole of the known world of their period.
Now modern science has wholly vindicated the pre-Socratic Greek view as
against the Socratic view of man, and will have nothing to do with an arbitrary
division of the human being into soul, or mind, and body.
Science now regards man as a psycho-physical unity, or a psychosome, or
mind-body, and no matter what we may believe about its ultimate nature, the
human organism "is describable only in terms of function as 'body-mind' or
'mind-body'. This definition is generally accepted. . . . Thus there is no longer any
way of distinguishing a category of human distresses or mal adjustments which is
'spiritual'. . . . and there is no sort of physical disorder without some
psychological concomitant or effect." 1
I have quoted almost verbatim the words of a correspondent in The Lancet in
dealing with this matter, because the choice of terms in this paragraph seemed to
me happy and accurate. But the fact that Science has lately swung round to the
pre-Socratic Greek view of man, as an indivisible unity, is the important point to
remember; because most people today probably imagine that the Socratic hoax
about man's duality, supported as it is by religion, is also the orthodox scientific
point of view. For further details on this point, see my Choice of a Mate, and
Health and Education Through Self-Mastery.
Some of the Greeks before Socrates had tried to

1 LANCET, 31–7–37.

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modify the rigid Monism of the ancient Greek world. Xenophanes, for instance,
had at the end of the 7th century B.C. attempted to advocate Dualism (most
people's present point of view) by emphasising the superior importance of man's
soul, or invisible side. The Orphic Cults (not too respectable), Pythagoras and
Empedocles had also laid stress on the soul, and these beliefs were rooted in an
ancient Animism.
It would take us too long, under the guidance of a scholar like Rhode, to
trace early Greek Dualism from Animism; but we can assume that up to the end
of the 5th century BC. Dualism as we know it — a belief in the separateness and
independence of body and soul, and in the superiority of e soul over the body, and
that the Hellenes up to the time of Socrates, still believed in the wholeness of
man.
It was a healthy belief, because it prevented the condoning and excusing of
bad physical attributes on the score of alleged lofty spiritual ones. A good man
was one whose visible, as well as invisible, qualities were good. The two were
never separated. Thus the Greek expression for a good man was "good looking
and good."
Thus the Greek expression for a good man was "good-
looking and good." The good, as a class, were the : the good-
looking and good.
 This was so until the end of the 5th century B.C. Everybody subscribed to
the doctrine.
But about 428 B.C. there suddenly appeared in the midst of these people a
man much more gifted than Xenophanes has ever been to alter this point of view.
And he happened also to be one of the ugliest men that has ever lived.
He was so ugly that friends, in introducing him, felt obliged to apologise for
him, and he was the object of

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general ridicule. Of low origin, and steeped in the least healthy elements of Greek
thought, he had also beet the male concubine of Archelaus. This man was
Socrates.
In a beautiful city of good-looking people, who held beauty, and especially
male beauty, in high esteem, 1 he was naturally at a great disadvantage. Judged by
the prevailing standards, he had to be placed at the bottom of the ladder. Only he
who was (good looking) could also be (good). Socrates stood,
therefore, to be condemned at sight.
Unfortunately for mankind, he had a shrewd mind and an unusually acute
lust of power. He would have made a first-class Yellow Press journalist or "best-
seller" in our sense.
Determined to get himself accepted as desirable, and impelled by his
inferiority feelings (à la Adler), he therefore tackled the almost hopeless task of
wiping out the effect of his repulsive visible qualities.
How could he do this?
Only by destroying his countrymen's belief in the oneness of man; only by
dividing man into two (Dualism) and making his invisible far more important
than his visible attributes.
And this he had the effrontery and perseverance to do.
I do not suggest that, with malice prepense, he set about persuading the
Greeks that their belief in the oneness of Man was wrong, while secretly
believing in his heart that it was right. That is not the way great reformers
proceed. Whether they happen to be right

1 See references to love of male beauty among the Greeks in Plato's CHARMIDES, c. 3; p.
154; LYSIS, c. 2, p. 204; and PROTAGORAS, c. 1, p. 3092.

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or wrong, they must at least believe that they are right; and, on the Adlerian
principle of direction from inferiority feelings, there is no reason to suppose that
Socrates knew that he lied when he did lie.
His process of thought was thus probably largely unconscious. He felt the
prevailing belief about the oneness of Man as damaging to his own prestige, and
this probably made him sincerely imagine that it must be wrong. Such subjective
forms of reasoning are very common, even among modern people with shrewd
minds.
It was the old hoax of the fox that had lost its tail. But, strange to say, he got
away with it and, by so doing, established for over 2,000 years the principal
beliefs of the White Man concerning human nature.
The best men in Greece — men like Aristophanes — despised and ridiculed
him and his doctrine. The merely conventional hated him. Hence, ultimately, he
was charged with corrupting the youth of the country and perverting its faith, and
he was condemned to death.
Unhappily for posterity, two of his apprentices, Xenophon and Plato,
survived him. Both were taken in by his attacks on the healthy old Greek belief in
the oneness of Man, and both had a scribbling and preaching mania which
enabled them to transmit to the generations that followed them their master's
unwholesome doctrine.
What, in fact, were the positions Socrates established? They were:—
(a) The Duality of Man, i.e. his two-sided existence. The one side being his
body ( ) and the other his soul or mind ( ).
(b) The soul's independence of the body.

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(c) The soul's superiority to the body.
(d) The worthlessness and despicableness of the body.
(e) The immortality of the soul.
Where does Plato reveal these five positions of Socrates? First of all in the
Apology, where he makes Socrates say: "I spend my whole life in going about and
persuading you all to give your first and chiefest care to the perfection of your
souls, and not till you have done that to think of your bodies." 1
In the Symposium Plato makes Socrates pay reluctant lip service to bodily
beauty, and condemn ugliness; but shows that he classes this standpoint as low
and transitory and makes him continue:—
"But man's next advance will be to set a higher value on the beauty of souls
than on that of the body, so that however little the grace that may bloom in any
likely soul, it shall suffice him for loving and caring . . . and that finally he may
be constrained to contemplate the beautiful as in our observance of our laws, and
to behold it all bound together in kinship and so to estimate the body's beauty as a
slight affair." 2
How plain the working of the repulsive man's inferiority feelings appears in
this passage!
But at the same Banquet, when Alcibiades tries to praise his bosom friend
Socrates, he confirms his master's standpoint as follows:—
"I tell you all the beauty a man may have is nothing to Socrates; he despises
it more than any of you can believe." 3
We also have the self-revelatory dialogue in which

1 Trans. by F. J. Church (30, A–B).

2 Trans. by W. R. M. Lamb (210, B and C).
3 Ibid (216, B. D. and E.)

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Socrates persuades Alcibiades that his love for him is deep and true:—
"If anyone," says Socrates, "has fallen in love with the person of Alcibiades,
he loves, not Alcibiades, but the belongings of Alcibiades . . . . But he who loves
your soul is the true lover. He lover of the body goes away when the flower falls.
But he who loves the soul goes not away. . . . I loved you for your own sake,
when other men loved what belongs to you; and your beauty, which is not you, is
fading away, just as your true self is beginning to bloom." 1
Thus did Socrates contrive to establish a complete separation between man's
visible and invisible components — as if the two really could be separated; and
always emphasised the greater importance and superiority of the invisible or soul
components.
Finally, in the Phaedo, he reaches the logical outcome of all this
unwholesome sophistry — the visible in man must be despised. Gathering to his
aid all his effrontery and all his hatred of the old, healthy Greek view of good
looks he says:—
"If we are ever to do anything purely, we must be separated from the body . .
. and thus being pure and separated from the body, we shall know the whole real
essence and that is probably truth . . . For purification consists in this, in
separating as much as possible the soul from the body . . . And does not holding
the passions in contempt and keeping them in subjection — does not this belong
to those only who must despise the body?" 2
Thus, not only were bodily differences between men to be held of no
account (a useful view to Socrates and

1 ALCIBIADES I (Trans. by Jowett, 131).

2 Trans. by Henry Cary, M.A. (66 D, 67 A and C, and 68 C).

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his like), but the whole of the bodily side of life was also to be despised.
The ingenuity, perseverance and fervour with which Socrates laboured to
establish all these principles in order to save his own self-esteem, can be
appreciated only by those who know Plato's dialogues. Suffice it to say that he
devoted his whole life to the task.
Thenceforward, not only was Socrates no longer despicable, but all his like,
all the physiologically bungled and botched, all Nature's step children, failures
and ugly ducklings, were raised to equality with the more happily endowed. Nay,
bodily defects were actually made to look respectable, almost a distinction.
Addressing Glaucon, indeed, Socrates declared as much. "If there be any
merely bodily defect in another," he said, "we will be patient of it and will love
the same." 1
Henceforward, man's visible aspects, his body, came to be regarded as vile
and despicable, and his invisible aspects the only valuable part of him. From now
on, a pure soul was to justify even foul breath, and a sound biological attitude to
man ceased to be possible.
A cripple, a hunchback, any degenerate, became as desirable as a normal
man, because, on Socratic principles, it could always be argued — and, of course,
was argued — that his blemish, his stigma, was not himself, and that his invisible
or "real" self redeemed everything.
Wonderful for Socrates and his like! But for the rest of mankind —
pollution.
Does not this complete topsyturvification of the old wholesome view of man
as One become satisfactorily explained when we regard it as the feat of a shrewd

1 REPUBLIC (Jowett's translation, III, 402).

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inferior, driven blindly on by his resentment, by his lust of power, to establish his
desirability in the teeth of the traditional standpoint of his fellows?
But what evidence have we that the monster, Socrates, was the original
broadcaster of all these deleterious doctrines?
There are three witnesses in the case of Socrates versus Healthy Man —
Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes.
Does any of these give us a reliable record of his views? At any rate, as Mr.
St. George Stock says: "Widely different as these three pictures are, they have yet
no unlikeness which is fatal to the genuineness of any." 1
But Grote, our greatest authority on Socrates, calls Xenophon "the best
witness about his master," 2 and of the Platonic dialogues says The Apology, Crito
and Phaedo appear to be examples of what can safely be accepted as a record of
Socrates' opinions. 3
Now, it will be noted that, of the quotations I have used above, both the
Apology and the Phaedo constitute important sources.
But of supreme moment in this question is the fact that, as regards Socrates'
insistence on dualism, his denigration of bodily beauty, and his exaltation of soul
above body — all cardinal points in his doctrine in my view — Xenophon, this
"best witness about his master," wholly bears out Plato.
In Xenophon's Symposium, for instance, Socrates addresses Antisthenes as
follows: "I fear that you

1 Introduction to THE APOLOGY. (Oxford 1907. p. 7).

2 HISTORY OF GREECE (Vol. VIII, p. 262, Note 1.).
3 Ibid, Vol. VII, p. 84.

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are not enamoured with [sic] the beauty of my soul, but with that of my body." 1
Further, he says, "The vulgar inspires mankind with the love of the body
only, but the celestial fires the mind with the love of the soul." Then, in reply to a
remark of Hermogenes, he says, "I will endeavour to prove that the love of the
soul is incomparably preferable to that of the body"; which he proceeds to do. 2
So much for the first-hand witnesses. Now the importance of this agreement
between Xenophon and Plato on this matter cannot be too much emphasised,
seeing that, as Mr. St. George Stock says, the two records (Plato's and
Xenophon's) otherwise differ widely.
 But if we now turn to ancient and modern authorities, our belief that
Socrates, and not Plato, was the successful champion of this new attitude towards
man, and, therefore, the founder of Dualism and of our doctrine of the superiority
of the invisible, over the visible aspects of man, is abundantly confirmed.
It must have struck the reader that the positions which I claim were
originally established by Socrates to save his self-esteem — the duality of man,
the soul's independence of the body, the superiority of the soul over the body, and
the immortality of the soul — all became basic principles in the doctrine of
Christianity.
What then do ancient and modern authorities say on the connection between
these fundamental principles and Socrates?
They wholly confirm my claim that Socrates was responsible for them.

1 Trans. by J. Welwood. M.D. (London, 1913), who evidently did not know the correct
particle after "enamoured."
2 Trans. by J. Welwood, M.D.

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In Justin Martyr's Apology, the fact that Socrates and his followers were
Christians before Christ is constantly implied.
In the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria, we find the same contention. 1
Dr. C. E. Robinson, in Everyday Life in Ancient Greece, says, "The creed of
the Christian Church was formulated in terms drawn from the Greek
Philosophers." (He can mean only Socrates in Plato's mirror). Musilio Ficino,
writing on Christianity in 1479, said, "The life of Socrates is a continued symbol
of the life of Jesus," so that "the doctrines of the one are identical with those of
the other." Coleridge in Table Talk (1830) remarks to Crabbe Robinson, "Jesus
was a Platonic philosopher." And Prof. A. E. Taylor, one of the leading
authorities on Socrates, says, "Socrates created the intellectual and moral tradition
by which Europe has ever since existed . . . . It was Socrates who . . . created the
conception of the soul which has ever since dominated European thinking. . . .
The direct influence, indeed, which has done most to make the doctrine of
Socrates familiar to ourselves is that of Christianity." 2
In plain English — the philosophy of the White Man owes its origin to the
efforts of a shrewd and ugly outsider, with acute inferiority feelings, to save his
self-esteem.
When, added to this testimony, we reflect that, on psychological grounds,
these doctrines were most likely to emanate from such a man as Socrates, who
was naturally anxious to abolish a point of view which

1 Dean Inge, in THE LEGACY OF GREECE (Chapter — Religion), p. 31; declares that
Socrates should be reckoned as a Christian.
2 SOCRATES (London, 1922, pp. 132–133).

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made the visible aspects of man as important as his invisible aspects, it seems to
be beyond dispute that Socrates was the first great transvaluer of values. 1
Nor is there in my claim anything psychologically inconsistent with the
character and unconscious motivations of Socrates; for we fortunately possess
other evidence regarding his unscrupulosity when wishing to escape from a
position or a suspicion of inferiority.
Everybody knows that Socrates made an unfortunate choice when he
married Xanthippe. In plain English, like many a man before and after him, his
marriage was a failure. According to traditional reports, his wife would scold him
and then drench him with water, and once she actually tore off his coat in the
market-place in full view of the crowd. 2
Now, any ordinary man, in like circumstances, would simply have shrugged
his shoulders and admitted that he had shown bad taste, had, in fact, "fallen into
the soup" and must make the best of it. Not so Socrates. Where his own self-
esteem was concerned, he was a genius at making the inferior appear the superior
plight, and he had the astounding effrontery to try to persuade his friends that he
ha deliberately chosen a shrew for his moral edification. Thus he told Antisthenes
that he had chosen Xanthippe so that her bad temper might make him more easily
put up with all sorts and conditions of men. 3 He had also the shamelessness to try
to make his acquaintances believe that, just as horsemen prefer spirited horses,
because having mastered these they

1 As to why Nietzsche overlooked, or laid no stress, on this important aspect of Socrates, see
Appendix I.
2 Diogenes Laertius, II, 36, 37.
3 Xenophon, SYMPOSIUM, II, 10.

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easily cope with the rest, so he had chosen Xanthippe. 1
More fools his friends to be taken in by such rubbish?
Yes; but it is significant that Socrates made these attempts to deceive them
in order to save his self-esteem, and it lends a colourable warrant to my
interpretation of the motives that actuated him in opposing and ultimately
defeating the belief in the oneness of man.
Naturally his five new positions were not immediately accepted by the
ancient world. They were long resisted by the best remnants of the Greek people.
Among the most formidable of these was his spiritual grandchild, Aristotle, who
continued to insist, when judging a man's worth, on the inseparability of his
visible and invisible aspects. 2
But there were too many in the world whom the Socratic teaching pleased
and flattered and, in the end, it became the dominant doctrine of the White Man.
For it made things so easy. No speechifying, no protestations of faith, no airs or
graces, could alter the shape of your nose, or modify your height, or make your
eyes beautiful, or make you in any way superior in body to the way you had been
made. Even Jesus himself hinted that it was impossible for a man by taking
thought to add one cubit to his stature. 3
If you were inferior bodily, however, you could, along Socratic lines, always
greatly enhance your

1 Diogenes Laertius, II. 37.

2 Most of the signs of opposition to the Socratic attitude to the body, which were noticeable
in Europe of the Middle Ages, were due to Aristotle's influence on the Holy Catholic Church.
3 Luke, XII, 25, 26.

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prestige by posing as a person with a superior soul, and, by making certain
professions of faith, adopting airs of piety and purity, and claiming high falutin'
interests, pass as a very superior person. In short, Socrates gave the chance of a
second innings on the moral side, if your initial innings on the bodily side had
been a failure.
No wonder Socrates ultimately prevailed. 1
Thus, for over two thousand years, the Socratic doctrine has been part of our
atmosphere, soaking into our blood and bones; so much so that, today, even those
who have never heard of Socrates — the charwoman, the postman and the coal-
heaver — all speak on these matters of man's s visible and invisible aspects as if
they had sat at his feet.
Now the Feminists of all times — whether in Hellenistic Greece or in
Renaissance or 17th century Europe, naturally seized with alacrity upon the
arguments Socrates offered them. For, if the body was negligible, if bodily
differences did not matter, if the soul alone counted, the visible or physical
differences between man and woman were also negligible. Indeed, the more one
behaved as if there were no difference between man and woman, the purer one
was, because the less one was considering the despicable body.
Thus the equality of the sexes was established with ease and, on the basis of
similar reasoning, continues to be established with ease to this day. Even the
necessary correlation of peculiar bodily or anatomical parts with certain
corresponding mental characteristics — a correlation which would seem to be
obvious and

1 See Appendix I for a discussion of Nietzsche's views on Socrates.

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constant in nature, and on the basis of which the sexes would have to be classed
as different mentally as they were different physically — was easily denied on the
principle of the Socratic negligibility of the body, and perfect equality was
assumed because, presumably, no sex-differentiated parts could be proved of the
invisible aspects of human beings.
Herbert Spencer merely stated the obvious when he wrote, "That men and
women are mentally alike is as untrue as that they are alike bodily. Just as
certainly as they have physical differences which are related to the respective
parts they play in the maintenance of the race, so certainly have they psychical
differences, similarly related to their respective shares in the rearing and
protection of offspring. To suppose that, along with unlikenesses between their
parental activities, there do not go unlikenesses of mental faculties, is to suppose
that here alone in all Nature there is no adjustment of special powers to special
functions." 1
Such, however, has been the deterioration in enlightenment and critical
faculty since the successful hoax perpetrated on the world by Socrates, that it has
become necessary to restate this obvious truth — and not this obvious truth alone
— at a time when everybody, consciously or unconsciously, is persuaded that we
are living in the most enlightened period of human history.
The first Feminists of the 17th century in France — Poulain de la Barre, the
Abbé de la Pure, Honoré d'Urfé, Mlle. Scudéry, etc. — therefore not only claimed
perfect equality of the sexes, but also argued that there was for women a "higher"
destiny than that of matrimony and motherhood. For, since the body was

1 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY (London, 1880, p. 373).

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the despicable and impure side of human beings, and women's functions as wife
and mother were concentrated chiefly in their bodies; since, moreover, sex
equality proved that the whole of man's sphere was open to woman if she chose,
woman could but elevate herself, purify herself, by discarding her normal
functions, her bodily rôle in society, and by engaging in other activities. By
turning away from her traditional sphere she would be nearer the angels.
The validity, in fact, of the Socratic point of view, was assumed without
question.
Nay, more: these Feminists were logical and consistent Socratics. For, they
argued, since the soul could have no sex (having no corporeal existence), and the
soul was the only essential part of human beings, the equality of the sexes must
be too unquestionable to be denied except by people who were wilfully obtuse or
impure. 1
The sane view of the pre-Socratic Greeks and Aristotle was not only
forgotten by the Feminists, it also ceased to prompt even the thought or
arguments of their opponents. This remained true down to our own times. (I was
the first of the many male and female anti-Feminists to be actuated by the pre
Socratic and Aristotelian standpoint in combating Feminism.)
But although the French Feminists may have been extreme in their
denigration of motherhood and the functions of childbearing, the mass of
ordinary, everyday opinion was not far behind them. No matter how much the
robust and healthy majority still felt the call of sex and continued while youth
endured to enjoy

1 This reasoning is constantly encountered in the Feminist literature of all periods.

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the lusts of the flesh, everybody, openly or secretly, believed the body was vile.
Naturally, the best and more normal women, despite the fact that their
procreative life was so wholly subject to bodily impulses and processes, held out
against a too practical application of the Socratic doctrine. But they remained
loyal to their true natures with uneasy feelings. They listened half guiltily to the
claim that there was an alleged "higher" life which they, poor things, were too
material to embrace.
Introduce but a few disillusionments, however, into their life of normal
functions; make their men ever so slightly less competent to reconcile them to it,
and they would quickly turn a more willing ear to the slanderers of the body, and
to the preachers of a so-called "nobler" calling than maternity for women.
But to the women less favourably endowed — to the frigid, the sexually
low-powered, the untemperamental, and the masculinoid — Socraticism seemed
a philosophy cut to measure. It justified to the hilt all their secret, tailor-made,
gentlemanly aspirations. And these were the women who everywhere became
vociferous in championing the Feminist Cause.
Where they erred grievously, from the standpoint of women as a whole, was
in failing to see that what fitted them like a glove could be nothing but a
thumbscrew for normal women. But in this they were actuated less by their
subconscious envy of their normal sisters, than by the prevalent Socraticism,
which justified the widest application of their doctrine and left them no grounds
for suspecting that their aims were in any respect aberrant or unrealisable by
women as a whole.
Thus, all the female and many of the male writers

- p. 18 -
on the Feminist side plead with surprising innocence and a strange lack of
objectivity, as if the flight from domesticity and motherhood must be in every
case a flight to a "higher" sphere. They argue that the life of all women can be
complete and full without normal bodily functioning.
As I have shown in great detail elsewhere, Madame de Sévigny in many
letters to her happily married daughter, Madame de Grignan (also a happy
mother) repeatedly implores her to avoid another pregnancy and to escape her
husband's embraces — not because she had ever suffered from maternity or had a
large family (she had only two children at the time and she and her husband were
well off), but because Madame de Sévigny herself abhorred "that side of life"
and, like the Précieuses, thought it low. 1 She was, in fact, a convinced Socratic
who, in addition, was temperamentally defective.
Similarly the English Feminists of the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, claimed that a life deprived of motherhood could nevertheless be full
for all women, irrespective of their natural endowments.
Mrs. Bertrand Russell, for instance, discussing the merits of "Free Love,"
says, "It is futile to argue that woman is cheated of her full rights if children do
not result. . . . Sex, even without children and without marriage, is to them a thing
of dignity, beauty and delight." 2 And she adds, "So far I have refrained from any
detailed discussion of modern woman and maternity because it is still necessary
to make it clear that a full life of activity for women is perfectly possible and
permissible without it." 3
 1 See my NIGHT HOERS (London, 1928, pp. 219–222).
2 HYPATIA (London, 1925, pp. 29–35).
3 HYPATIA. p. 40.

- p. 19 -
No need to give other examples; the literature of English Feminism is full of
instances of this error. And a cruel error it is, since only by regarding women and
men as wholly undifferentiated in bodily needs and functions, is it possible to
disregard normal women's fundamental need of exercising their peculiar
functions, if they are to remain healthy and sane.
A flagrant example of the neglect of bodily considerations in discussing the
two sexes is also to be found in a singularly silly novel which had a great vogue
among the highly Socraticized middle classes of England in the late twenties of
this century. I refer to Orlando by the Feminist writer, Virginia Woolf. Here a
creature is depicted who changes from male to female and vice versâ without the
slightest apparent alteration in mind or outlook. It obviously pleased the Socratic
English middle classes, because it was very popular, and to the Feminists it was,
of course, a priceless document.
I have always had the greatest difficulty in making even intelligent people,
particularly women, see that the story burked the whole issue regarding the
mental and physical characteristics of men and women by religiously avoiding all
reference to the inevitable association of what Spencer terms bodily differences
and their concomitant mental differences.
In four books 1 I have shown the havoc that is wrought among normal
women in England alone by this false assimilation of the female to the male; as if
the female, like the male, could live a normal life

1 See THE NIGHT HOERS, ABORTION, THE FUTURE OF WOMAN, and THE TRUTH
ABOUT CHILDBIRTH, all four scrupulously left unnoticed by the Feminist Press of England
and America.

- p. 20 -
without maternity or with only an incessant repetition of unfruitful sexual
embraces.
To overlook the fact that the male and female sex cycles differ
fundamentally, and that whereas the one begins and ends with the sexual
embrace, the other, in order to be normal, begins with the sexual embrace and
ends only with the weaning of the child — to overlook this, whilst it leads to
untold misery and disease among normally endowed women, means that, owing
to a strong Socratic bias, the body is left wholly unconsidered in the scheme of
female life.
But the Feminists of the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries, in their Socraticism,
were so far from perceiving this oversight, that everything in relation to woman
was judged and valued merely on the basis of what was right and suitable for
man.
 If, for instance, a University education were right for man between the ages
of 19 and 23, it must also be right for woman.
The fact that the best obstetricians in the land declared that "from 18 to 23 is
the age at which the first labour may be expected to run its easiest and most
favourable course," 1 was not thought relevant, and the whole movement for the
so-called Higher Education of Women proceeded as if such fundamental
considerations were negligible. And the middle and well-to-do classes, of course,
set the fashion for the whole nation.
The marriage age for women, therefore, became delayed to an average of 25
1/2 years, which meant that in the most favourable circumstances a first child
could hardly be born until three years later than the optimum last year when,
according to experts, a first

1 A MANUAL OF MIDWIFERY by Thomas Watts Eden, M.D., and Eardley Holland. M.D.
(London, 1931), p. 225.

- p. 21 -
labour was most likely to follow an easy and normal course.
If childbirth casualties multiplied, what mattered, so long as the Socratic bias
in favour of neglecting bodily considerations continued to be satisfied? If men
married after 24 and even as late as 32 or 35, why should not women?
The whole of the sophistry which enabled nineteenth century Industrialism
and Commercialism to drive women from home and their maternal interests and
duties, was consciously or unconsciously based on the same error.
One male Feminist, W. Lyon Blease, in his lofty Socratic contempt for
bodily considerations, actually boasts that, thanks to Feminist influence, the age
at which women now marry is "steadily increasing." 1
He could not know, nor probably would have cared even if he had known,
that Dr. Eardley Holland, one of our greatest obstetricians, in enumerating the
additional loads now imposed on the ordinary hazards of childbirth, would
mention "the increasing age of all mothers." 2
Since there was something decidedly not nice about the bodily side of life,
the longer "pure" young women were kept from it the better; thus, in her last
book, Winifred Holtby said, "We do all we can to discourage intelligent and
energetic women from early marriage and from having children." 3
English fathers, animated by a sub-conscious jealousy of all those who
approached their daughters with a view to marriage, and inclined to delay this

1 EMANCIPATION OF ENGLISH WOMEN (London, 1913), p. 144.

2 LANCET, 27–4–35.
3 WOMAN (London, 1934, p. 168).

- p. 22 -
wrench as long as possible, eagerly added their weight to the many influences
making for the industrialisation and commercialisation of women. For, in
England, an attentive scrutiny of the Press reveals case after case in which young
couples, in despair at getting the consent of the girl's father to an early marriage
by ordinary means, ultimately present their plea to a magistrate. And it is not
unusual in such cases for the fathers to argue, even when everything else is
favourable, that 18 or 19 is "too young" for a girl to marry. 1
She is not too young to earn her living, or to ruin her health and lose her
bloom at a typewriter or an office desk. But she is too young to know "that side of
life," and the father's secret jealousy is gratified.
To oppose these tendencies and errors is to be regarded by these
unconscious Socratics not as friends but as enemies of women. Thus, in their
eyes, an Anti-Feminist is always a misogynist.

Further and Unexpected Consequences of the Body-despising values of Socrates.

In addition to the above-mentioned consequences of the Socratic doctrine of
the soul and body, two further and far reaching results of it have been little, if at
all, observed by the scientific sexologist and sociologist. Lay writers for and
against Female Emancipation have observed them even less.
The first concerns the moral support Socraticism lends to that androphobia,
or man hatred, which, as we shall see, animates the average female agitator for
Emancipation. The second relates to the emphasis

1 See examples adduced in THE TRUTH ABOUT CHILDBIRTH, pp. 106 and 266. But
volumes could be filled with examples.

- p. 23 -
Socraticism lays on the latent self-contempt of the female.
These two unexpected results of the Socratic body-despising doctrine may
be examined separately, although each influences and aggravates the other.
1. In countries where Protestantism (i.e. Socraticism untempered by
Aristotle's sanity) has become dominant, and an extreme development like
Puritanism has permeated the life and sentiments of the people, the sex-phobia
arising inevitably out of the body-despising doctrine imparts moral force to the
anti-masculine and android female as follows:—
Since, in normal circumstances, it is the male who initiates the female into
the mysteries of the sexual embrace, and the latter is regarded as shameful, if not
actually sinful, in sex-phobic cultures, man necessarily becomes identified with
the villain of the piece. 1 He is branded as the enemy of female virtue, a creature
of "low" appetites, constantly striving to stage woman's most "humiliating" and
"unsavoury" situation. He becomes, in fact, a "beast," and, among medical
women, school-mistresses, and disgruntled wives generally, it is not uncommon
to hear him referred to thus. 2
Nor can this be wondered at; for, given the ideology which slanders the
sexual side of life, and the moral indignation provoked by it in Puritans, it
naturally follows that the active agent in sexual congress — Man — can hardly
escape condemnation. On the other

1 For an intelligent woman's confirmation of this, see Wilma Meikle, TOWARDS A SANE
FEMINISM. (London, 1916, pp. 85, 98. 99.)
2 See Theodore Joran, LES FEMINISTES AVANT LE FEMINISME (Paris, 1910, p. 201).
"Pour les femmes que le féminisme moderne a perverties, le mot de 'mari' est toujours synonyme
de butor et de méchant."

- p. 24 -
hand, the girls and women who repudiate this view and surrender the citadel to
the male, are hated as the Quislings and Fifth Columnists of their sex. If they are
unamenable to the "sound" attitude, they become the object of a loathing even
greater than that reserved for men. 1
In the mutinous, disgruntled and often android females who compose the
spearhead of the Militant Feminist Movement (and thousands such are produced
in every generation in England), this Puritanical reason for condemning and if
possible defeating the male constitutes a powerful moral arm added to their
arsenal of weapons. Nay more: It converts into a crusade their frequently
unconscious desire to fight him. They become a host of Joans of Arc, fighting to
"save" their sex. Even to oppose them in argument becomes an act almost
immoral.
Thus man as "the beast" becomes legendary (if only in secret, as a kind of
Masonic pass-word) among the sisterhood of the emancipated in Protestant and
particularly Anglo-Saxon countries. And, since moral reasons for waging war add
self-righteousness to the spiritual equipment even of aggressors, militant "Modern
Women" have for the last century in Anglo-Saxon communities been celebrating
an orgy of self-exaltation and self-applause.
When, therefore, the majority of the "beasts" — the men, against whom the
war is waged — also secretly believe in the Socratic slander of the body, and
hence in their own depravity, while some even proclaim it

1 See Henry Kistermaecker's Preface to Madame S. Poirson's MON FEMINISME (Paris,

1905). Speaking of women feminists as a whole, he says, "Leur Féminisme, c'est la haine de
l'homme, qui n'en a plus cure, et leur féminisme c'est aussi la haine de la femme qui prend encore
souci de l'homme."

- p. 25 -
publicly, 1 the enemy is already half defeated at the outset. Some at least of the
success of Feminism in Anglo-Saxon communities thus becomes obvious.
2. The emphasis laid on the self-contempt of the female by Socraticism in
Anglo-Saxon communities, where few women ever become reconciled to their
womanhood, 2 is due to the following ideological vagaries:—
Given the grounds for slandering the body and the sexual functions in
particular, it follows that women who are unreconciled to the fact of their sex
and, from puberty onwards, are in addition consistently reminded of the great part
sex plays in their anatomy and their lives, are inclined to assume towards
themselves the attitude they assume towards sexuality.
In other words, a being who at, or soon after puberty, perceives that she is
sex from shoulders to pelvis, will necessarily tend, in a Socratic and Puritanical
atmosphere, to despise herself. 3
 If, then, she should, in addition, belong to a society like that of modern
England or the U.S.A. where it is difficult in any event for her to be reconciled to
her womanhood, her latent self-contempt necessarily becomes emphasised.
It is usually owing to this extra emphasis laid upon her latent self-contempt
in Anglo-Saxon countries, that she strives with untiring zeal to appropriate to
herself every male attribute and activity she can. Because, despite the moral
stigma attaching to the male, it is only in this way — or so her amoral sub-
conscious

1 See, for instance, Lecky: HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS (Vol. I, p. 104), and
Ruskin's SESAME AND LILIES. especially Lecture II.
2 For an elaboration of this matter see Chapter III, p. 67 infra.
3 For a complete confirmation of this statement, and by a woman, see Wilma Meikle, op. cit.
Chapter VII.

- p. 26 -
reasoning prompts her — that she can rid herself of at least a portion of her
womanhood.
The alacrity with which girls and women in Anglo-Saxon countries seize on
the smallest pretext to don male garments, pursue men's sports and pastimes, and
invade male callings, is thus to a large extent explained. To the uninitiated
observer it may appear as if they were merely trying to achieve their
"independence," or to extend their influence. But the truth is they are trying to
throw off the oppression due to their inordinate disaffection towards their own
sex and everything relating to it.
The fact that this same disaffection, unacknowledged openly and hardly
admitted to self, also strives in countless cases to find relief by denigrating the
male, naturally leads to a reinforcement of the attitude discussed under (1) above.
For if self-belittlement can be reduced by belittling what we compare ourselves
with — and this result is often achieved thereby — it follows that it is only
human in the female to belittle man. Thus hostility to the male becomes
intensified in unreconciled Anglo-Saxon women.
Even in the rare reconciled Anglo-Saxon women, however — in those, that
is to say, who outwardly appear contented with their lot, harbour none of the
resentfulness typical of the virago, and resemble the more serene female of the
Continent — there will still be found the self-contempt present in women as a
whole. It is, indeed, as I hint above, universal throughout Europe (though acute in
Protestant communities), and it may be felt and recognised as follows:—
(a) In the difficulty which even a superior man experiences in retaining his
wife's or mistress's regard when once he has demonstrated any deep affection for

- p. 27 -
her. For the woman, looking at herself through the optics of her acquired
inferiority feelings, inevitably "writes down" the man who exalts her in
proportion as she writes down herself. "What? Can he possibly be so enthusiastic
about me? — Me? — He must be a. . . ."
 The fact that most of this reasoning proceeds at a level below consciousness
does not, however, prevent it from determining attitudes, at the conscious level,
which make life difficult.
(b) In the sacrifices a woman will make to be exalted or adored by her
environment, especially the most innocent 1 part of it — her children. To this end
she will proceed to any shift, even to sacrificing the dignity of her husband and
the filial piety owed to him by his children. There is no need to read Laura
Marholm 2 to open our eyes to this phenomenon. It can be seen everywhere, but
especially in England. Indeed, only the other day, I heard of a most poignant
example of it. It was admittedly an extreme case; but extreme cases, like the
peaks of the highest mountains, betray the presence of a range.
The circumstances were briefly these: A man rendered deaf by the War of
Belgian Independence (1914–1918) and the father of two children, a girl and a
boy, found not only that his wife had throughout their married life striven to fix
the children's affection on herself, but also contrived to make her conquest the
more certain by bringing him constantly into contempt. She achieved this end
chiefly by ridiculing him in a tone of voice he could not hear. At last, when

1 I mean by "innocent" here, incapable of doing her harm owing to their ignorance of her
true nature.
2 See her PSYCHOLOGIE DER FRAU, Vol. II, pp. 177–184.

- p. 28 -
his eyes could no longer leave him in any doubt that he was becoming the hourly
butt of his family's derision, he suddenly appreciated the enormity of his wife's
behaviour, and in a fit of blind rage fell upon her and tried to pay her out in blows
for a life's betrayal.
His wife thereupon telephoned to the police and, for his pains, this
unfortunate victim of the first World War was clapped into a lunatic asylum.
But let no one suppose that the wife in this domestic drama was
exceptionally cruel as women go. She merely suffered, perhaps more than usual,
from self-contempt, and therefore required a larger measure of undivided
attachment from her children. If she did not reckon the cost of the means she
adopted to appease her gnawing sense of inferiority, she displayed perhaps less
perspicacity though not more cruelty than the average woman.
(c) In the direction taken by the Feminist Movement when once it had
gathered enough force to make demands upon society and the legislature.
It will be observed that this Movement did not agitate for reforms calculated
to better the lives of the majority of women of normal instincts and constitution.
It made no attempt to exalt the status of the housewife and of domestic duties
along the lines suggested in this volume. 1
It did not try to raise the status of the domestic servant. Nor did it strive to
bring about such changes in our social life as would enable the working man to
earn enough to allow his wife to remain at home. And this despite the fact that a
large number of publications on female labour (often compiled by women
investiga-
 1 See Chapter IV infra.

- p. 29 -
tors) had made it abundantly plain, long before Female Suffrage was granted, that
the average working-class woman preferred to remain at home, and left home
only under the stress of need. 1
Finally — to mention only the more striking features — both before and
after the granting of Female Suffrage there was no organised feminine agitation
to press for immediate measures to reduce child deaths on our roads. And this
despite the fact that before the Second World War over 1,500 children were being
killed every year by motor vehicles. Even to this day no feminine outcry has been
heard against this slaughter of children, although the death rate, in spite of the
reduction of cars, remains alarmingly high. 2
No; there was no appeal to self-esteem, no chance of making women more
conspicuous or more glamorous, in such agitations. The efforts of the
emancipated have all been differently directed, because they were animated, not
by any public spirit, or even maternal devotion, but only by the persistently
gnawing feeling of inferiority. 3
Let anyone impartially examine what the Woman's "Freedom" Movement
has meant to this country, and he will inevitably conclude that it has invariably
spelt female victories in the direction of self aggrandisement,

1 See, for instance, the eloquent Symposium on MARRIED WOMEN'S WORK, edited by
Clementina Black (London, 1915).
2 See DAILY MAIL, 3–9–42. "The number of children killed in road accidents is higher
than in peace time. Every ten minutes of the day a child is knocked down and injured." See also, a
report in THE NORFOLK AND SUFFOLK JOURNAL AND DISS EXPRESS of 23–4–43.
"Road accidents to children, in spite of restrictions on traffic, have increased since the war broke
out. On an average, nearly 100 children are injured every day, 3 or 4 of them fatally. Most
fatalities occurred to children of the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7."
3 See, for instance confirmation of this, Wilma Meikle, op. cit. pp. 11 and 12.

- p. 30 -
public notoriety, and the invasion of glamorous male occupations.
But, once more, let no one suppose that this is either extraordinary or
contrary to what the origins of the Movement might have led any thinker to
expect. For, given the feeling of self-contempt we have been examining, no other
results than those we have seen could possibly have followed from a vociferous
and leading section of English womanhood clamouring for "Freedom."

- p. 31 -
Chapter II
(2) The Influence of the Masculine Accent over our Civilisation, i.e., the
Civilisation of the White Man. 1
Just as our basic philosophy derives from Greece, so does the strong masculine
accent over our civilisation which, of itself, would have sufficed to create
Feminism.
The Greeks had probably been homosexuals for a very long period in their
history, but were certainly ardent homosexuals and shameless defenders of it at
the time when their influence over the White Man's philosophy began to spread
across Europe.
It cannot be too emphatically stated, therefore, that our leading principles in
regard to humanity are all derived from a people who were, from the standpoint
of English Law, criminals, with whom no self-respecting modern European
would have wished to associate.
Not only did the Greeks of the Socratic era disbelieve in any passionate
relationship to woman, but they also hardly thought it possible. In plain English,
women stimulated them less than men. For the really stirring emotions of deep
love, the Greek of the 5th century B.C. and later turned only towards his own sex.
And, remember, it was not the ruck and scum, or the lowest of the Greeks who
were thus disposed, but, as Dr. Licht points out, the best and most exemplary of

1. For a full discussion with documentation of this influence see Part II, Chap. III, of my
CHOICE OF A MATE (London, 1934).

- p. 32 -
the Athenians at the time led the fashion in this depraved taste. 1
Owing to the fact that all the clap-trap about the soul and the superiority of
the soul over the body has come down to us from these same homosexual Greeks,
every effort has been made, as Dr. Licht points out, 2 to suppress the truth about
their homosexuality in all works on classical history, in all encyclopædias and, of
course, in all school manuals, throughout Europe. For, unless it had been hushed
up in the countries where the Socratic philosophy prevails, certain unpleasant
reflexions might have been cast on the religion derived from this philosophy.
My wife, for instance, who went to Girton and studied classics there for
three years, had to be told by me all about Greek homosexuality after she had
come down from the University.
Nor should anyone feel satisfied that he has sufficiently investigated this
question until he has seen my handling of such specious apologists of the 5th
century Greeks as J. A. Symonds and Mahaffy, who have tried to argue, either
that homosexuality was a phenomenon restricted to a few isolated instances, or
else that it was merely an insignificant or transient feature of Greek life. 3
At all events, the fact is established that the Greek of Athens in the 5th
century B.C. — the crucial century as far as our White Man's ideology is
concerned — could obtain little stimulation from women. He sought his
stimulation, therefore, both in art and sex, in the male, or what resembled the
male as closely as possible.

1 SEXUAL LIFE IN ANCIENT GREECE, Pp. 411–412.

 2 Ibid.
3 CHOICE OF A MATE, pp. 349–354.

- p. 33 -
But, as a consequence of this, male characteristics were imparted to females
to make them more attractive. Thus, as I have shown with some detail elsewhere,
1
the leg-torso ratio of the female both in statues and in vase paintings, grew to be
ever more and more that of the male. Indeed, the whole of Greek plastic art,
reveals a gradual increase in the length of the female leg relative to the torso, and
a modification of the female form to approximate to that of the male.
Insensibly, the male standard of bodily beauty became more or less the only
standard. There was no such thing as a beauty of female form that had a quality of
its own.
Given the homosexual bias, this absurdity was at least comprehensible. But,
without it, the absurdity becomes gratuitous, because no argument based on
æsthetics, the laws of proportion, or any other reasoning, can make male beauty
the norm of human beauty.
As well argue that red is more æsthetic than blue, or that a church is more
beautiful than a castle, as claim that the male form is superior to the female. Each
has its peculiar beauty. To begin to compare them and, on any grounds
whatsoever, claim that one excels the other, is at once to be launched on a sea of
nonsense.
The Greeks could, with some show of reason, maintain that they, as
homosexuals, preferred the male form and found the female attractive only when
it approximated to that of the male.
But the sane, the balanced and only tenable position among normal,
heterosexual people, is to regard the male and female forms as unamenable to
comparison as regards degrees of beauty.

1 CHOICE OF A MATE, part II, chap. III.

- p. 34 -
The asumption of any other position provokes the following questions:—
On what grounds is the straighter, more muscular leg of the male, with its
relatively longer femur, the more beautiful? What canon of beauty places it
higher than the female's in the æsthetic scale?
On what grounds is the female's relatively longer back regarded as less
beautiful than the male's?
On what grounds are the female's more rounded thorax and her protuberant
breasts regarded as less beautiful than the male's muscular and breastless chest?
There is no satisfactory answer to these questions. Those who try to defend
the point of view they imply might as well attempt to prove that a horse's head is
more beautiful than a dog's.
But to the ancient Greek such questions presented no difficulty. He would
have answered them readily, with the most elaborate æsthetic arguments,
believing all the while that he was serving truth and not his homosexual bias.
 Unfortunately, with the rest of the rubbishy material that came down to us
from Greece of the 5th and early 4th centuries B.C. we inherited statues of female
forms bearing marked male proportions, together with the bias that lay behind
them.
I am not suggesting that we took over this lumber as people homosexually
minded. I submit only that, as with everything else that came down to us from
these degenerate Greeks, their bias in favour of the male form descended upon us
as axiomatic owing to the authority and dignity time had imparted to everything
connected with Hellenic culture, and owing to

- p. 35 -
the high prestige Europe's religious inheritance necessarily lent to that culture.
Especially in Protestant countries, therefore, which have always been most
subject to the influence of Socrates and the worst in Greece, there arose a
tendency to exalt the "boyish" figure in women, and insensibly to accept a
masculine accent over every aspect of civilisation.
By leading us into the error of favouring women with "boyish" figures,
however, it has encouraged the multiplication of a female type — narrow-hipped,
long legged and generally masculinoid — which has inclined us ever more and
more towards a Feministic or virago civilisation, especially favourable to
masculine women. But, more important still, by placing a masculine accent over
our civilisation, it has tended to render wholly feminine things of little interest, of
little dignity, and little value.
This Greek sophistry — for that is all it is — can be traced right through the
ages. It inaugurated a stampede in the direction of masculinity which, though it
may at times have abated, has never entirely ceased Milton, who was much
influenced by Greek philosophy and the Hellenic point of view generally,
unconsciously voices this Greek bias in favour of male beauty, although I feel
sure he was no homosexual.
In Paradise Lost, after describing Eve's contemplation of her own image in
a lake, and her enchantment over it, he makes her admit on meeting Adam,

"How beauty is excell'd by manly grace, 1

And wisdom, which alone is truly fair."

1 IV, 489–491.

- p. 36 -
Later on, in Adam's words to Raphael, the inferiority of female beauty is
again suggested:—

"For well I understand in the prime end 1

Of Nature her the inferior, in the mind
And inward faculties, which most excel;
In outward also her resembling less
His image who made us both."
 Thus, here, Milton's excuse for placing Eve's outward form below Adam's is
not a conscious Greek bias, but a rationalisation based on the masculinity of God.
Innumerable instances of the same kind could be taken from English, French
and German literature, showing the dominance of the Greek masculine accent
over our culture. But I have space only for outstanding examples.
Goethe, greatly influenced by Winckelmann, the famous authority on Greek
Art, betrayed a similar unconscious bias in favour of male beauty. Nor need I
prove, I hope, that Goethe was never suspected of homosexuality. In conversation
with Friedrich von Müller, he declared that "man is, after all, very much more
beautiful, more excellent, and more perfect than woman," 2 and not long
afterwards, in a short but mostly absurd diatribe against women, Schopenhauer
makes these quite indefensible statements:—
"Only a male intellect befogged by sexual desire could ever call this small,
narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex beautiful. . . . It would be
much more justifiable to call the female the unæsthetic rather than the beautiful
sex." 3

1 VIII, 540–544.
2 UNTERHALTUNGEN MIT DEM KANZLER FRIEDRICH VON MÜLLER (Stuttgart,
1898. p. 231).
3 PARERGA UND PARALIPOMENA, Vol. II, Chap. 27; Über das Weib.

- p. 37 -
Now here we have an otherwise intelligent and cultivated man so deeply and
unconsciously dominated by the Greek masculine accent over our civilisation
that, for the reasons stated, he calls woman's form unæsthetic, as if, for all the
world, man's form had established a rigid canon of beauty from which any
departure constituted hideousness!
On no more justifiable grounds it would be equally permissible to argue that
the female form had established a norm or canon from which the male departure
constituted hideousness. Thus, the deliberate choice by these men, and by scores
of others, of the male form as the more beautiful, can have been due only to an
influence which they felt, but of the existence of which they were largely
unconscious. This influence was the Greek homosexual tradition.
A hundred years later, in spite of the lip-service paid to woman's beauty by
the designation of her sex as "fair," even science revealed this same subjection to
Greek influence. As I have never believed that scientific men are more free than
the rest of mankind from the imponderable moral and other influences of their
Age (despite all their boasted objectivity), this adoption by scientists of the Greek
view of the male form never surprised me. But it needs explaining, and is hard to
forgive.
Dr. Heilborn, for instance in a comparatively recent work, has the following
gem of unscientific nonsense masquerading as a sober scientific finding:—
"The natural knock-knees of the woman are, æsthetically, the great blemish
in the figure of the small, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped and short-legged sex."
1

1 THE OPPOSITE SEXES (London. 1917. p. 14).

- p. 38 -
Why a blemish? — unless, my dear doctor, you, a scientist, are
unconsciously labouring under the Greek homosexual bias, and regard the
straighter legs of the male as the canon of beauty.
I cannot quote all the examples of similar blindness, so must limit myself in
conclusion to the statement of one who is generally regarded as England's most
authoritative sexologist.
Writing on this very point, Havelock Ellis, said: "This obliquity of the legs is
the most conspicuous defect of the feminine form in the erect position." 1
Can it be wondered at that the gratuitous masculine accent implied in these
judgments infected the attitude of the general population including, of course,
women?
Besides inducing those women who could boast of any taste to wish to
resemble men in form, it necessarily gave them a bias against all things feminine.
It established what I have elsewhere termed a "monomorphic" view of the sexes,
and it was in accordance with this monomorphic view that all questions relating
to the sexes soon came to be judged. That is to say, this masculine accent, by
urging women to favour everything that was stamped with the hall mark of
maleness, whether in the realm of habits, occupations or looks, reinforced the
claim to sex-equality already based on Socratic teaching.
Was a particular practice, or habit, or pastime, suitable for men? If this
question could be answered in the affirmative, then it was assumed that these
things were also suitable for women.
In this way, the Greek masculine bias spread to every department of our
lives.

1 MAN AND WOMAN (London, 1904, p. 50).

- p. 39 -
Consider, for instance, higher education! In the middle of last century this
matter was much debated by the Feminists of the period in its relation to women,
and there grew up a powerful movement to secure the benefits of Higher
Education for girls, which was supported by people such as Emily Davies, Mrs.
T. H. Green, Mrs. Creighton, the Hon. Mrs. Edward Talbot, Miss Milman, Miss
Wordsworth, Miss Anne Jemina Clough, Madame Bodichon, George Eliot, Prof.
T. H. Green, Dr. Harper, Prof. Rolleston, Thorold Rogers, S. H. Butcher, Dr.
Mackarness, Mr. Frank Paget, Mark Pattison, and Prof. and Mrs. Sidgwick — to
mention only the more prominent.
All these people were either parsons, parson's sons or wives, Liberals, and
anything but realists. They had all had Socrates poured in torrents over them from
their earliest childhood. The fact that they were unaware of it, and imagined that
their monomorphic and bodiless outlook was the product of their unaided and
original cogitations, only shows how unconscious most people are of the early
conditioning of the "personal" opinions they hold in their maturity.
They all became founders or patrons of Colleges for Women, and Henry
Sidgwick, whose father was a Church of England parson, no doubt thoroughly
saturated with Platonism, actually founded Newnham College, Cambridge.
They did not, like rational beings, set out to supply a niche only for
exceptional women whose inferior sexual endowment made them predestined
neuters. They set out to provide an appeal and a standard for all women — at
least of their own class, and to invite and encourage them to embark on a career
of Higher Education as a routine practice.

- p. 40 -
If men could be undergraduates between 18 and 23, why not women? Was it
good for men? Then it must be good for women! And this company behind
Girton, Newnham, Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall went in honour to their
graves!
What concern was it of theirs that two of the greatest obstetricians in the
country set a limit to the age when a first labour could follow a favourable and
normal course? 1
Even if this piece of information was not available to them at this time, there
is no evidence that they tried, before starting their campaign, to collect what
information there was on the subject. There is not even any evidence that they
ever thought of this possible objection to their schemes. In fact, I believe it may
be truthfully stated that never once did it occur to them to inquire whether the
best and normal girls between 18 and 23 would be benefited or damaged, in their
bodily aspects, by the programme they were promoting. 2
This is a severe indictment, but it is a just one.
They were actuated only by two ideas:—
"What is good for the male is good for the female."
"The later sweet innocence learns the body side of female life the better!"
To delay marriage for the young female, therefore, could never have struck
them as unwise. On the con-

1 See previous Chapter, p. 26.

2 I do not refer here to another aspect of the assimilation of the female to the male, i.e., in the
matter of pursuing the same sports; but, it is an important aspect of the influence of the male bias
in our civilization, and I have dealt with it elsewhere. See WOMAN: A VINDICATION and THE
TRUTH ABOUT CHILDBIRTH.

- p. 41 -
trary, like the well-meaning ass quoted in the last chapter, they thought it all to
the good.
True, not all girls go to the University! But those who do set the fashion.
And if in England today the average age of women at marriage is two and a half
years later than the last possible year for a favourable first labour, it is due chiefly
to our nineteenth century Socratics. Although believing that they acted and
thought along original lines, they were really dominated by the body despising
bias and the acute masculine accent over civilization.
The classes that did not send their daughters to Newnham or similar places
saw to it that they went to work and were equipped for remunerative
employment, and pursued these ends with much greater resolution than they
applied to getting their girls married.
When, therefore, among those who did ultimately marry, childbirth
difficulties naturally multiplied, the cause was sought in every possible
circumstance except in the fact that marriage had been unduly delayed. Not until I
published my Truth About Childbirth was this major cause brought prominently
to light, and then the book was ignored by all the papers!
Nor do I exaggerate in pointing to the imitation of the girls of the wealthier
classes by the classes below, for an independent scientific female witness bears
my statement out.
"The majority, no doubt, of wage-earning and professional women do
ultimately marry," says Dr. Laura Hutton, "but there is no doubt that their
professional interests, together with their relative, if not absolute

- p. 42 -
economic independence and freedom, do tend to delay marriage." 1
The cruel consequences of all this delay in marriage, as well as of the
frequent celibacy among girls normally endowed for motherhood, but diverted to
other interests until it is too late to change, will be found fully described in my
various books. I am here merely stating the ideas and principles behind the
Feminist Movement.
Another flagrant example of the masculine accent over our culture and the
monomorphic bias it creates, is the Birth Control Movement, which has aimed at
securing for women the male's adaptation to sex, and at warding off the so-called
menace of over-population, without once allowing for the special needs and
functions of the female body.
Seeing that woman is sexually potent from her fifteenth to her forty-sixth to
fiftieth year, the Birth Controllers, by wishing to limit her to two or three
children, condemn her to whole decades during which she cannot function
normally as a female at all. Satisfied that their methods secure a normal sexual
life for man, they overlooked or deliberately neglected the fact that the sexual
cycles of man and woman differ. For while the man's begins and ends with sexual
congress, woman's begins with sexual congress and ends normally only with the
weaning of the child.
It was surely bad enough when ignorant laymen advocated Birth Control
indiscriminately, irrespective of whether a woman was or was not normally
equipped. But when the medical profession took the monomorphic view, it
became a scandal. Few people,

1 THE SINGLE WOMAN AND HER EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS (London 1935, p. 3).

- p. 43 -
however, apart from myself, appear to appreciate this.
Two instances of this monomorphic view among scientific men will suffice.
Four doctors — John Ellison, Aubrey Goodwin, Charles W. Read and
Carnac Rivett — all gynaecologists of note — in a book on sexual morality, make
this extraordinary statement:—
"Men and women who wish to marry, and desire to remain childless on the
grounds of either finance or a distaste for children, must be free to do so. From
the purely medical aspect they will remain healthier and therefore more useful
members of the State, if they are allowed to live a normal sexual life, than they
will if their sexual activities are prohibited." 1
What does, what can "normal" mean in this context? There is no such thing
as a normal sexual life for women without child-bearing. The passage, therefore,
is unworthy even of an intelligent layman, and is all the more disquieting seeing
that it hails from a quarter claiming objectivity and expecting confidence because
it is objective.
But it reveals the unwitting subjection of four medical men to the influence
of the masculine accent over our civilization. Because the man's sexual life is
normal with Birth Control, everything is normal!
A still more flagrant example of this, however, occurs in the writings of
Havelock Ellis, the sexologist who enjoyed more popularity and prestige than any
other scientific authority of his Age. He actually said:—
"The method of birth-control by one of the contraceptive measures is the one
and only method which places in the hands of the whole population possessed of
ordinary care and providence the complete power

1 SEX ETHICS (London, 1936, P. 36). The italics are mine A.M.L.

- p. 44 -
to regulate, limit, or, if necessary altogether prevent, the production of offspring,
while yet enabling the functions of married life to be exercised." 1
Whose functions of married life? Obviously only the man's! For you cannot
"altogether prevent" offspring and enable the functions of married life for women
to be exercised! Thus we again find the unconscious submission to the
monomorphic bias in a scientific mind.
How could laymen fail to argue that what was good for the male was also
good for the female, if accredited scientists led the way?
This lapse on the part of Havelock Ellis, moreover, is the more odd, and the
more conspicuously betrays the unconsciousness, and therefore the insidiousness,
of this masculine accent over our lives, seeing that no one could have stated more
explicitly than he has done the masculine bias in the Feminist Movement.
"In England," he says, "by a consciously perverted form of sexual attraction,
women were so fascinated by the glamour that surrounded men that they desired
to suppress or forget all the facts of organic constitution which made them unlike
men, counting their glory as their shame; and sought the same education as men,
the same occupations as men, even the same sports." 2
 To this extent is it possible for an Englishman to seal up his ideas in separate
watertight compartments! Had he once allowed the thought in the above
paragraph to merge into his discussion of Birth Control, he would have seen the
incongruity of the latter.
In such an atmosphere, with the masculine bias cropping up everywhere,
could our young women

l EUGENICS REVIEW. April, 1917. The italics are mine. A.M.L.

2 STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX, Vol. IV, p. 4.

- p. 45 -
themselves possibly fail to feel doubtful about the desirability of being women?
Can it be wondered at that, with brassieres to flatten their breasts, if these happen
to be normal, with heavy boots, tailor-made clothes, slacks whenever possible,
slimming and hardening sports, they tried to pass off as youths, or at least as fit
for the life of youths?
Olive Schreiner, who gives abundant evidence of her resentment at being a
woman, makes her heroine, in The Story of an African Farm, exclaim, "I will give
it [£50 having been already mentioned as the price of the ring] to the first man
who tells me he would like to be a woman." 1
How bitterly this reveals her dissatisfaction with her womanhood!
If England's every other achievement is ever forgotten, surely her fame will
survive on this score alone — that she contrived to wean her women from their
satisfaction with being women, and from their principal and most natural
adaptation. It was a mighty feat! That is why even a critical posterity may forget
every fact about the English except this one.
Everything seemed against their achieving it: the fact that women's
equipment for reproduction and sexual interests is elaborate and its impetus
insistent, rhythmical and perpetually refreshed; the fact that, correlated with this
elaborate apparatus, there were instincts which would not be denied and put off,
and the fact that Nature as I have shown, so sternly insists on normal functioning
in them, that she punishes unmercifully those who think they can flout her!
Everything, everything was against the Anglo-Saxon of the last hundred and fifty
years! And yet, without

1 Part II, Chap. IV.

- p. 46 -
any malice prepense, and with her men armed only with a genius for blundering
incompetence and tepidity in sexuality, England set out to wean her womenfolk
from their traditional, their age-long, their prehistoric, their only adaptation, and
succeeded beyond the limits of the most ambitious dreams!

- p. 47 -
 Chapter III
(3) The Influence of Men; (a) Those Men whose Average State is one of Partial
or Complete Sex-Starvation.

The state in which men are most prone to sentimentalize over women, especially
young and attractive women, and to exalt them unduly, is one of sex-starvation or
tumescence, acute or sub-acute.
The chaste young Englishman who, in the plenitude of his sexual potency,
and half-mad with longing, introduces to his horrified family a fright of a girl
whom he declares to be the greatest beauty on earth, is in a condition which
totally unfits him to judge correctly any young woman whatsoever.
As most parents know to their cost, to remonstrate with him while he
remains in this condition, is not only futile, but also dangerous; for it tends only
to increase his illusion. Besides, it threatens him with the loss of what his
instincts tell him is the only means of relief for his tumescent state.
Marriage in such circumstances, although unfortunately frequently allowed
today, is likely to be at best a failure, more often a disaster. For it is not love, but
tumescence that is blind.
The extraordinary feature of these cases is that, while the elders in the family
concerned are often revolted by an infatuation which, regarded soberly, looks like
lunacy, they rarely, if ever, ascribe the anomaly to its proper cause. They think
the youth stupid, blind, wilful and weak; but never appreciate

- p. 48 -
that if they themselves and the customs of their country had not been bent on
keeping him chaste long after he began to boil with sexual desire, he would never
have been capable of so grossly exaggerating the qualities of a particular sex
object, as to present his family with a slut, a vixen, a common harlot, or at best a
scare-crow, as his future wife.
Now in less extreme forms, this situation is very common in English
families, and it is deplorable; for the subjective momentum, driving a tumescent
and chaste male to transfigure a sexual object, is unfair both to himself and to the
woman he selects. The ultimate and inevitable disillusionment is bound to be
commensurate with the degree of transfiguration which his tumescence has
induced.
But this kind of violent youthful tumescence has only a local influence on
the world. Its worst consequence is to add to the number of disastrous marriages.
There is, however, another kind of tumescence, less acute, chronic, and
almost endemic in England and countries like England, which has a much wider
influence, and it is peculiar to men in early middle age and for a decade or so
after.
It is the outcome of monogamic conventions in a society where the males are
either too moral, too much wedded to safety, too respectable, or too cowardly, to
attempt any extra-matrimonial liaison after their wives have ceased to stimulate
them.
 Monogamy has this fundamental flaw — that it makes no provision against
the inevitable decline in sexual stimulation which supervenes between the parties
to a marriage. In time, therefore, a twofold process sets in, which in hundreds of
thousands of

- p. 49 -
cases, operates against complete sexual relief at least for the male.
For, on the one hand, the sexual object, the wife, insensibly loses the power
of stimulating him and, on the other hand, as age advances, his sexual powers
demand not a diminishing but an increasing stimulus. 1
Thus, it is not a matter of the gradual vanishing of one point, as when a train
leaves a station. It is the gradual vanishing of two points in opposite directions, as
when trains pass one another, leaving an ever wider and wider void.
In the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of middle class families
must have felt the effects of this process — the middle aged males, too
respectable, or too religious, or too timid to venture outside the matrimonial
alcove for their sexual satisfaction, must after twenty-five years of marriage, have
lived, year in and year out, in a state of more or less chronic tumescence. 2
And since men in this state tend to sentimentalize over women and to exalt
them, and, what is even more important, to find "spiritual" satisfaction in having
young women about them, there grew up in the nation a powerful body of
otherwise sane men who, obsessed only by their unbalanced emotions, were
prepared to make every conceivable mistake in regard to the position of women.
From the men who were content with immoderately exalting women, to the
men who, if they had to choose between a male or female staff, would invariably
decide

1 See Appendix II.

2 Among schizothymes — i.e., the type which tends to become dominant in urban
communities — this condition becomes all the more intolerable seeing that in them adequate sex-
stimulation means something much more potent and varied than it does to cyclothymes.

- p. 50 -
on the latter, there were, of course, many gradations; but the essential fact is that
all these men were morbidly sensitive to female charms, could not judge soberly
and sanely when confronted by a woman, and were therefore in danger of being
unduly influenced or controlled by women. A study of police. County Court and
High Court cases reveals this tumescent tenderness for women even on our
magisterial and judicial Bench, and a case always has to be exceedingly black
against a woman if she is to lose against a male plaintiff.
As Montesquieu so wisely remarks through the mouth of the Oriental,
Usbek, "la pluralité des femmes nous sauve de leur empire; elle tempère la
violence de nos désirs." 1
In other words, a tumescent man, no matter what his age, must ultimately
fall under the empire of women. If, after twenty-five years of marriage, when his
wife has long ceased to stimulate him adequately, he is chronically tumescent,
this merely places him chronically under the empire of women.
Now it is probably true to say that almost the whole of our middle-aged and
respectable male population in the nineteenth century, and the majority of it
today, could be described as more or less tumescent for the reasons given above,
and there is no doubt that this powerful phalanx of men went, and still go, a long
way towards helping Feminism and its aims to be realized.
For many of these men promoted Feminism, not only in their offices and
industries, or in their private lives, by supporting the Feminist programme, but
also by advocating and defending the Feminist Cause as publicists.

1 LETTRES PERSANES, LVI.

- p. 51 -
But, just as mild chronic tumescence in the middle-aged married male of the
middle classes, makes him susceptible to women's empire, so the total and
persistent chastity of males, who for some psychological reason are impotent,
makes them both subservient to women and inclined to worship them.
Our John Stuart Mill, Ruskin and Buckle are merely outstanding examples
of this type, and we have only to note the faulty, impassioned reasoning of a book
like The Subjection of Women, or the deleterious apotheosizing of women in
Sesame and Lilies, or the rapture thinly disguised beneath scientific terminology
of The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge, in order to appreciate
how unrelieved tumescence can cloud the minds even of intelligent and practical
thinkers.
For Mill was a logician. The faulty reasoning in The Subjection of Women is,
1
therefore, unpardonable. As for Ruskin, anyone who can read Sesame and Lilies
(Lecture II) without feeling the proximity of a ruttish, sentimental and pent up
goat, must be singularly insensitive.
Other strange and suspicious characters of the same kind are Condorcet,
Tolstoy, and Ibsen. All of them were unbalanced by abnormal features in their
sexual life, and to examine their careers is to confirm this view. 2
Men such as these, and many more who could be

1 See my analysis of only certain parts of it in WOMAN: A VINDICATION, pp. 282–290.

2 For a review of the type these six men represented, see my Man: An Indictment, Chap. V.
But it should always be remembered that male impotence does not necessarily imply abnormal
genital equipment. Where male secondary characteristics arc normal, as they were in these six
men, it may simply mean failure to achieve a heterosexual union.

- p. 52 -
named in connexion with Anglo-Saxon Feminism, became, as it were, the
bellwethers of the army of inarticulate tumescents, who helped to foster
Feminism throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and after. Their
often unobtrusive but steady influence continued to create the state of affairs
which, although now "quite natural" to all who are used to it, must appear to the
non-tumescent males of other climes and cultures little less than insane.
 Further light on the relation of chronic tumescence to the extravagant
exaltation of the female by the male is shed if we consider what happens in
countries where women are scarce, and where the majority of men are
consequently forced either to celibacy or else to an attitude approaching servility
to woman in order to obtain a wife.
In Canada and the United States of America, where these conditions
prevailed for a long time, the exaltation of the female reached such fantastic
heights that, even to the present day, this attitude has left its stamp on the
manners and customs of the Anglo-Saxon Canadians and Americans.
As late as Dickens' first visit to America in 1842, the tradition must still have
been very strong, for in his American Notes, 1 the great novelist, describing
railways in the U.S.A., wrote: "If a lady take a fancy to any male passenger's seat,
the gentleman who accompanies her gives him notice of the tact, and he
immediately vacates it with great politeness."
This is the sort of thing that occurs automatically under conditions in which
the male, for what reason soever, is kept in a chronically tumescent or sexually

1 Chap. 4, Para. 6. See also Helen Jerome's THE SECRET OF WOMAN (London, 1923), p.
122.

- p. 53 -
unsatisfied state, and as the conditions of a Colonial Empire are commonly of this
kind, Anglo-Saxon colonial civilisation has necessarily made a heavy
contribution to Feminist ideology.
(b) The influence of men who know nothing about women's nature.
The number of men in Puritanical countries who are ignorant of the
physiology and general nature of woman, is fabulous. Even among the educated
class they are the rule rather than the exception, and when John Stuart Mill quite
rightly acknowledged that "an Englishman is ignorant respecting human nature," 1
he stated a truth which covers my own claim that, as a rule, the Englishman
knows nothing of woman's nature.
He rarely gets further than to regard woman as "a sort of queer man," as an
English doctor quite rightly puts it. 2 The result is that not only can women
deceive him daily and even hourly about themselves, but also he is prepared to
accept any kind of story, however absurd, that relates to women's sexual life.
To mention only one example of this, I once had the astonishing experience
of hearing from an educated English married man of thirty that, in the sexual
embrace, the uterus was always penetrated! And he happened to be a man not
unversed in science and not unfamiliar with sexological literature!
Now, with men of this kind, any hoax, any cock-and-bull story about women
and their sexual life, is likely to convince, and if women leaders of the Feminist
Movement have harped so much on the string of men's having all the enjoyment
and women

1 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN, Chap. III, Sect. 14.

 2 G. T. Wrench, M.D, THE MASTERY OF LIFE, p. 247.

- p. 54 -
all the pain of the sexual life, it is because they knew they could reckon on this
kind of ignoramus by the hundred thousand, especially in the educated middle
classes.
It was important, as part of the plot to gain power over the docile and
ignorant English male, to give him a guilty conscience, and how could this be
done more speedily than by labouring women's purely passive, non participating
and painful part in venery?
Thus among hundreds of other voices, male and female, crying the same
stupid and inaccurate slogan, Mrs. Bertrand Russell exclaims:— "What is man's
part in sex but a perpetual waving of flags and blowing of trumpets and
avoidance of the fighting?" 1
I have yet to meet the middle-class Englishman who is not taken in by this
nonsense, and a graphic — aye, almost photographic writer like Kipling, who
knew his English middle classes well, is bound to reveal this aspect of the
cultured Englishman who feels a guilty conscience towards his wife owing to her
"unhappy" share in this rather "degrading" side of life.
In The Story of the Gadsbys, Kipling describes Captain Gadsby, a typical
Englishman, as consistently calling his fluffy little wife, "poor little woman," and
when she tells him she is going to have a baby, Kipling makes him exclaim, "Oh,
I'm a brute — a pig, a bully, and a blackguard, my poor, poor darling!"
Like the rest of Englishmen, he believed that he had had all the pleasure and
she was going to have only the pain! His exclamation is but the expression of a
guilty conscience!
How easy must Englishwomen have found it to lead such a man by the nose!

1 HYPATIA, p. 42.

- p. 55 -
When, however, added to this complete and infantile ignorance concerning
the female sexual life, there is the customary gross exaggeration of the pains of
normal childbirth, the constant state of mind of the average young or middle-aged
English husband is one of such complete moral prostration before his wife that it
is astonishing that he even contrives somehow to get his own way about such a
harmless pastime as smoking a pipe in his own house.
This exaggeration of the pains and dangers of child-bearing is acknowledged
even by the more enlightened members of the medical profession themselves. For
instance. Dr. Dale Logan has said: "The dangers and difficulties of general
midwifery practice have been magnified out of all proportion by specialists and
public health officials," and "they have put the fear of death into every child-
bearing woman." 1 Whilst a member of Parliament, Mr. Janner (Stepney) was
once compelled to lodge a protest against it: "It is extremely important that the
impression should not be created that child-bearing is in itself dangerous." 2
With this scare in official circles, the layman could hardly be expected to
take a sane and sober view of normal parturition as a natural and therefore
harmless — nay, beneficial function for normal women. The trouble is that, with
all this scientific and popular panic about a perfectly normal process, no wise
corrective is ever circulated to the effect that dangers as

1 LANCET, 17–11–34, pp. 1141–1142.

2 Daily Press, 8–7–35. When, in my TRUTH ABOUT CHILDBIRTH, I stated that English
women were often terrified at the thought of child-bearing, this was stoutly denied in many
quarters. It is only when one of this multitude of terrified women happens exceptionally to attract
attention by appearing in the Courts that the facts about this state of mind comes to light. See the
case tried by Mr. Justice Collins, at Leeds, on May 22nd, 1946, and reported in the Press of May
33rd.

- p. 56 -
well as difficulties in childbirth occur only when the conditions are abnormal.
The consequence is no layman or woman ever knows or is ever told what are the
normal conditions under which childbirth can be expected to run an uneventful
and easy course.
But it is not in the interests of the vociferous Feminist-minded women of
England to hint at the normal conditions; for, by making motherhood appear
always and in all circumstances "a heroic sacrifice," they were much more likely,
in these days, to exalt than to debase woman.
They could confidently stake on no layman's having the acumen to infer that,
if a natural function had so far deteriorated in large numbers of modern women, it
might possibly be due either to defects of conformation in those thus tortured,
maimed or else killed by the process, or else to vicious habits of feeding, or to the
average age at which women start child bearing having been too much. advanced.
Hundreds of instances could be quoted from modern fiction in which
childbirth is described as nothing but a superhuman ordeal. I have yet to come
across a novel in which a confinement is described, where the heroine does not
suffer the tortures of the damned. And since our fiction is but the reflection of our
everyday life, it is assumed that the picture gives a fair representation of the facts.
Never a word in these books, however, of the abnormal conditions which
lead to all this torture. On the contrary! The object seems to be to make the
torture itself appear a normal consequence of the end of pregnancy!
So terrible, so disillusioning is childbirth alleged to be, that a woman, having
once had a child, is supposed

- p. 57 -
to be able to see no more beauty, no more poetry, in existence.
Thus, Mary Webb, in a novel which, psychologically speaking, is false to
the roots, observes: "A woman must have had an amazing genius if she is still a
poet after childbirth." 1 Why? —
Now the Englishman, with his habitual ignorance of human nature and,
above all, of woman's nature, could hardly be expected to see through all this fog
of misrepresentation and false innuendo; and since my laborious efforts to
enlighten him, especially in books like The Truth About Childbirth, are carefully
kept from his notice by a Feminist-ruled Press, he falls an easy prey to the
Feminist plot to exalt woman and to implant a guilty conscience in man by means
of all this parade of female martyrdom in motherhood. The anger shown by
Feminists at the mere suggestion that the pangs of normal childbirth are
exaggerated, reveals how precious to their Movement is the legend of woman's
sacrifice in motherhood. 2
The masculine accent alone over our civilisation inclines the modern man to
take a pessimistic view of pregnancy and childbirth. For, seeing that he looks on
woman merely as "a queer sort of man," and is usually quite incapable of an
objective outlook, he contemplates a pregnant woman through the single spy-
glass of monomorphism, and arguing how terrible it would be for him to be in
this condition, assumes that for a totally different kind of animal, adapted to the
condition, it must be terrible too!
As well argue that it must be painful for the

1 GONE TO EARTH, Chap. XXVI. But for a general summary of all the misconceptions
about women in the novel, see Chap. XXXIII of the book.
2 See Appendix III for an example of this anger.

- p. 58 -
rhinoceros to bear that objectionable horn on the bridge of his nose!
As for ever supposing that it may be good for a normal woman to function
normally by bearing children — his reasoning never reaches this lofty plane of
common sense.
Now this gullibility of modern Anglo-Saxon males, this lack of any power of
knowledgeable criticism of the Feminist hoax of "female sacrifice," has of course
been an important trump card in the hand of the Feminists, and it has been played
with an effrontery which was equalled only by the denseness it had to encounter.
"But surely many women die in childbirth!" I hear these same Englishmen
protest in bewildered tones.
Of course they do — just as many men die of heart disease, of blood-
poisoning, or of pneumonia. The deaths in childbed have no more necessary
relation to normal parturition, than the deaths from disease have to normal male
existence.
I think I have proved satisfactorily in my Truth About Childbirth that both
the risks, the difficulties and the agonies of parturition are abnormal, and are
encountered only where the conditions are abnormal. And my book has not been
answered. 1
Meanwhile Englishmen, as well as English women, continue to grow lyrical
when they write or speak of woman's "supreme sacrifice," and among urban
clerks, civil servants, and other stylite saints of our artificial civilisation, who
never have the opportunity of watching even a healthy animal like the cat or a
sanely-nurtured bitch, give birth to young, gulp down a lump

1 See Appendix III.

 - p. 59 -
in their throats when they think of their guilty joy and woman's cruel suffering
through sex!
(c) The influence of fathers of daughters (especially in England).
The influence of the average father of a family in England, in aiding and
abetting the aims of Feminism, is another feature of our society which, although
obvious enough to anyone who has closely observed the English of the middle
classes, is consistently overlooked, even by those who have had to suffer from its
consequences.
Assuming, as I am afraid we must, that in all countries like England, where
Puritanism, strict respectability, and the fear of unpleasant consequences, in
hundreds of thousands of cases, keep a man of early middle age and beyond, after
twenty-five years of marriage, in a state of chronically mild tumescence, it
follows that there must inevitably arise between his adult daughters and himself a
relationship in which unconsciously he cannot help wishing to play the part of
lover.
It is concealed beneath a thousand conventions. It is suspected by no one,
least of all, as a rule, by himself and his daughters. But that it exists is, I submit,
unquestionable.
Very occasionally, a fearless writer like myself, or like Rudolf Besier, makes
so bold as to call attention to it in a romance. 1 But in the private life of most
English families it is noticeable in the stubborn and often unaccountable
opposition such fathers will offer

1 See my own THE GODDESS THAT GREW UP (Hutchinson 1922), and Rudolf Besier's
THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET. When my novel appeared it was actually read by the
man who is the father in the story, and yet he never saw that it related to him. This shows how
utterly unconscious is the whole complex of emotions in such cases.

- p. 60 -
to their daughters' marriages, especially their early marriages.
On the Continent, such fathers are saved from a sentimental attitude towards
their daughters by having a mistress of their daughters' age. But in England, at
least in the middle classes, it is "not the thing," with the result that, quite
unconsciously, the father tends to regard as a rival any young man who crosses
the threshold of his house.
In the working classes, the situation again and again leads to prosecutions
for incest, 1 or it culminates in the appearance of the young couple before a
magistrate with the object of forcing the obstructive father to compliance. 2
But in the respectable middle classes it more often leads to a policy dictated
chiefly by the father's preference for an alternative. Seeing that it pains him less
to see his beloved daughter or daughters wither in an office, at a typewriter, or in
a laboratory, rather than in the arms of a desirable man junior to himself, he
becomes an ardent and indefatigable promoter of the very worst aims of
Feminism. He concentrates, in fact, a hundred times more energy and spends a
hundred times more treasure on preparing his daughters for a career than on
trying to get them married.
He will rationalise this policy to make it appear his "unselfish" effort to
secure his children's best interests. He will refer to "these precarious times," and
the need of making some provision for his daughters' future. "After all, they
cannot all find

1 Teste THE NEWS OF THE WORLD (passim).

2 Ibid.

- p. 61 -
husbands! What if I died? I must die some time!"
He may also point to financial independence as being in itself a good thing.
It will never occur to him to devote some of the money otherwise spent on his
daughter's expensive post-school education to supplying her with a dowry which
would ease the way to marriage for her.
Meanwhile, behind all his self-deceiving wiles, the psychologist will be able
to discern the unsatisfied pangs of a chronically tumescent man of middle age,
unconsciously enamoured of the young women of his household, and secretly
rejoicing that their best years are being consumed in some sterile and
remunerative occupation.
True, the girls themselves, by leaving a home which young men are
discouraged to visit, will often by so doing find the opportunity their jealous
father has denied them.
But this is outside the parental scheme and, when it occurs, comes as a
shock.
The other alternative, less frequently adopted, because much more difficult
to achieve, will consist in the policy of deliberately attaching his daughters or
daughter very closely to himself, while at the same time allowing only the most
conspicuous caricatures of maleness in the form of young men to eat at his table
and consort with his offspring.
I have, however, seen this policy pursued with success in one or two
families. The essential conditions are, the father's exceptionally happy
endowments as regards appearance, manliness, and capacity for good-fellowship;
wealthy circumstances, so that the daughters have the means to ride, to pursue
expensive hobbies, and to sublimate sex along religious, sporting

- p. 62 -
or artistic lines, and a rigorous exclusion by the vigilant male parent of all young
men who might be expected to compete with him in natural advantages.
This policy contributes less actively to the Feminist programme. It does so
only in this sense, that the daughters in such cases are usually pronounced
androphobics, adoring only their sire and despising the rest of mankind. They are
also usually masculine in their tastes and habits.
The part this factor — the Anglo-Saxon father — has played in aiding
Anglo-Saxon Feminism is incalculable. And when one bears in mind that the
secret and unconscious motivation of a parent of this sort is often so powerful that
he will pay lip-service to Anti-Feminism in conversation and, with the most hide-
bound Schopenhauerians, inveigh against women M.P.s and women in public
life, it will be seen how deeply and insensibly this element, consisting of the
chronically tumescent English father, must have helped, usually quite
unwittingly, the most ambitious aspirations of the Feminists in all Puritanical
countries.
(d) The influence of the degeneracy of the male on the progress of
Feminism.
(1) Since each sex has components of the other in its constitution, it is
important, if happy adaptation is to be achieved, that each sex's elements of the
other should be made and kept recessive — the male's female components should
be kept recessive and the female's male components.
Environment tends to pick out or leave dormant the potentialities of organic
beings. For instance, a rat in a steel cage is never stimulated by its environment to
act as a rodent at all, and if it were, it would be

- p. 63 -
thwarted. Likewise a tame rabbit, kept in a wooden hutch, is never stimulated by
its environment to burrow, and if it were, it would find in its environment no
possibility of doing so.
Environment, therefore, does not create anything in us, nor does it put
anything into us that was not there already. What it does do is either to stimulate
or leave dormant what is already in us.
An environment for the male, therefore, which stimulates his dormant
female components, would be bad, because it would tend to make him the less fit
to act as a male when the occasion demanded. Conversely, and in spite of all
Feminist educationalists may say, an environment which stimulated the dormant
male components in the female would be bad, because by bringing out her
potential masculinity it would make her less fit to act perfectly as a female when
life necessitated her seeking the female adaptation.
A sound society, therefore, concerned about the happiness of its members,
would devise such environments for the male and female respectively as would
maintain in a recessive state the components which each had of the other sex.
Part of the normal adult's environment, however, is a member of the
opposite sex. This is so the moment normal sexual intercourse, no matter how it
may be regulated, begins.
Supposing each party to a sexual relationship of this sort (whether you call it
marriage, or "collage," or boredom à deux, no matter!) has been properly
educated, that is, in an environment where all the dormant components of the
other sex have been made and kept recessive, the best environment for each, in

- p. 64 -
order to maintain this recessive condition, is a member of the opposite sex in
whom the components proper to his or her sex are all in a state of high potency.
In other words, the male components of the female, kept recessive by her
education, if it has been sane, find their most effective check in adulthood, and
their , most effective further cause of recession, when confronted by similar
components of a higher potency, all well developed (if his education has been
sane), in her sexual partner.
Given, however, any uncertainty, any feebleness or any wavering in his male
components, and an environment will at once be created in which her male
components will find a chance of assertion. This will be all the more readily
seized, the less they have been kept in a recessive state, and gradually the whole
of the proper balance between the sexes will be disturbed and made what it is in
effect in hundreds of thousands of modern English homes — one in which the
male is constantly finding his empire invaded by his female companion.
Conversely, the male's recessive femaleness is best kept in check by the
female components which he should find in a far higher degree of potency and in
a far higher state of development in his female companion if she has been sanely
educated. If, however, she is already an unbalanced female herself and, owing to
the modern insane education of girls, her male components are constantly trying
to assert themselves at the expense of her female components, her male
companion will find he is really made three-eighths, or almost half, homosexual
by having any relationship with her. His female components will

- p. 65 -
not be kept in check; he will become unbalanced too, and the result will be the
average English home in which each partner is incessantly trying to "jump" the
other, with only partial success, but with a terrific amount of flying feathers, dust
and screeches.
But it is when people of this sort happen to get a divorce that the real fun
begins; for, under the impression that incompatibilities of the kind they imagine
they have suffered do not necessarily recur with another and "better" partner, they
marry again and the whole routine process of mutual "jumpings" starts afresh in
due course.
The man who marries hoping to have secured enduring happiness is
romantic enough. But the greater romantics of all are the divorced, male and
female, who with fresh hope, and not knowing that the trouble is in themselves,
eagerly select a new partner when the Law has freed them from the first.
Thus, it may be taken as a general rule that, when either partner finds in the
other an imperfect sexual environment, the components of the other sex in each
will tend to emerge and become assertive if not aggressive.
But success in assertion always means greater assertion. Thus, when the
female finds her male components able to measure themselves against the similar
components in her partner, they develop and flourish.
In all societies, therefore, where either through loss of stamina, or of health,
or of sexual potency, or of character, the male becomes what is popularly called
"effeminate" — and in highly urbanised communities this is the great danger —
there is an automatic tendency for the male components in the female to cease
 - p. 66 -
from being recessive. And where, in addition, the female's education has been
faulty and insane, this happens very quickly.
(ii) A further important point is this — that happiness in a society, especially
in its domestic relations, depends to a great extent on the reconciliation of the vast
majority of women with the facts of their sex. That is to say, they must find their
adaptation as females so gratifying to their psycho physical equipment that they
would not wish to exchange their condition for any other.
Now the principal factor in thus reconciling them and in making them glad
to be females, is their male partner, and only secondarily is it the children they get
from him.
Why is this?
Because — and that is a fact wholly overlooked by every sexologist except
myself — the female's relationship to the male is a much older biological
phenomenon than her relationship to the child. 1
Thus when her adaptation to the male is wrong or unsatisfying, the
dissonance goes far deeper, and touches far older chords in her nature, than when
the adaptation to the child is wrong. And where the adaptation to the male is
wrong or unsatisfying, there will be an automatic tendency to alienate the female
from her sex, and to confirm all those other tendencies which promote the
assertion of her dormant male components.
The disconcerting haste of most English women, when circumstances offer
the slightest excuse, to rush to male callings, to behave as males, and to dress as

1 For the full scientific explanation of this, see my MAN: AN INDICTMENT, pp. 3–4.

- p. 67 -
males, is therefore a conspicuous sign of two conditions in them — their radical
dissatisfaction with their sex, and the inadequately recessive nature of their male
components.
An intelligent woman. Dr. Helene Deutsch, who was a pupil of Freud's,
discussing the important fact of the repression in early childhood by little girls of
their disappointment and indignation at finding themselves deprived of the male
generative organ (castration complex), points out that there are three types of
women:—
(a) Those who have become reconciled to this lack by regarding it as a
punishment, and seeking compensation in feminine joys. These are the normal
women.
(b) Those who have never become reconciled and who wish to avenge
themselves on the world, and particularly on men, for their grievance. These are
the viragoes, the militant and bitterly androphobic Feminists, of whom women
like Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, Mlle. Scudéry, Honoré d'Urfé and any number
of Anglo-Saxon Feminists, ancient and modern, are examples.
(c) Those who remain until the end stubbornly unconvinced that they are
completely deprived of the male generative organ, and who therefore shun all
circumstances and experiences which may disabuse them of this idea.
These are the so-called "frigid" women, and the women who refuse all
sexual experiences for fear of being disillusioned. 1

1 See PSYCHOANALYSE DER WEIBLICHEN SEXUAL FUNKTIONEN (Vienna, 1925,

Chap. III).

- p. 68 -
Of these three categories, the first are, of course, the most valuable to
society.
I should, however, modify Dr. Deutsch's analysis to the extent of pointing
out that, whether or not their reconciliation to their sex is due to their regarding
their deprivation as a punishment, a very potent impediment to their
reconciliation must, in any case, be the inadequate maleness of the men forming
their male environment.
It must be clear that when such normal women happen to light, as in
degenerate times they most frequently do, on sexual mates who, either through
the lack of that fire which purifies, or through any lack of mastery over life
(especially the sexual side of life), or through a general feebleness which fails to
bring out the woman in woman, do not succeed in making them glad to be
women, there is a grave danger that there may be a revulsion of feeling and that
the reconciliation to their sex, achieved much earlier in life, may be, as It were,
unwound, or wound back, so that they return to the status quo ante — their state
before the reconciliation took place.
Now owing to the Puritanical tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, there is
always an abundance of men who lack the fire which alone purifies, who are
devoid of that mastery over life and over sex which satisfies, and who are
otherwise incapable of making women feel grateful for being women.
When, added to these failings, a tradition of urbanism spreads ill-health and
reduced stamina among their males, there supervenes, in the normal woman who
marries, a sense of frustration and of revolt against the sexual aspects of life,
especially of her part in sex, which is incompatible with content-

- p. 69 -
ment in general and with contentment at being a female.
To meet Continental women, whether in Italy, France or Spain, whose men
have succeeded in making them glad to be women, is at once to appreciate this
point, a point not easy to convey through the printed page to anyone who has had
no experience of foreign women. There is no doubt that many more normal
women, in Helene Deutsch's sense, remain reconciled to their sex in the countries
I have mentioned than in those climes where Puritanism has long held sway.
Although even in France and Italy, in those areas where urbanism has done its
worst, I have noticed that an irreconciled type of female tends to become
sporadic.
When, however, to these normal women who revolt after marriage, are
added the body of females belonging to Dr. Deutsch's second and third
categories, a considerable contribution is made to the forces of the Feminists and
their arguments. And this contribution may justly be ascribed wholly to the
existence in large numbers of degenerate men.
(iii) Another important source of strength to Feminist claims, to be found in
the existence of degenerate males, is that consisting in the muddle and disorder
such males tend to create in the communities over which they preside.
The consequences of their lack of mastery are often so appalling, and
matters reach such a pass, that women lose their respect and confidence and
imagine that their help, their co-operation, is needed to extricate society from its
mess.
Thus, difficult as it would be to imagine women's thinking their assistance or
co-operation necessary

- p. 70 -
under a Napoleon, under a Cromwell, or under a Caesar, they feel naturally
inclined to come forward under weak or democratic governments, under weak
kings, like Louis XIV and Louis XV in France, and in periods of social chaos (the
French Revolution for instance), because the disorder and lack of mastery in such
conditions tend to become fantastic. 1
Concurrently with the belief among the leading viragoes, however, that in
times of confusion, the hour has struck for women to intervene in public life in
order to help straighten things out, there is, in urbanised societies, also presented
to the women as a whole the spectacle of their menfolk performing a multitude of
tasks which can, by no form of reasoning, be made to appear essentially male.
Such occupations as clerking, salesmanship, secretarial work, typing,
packing, machine-minding, and machine-feeding, waiting, cleaning, painting,
filing, accountancy, all medical services, dentistry, surgery, legal work, cooking,
driving cars, etc., are really epicene jobs. When once you have conceded the
principle of work for women outside the home, there is not one of these tasks that
can reasonably be regarded as essentially masculine.
At most one might claim — and I speak from experience here — that the
female voice, whether in argument or in mere comment, sounds less convincing
and less persuasive than the male in a court of law, and that this may account for
the conspicuous lack of success among women barristers both in England and
France. But as regards the other occupations

1 This may explain why it is that Anglo-Saxon women in general display spontaneous hatred
of any man of the Caesar type, and are always foremost in the clamour to suppress him. Disorder
gives them their chance of self-assertion.

- p. 71 -
mentioned, there is not one which women cannot undertake as efficiently as men.
To the bulk of modern women, therefore, in highly urbanised and industrial
communities, there seemed no reason why such work should not be done by
them. Indeed, when they tried their hand at them, they found how childishly
simple they were. Nor, apart from the fact that these occupations withdrew them
from domesticity, delayed marriage, or made it impossible, was there anything
irregular about women being employed in epicene labour!
And even as regards their withdrawal from domesticity, this too is not
unrelated to the question of male degeneracy. For, in domestic work there is
much drudgery, much unglamorous toil, much which is not conspicuous and
therefore little appreciated, and when such work is performed daily without the
inspiration given by some one who makes it seem wholly worth while — without,
that is to say, the male partner whose value as a human being, as a male, as a
friend, as a guide, as a consultant and as a stimulus, is daily appreciated, it leads
only to revolt and resentment.
Thus, although after admitting the principle of withdrawing women from the
home, there can be little objection to their performing the epicene labours which
they now perform in their millions, what was a mistake, and a bad mistake, was
the interpretation everywhere given to this employment of women in epicene
jobs. Instead of being regarded as one of the counts in the charge against modern
society, and as a proof of the degeneracy of the male, and a decline in his status
and function, it was all too hastily assumed that it denoted sex-rivalry, that is, an
invasion by women of essentially male spheres and, therefore.

- p. 72 -
that it was tantamount to an ascent of women, a rise in their status and prestige!
The Feminists, male and female, whose judgments are almost invariably
mistaken, were the first to give it that interpretation, and annual figures were
given in their various publications throughout the first four decades of the 20th
century, showing with triumph the steady increase of women workers in all these
epicene tasks and in all the epicene professions!
Framed as a parable, the mistake was. equivalent to a woman's interpreting
her ability to keep abreast of a lame man as the acquisition on her own part of
new powers of fleetness, instead of his loss of this quality.
Thus, what was really a circumstance to be deplored from the standpoint of
humanity's future, was regarded solely as a feminine victory, and the degeneracy
of man through Puritanism, Industrialism, Urbanism and ill health, gave not only
the opportunity but also the very grounds for the insensate and reckless exultation
of the Feminists over what they imagined was an advance, a step forward in
human evolution!
The fact that the very changes which allowed women a share in epicene
employment and in public .life did nothing to straighten out the muddle the
Englishman had made of his society; the fact that the large-scale employment of
women merely aggravated some of the worst aspects of our industrial civilisation,
is perhaps already beginning to dawn on a few unenlightened thinkers. But
generations of greater and more hopeless muddle will be needed before the
Feminist viragoes, at least, will be induced to regard their Movement in all its
manifestations as a lame, superficial, morbid and, therefore, deleterious innova-

- p. 73 -
tion. As for the mass of mankind in Anglo-Saxon countries, they will require
many rude awakenings and much cruel suffering before the whole of the Feminist
fuss and noise will appear to them in its true light, as. merely a phase in the
degeneracy of the male, and a phase which, as might have been anticipated, has.
brought more misery, disease and death than satisfaction and joy to the majority
of women.
(iv) A further important contribution to the cause of Anglo Saxon Feminism
has been made by degenerate Anglo-Saxon manhood, through their lack of
mental alertness and of psychological insight. This, prevented them from seeing
through the fog and dust of Feminist agitation and noisy propaganda, and from
appreciating the specious and trumpery nature of the claims often made by the
leaders of the Woman's Movement.
Always easily caught by slogans, decoy phrases and catchwords, the Anglo-
Saxon at the best of times is never logical. When, however, generations of
epicene labours had effeminised him and made him more the slave of his
emotions than of his intellect, there was; added to his native illogicality a
sensitiveness to emotional appeal which ill-equipped him to examine the Feminist
case with coolness and sound judgment.
Always ready to believe any story, however fantastic, about women's alleged
"sacrifice" in motherhood; always prone to feel a sense of guilt over men's
alleged monopoly of the pleasure in sexual relations, and never clear or well-
informed concerning women's sexual life and its needs, the Anglo-Saxon male is,
as a rule, quite incapable of seeing through the deceptive facade of the Feminist
position. A man who easily

- p. 74 -
gets a lump in his throat in discussing woman is really unfit to judge anything
connected with her.
When told, therefore, that woman was unrepresented in Parliament because
she did not vote, or that public affairs were going to the devil because they were
deprived of woman's contribution in brains, "intuition" and practical sense; or that
women's battlefield was the childbed and that they were thus entitled to as much
say in the administration of the country as the men who supplied its defenders,
the average Anglo-Saxon was prepared to regard these appeals as the most cogent
arguments in support of Feminist claims.
Ignorant of his legal and Parliamentary history, unaware of the fact that long
before there was even a possibility of woman's suffrage, not to mention female
M.P.s, any number of Acts favourable to women, and protecting married and
single women's rights and safety, had been passed by an all male House of Lords.
together with an all male House of Commons, elected by an all male electorate,
the average Englishman of the late 19th and early 20th century was easily
persuaded that women kept outside public life and not allowed to vote were in an
abandoned and derelict position in which all their feelings, their privileges and
rights as human beings were trampled underfoot.
He was encouraged to imagine women in the position of an alien and slave
element in the population, quite unrelated by filial, fraternal, or conjugal ties to
the ruling male population, and to argue that unless they were allowed to have a
hand in the administration and a voice in the electorate they would be wholly and
utterly excluded from any chance of consideration and protection.

- p. 75 -
Nor, if any reader remembers the Feminist agitation of the early years of this
century, will he be able to recall that there was any serious attempt to contradict
this ridiculously untrue picture of the state of affairs.
Least of all was the average Anglo-Saxon male capable of detecting and
refuting its conspicuous flaws. Such a man did not even get so far as to appreciate
that the whole of the much hackneyed list of female grievances was largely .the
invention of a few, a mere handful, of mutinous middle-class wives and
daughters, many of them masculinoid, and that the mass of women were quite
content to leave their welfare and protection to their brothers, fathers and
husbands, knowing full well from past experience that they could safely do so.
To the brain of the average latter-day Anglo-Saxon, moreover, there seemed
to be very sound sense in the argument, popular among the militant suffragettes,
which compared the magnificently privileged position of Marie Corelli's
gardener, who had the Vote, with the downtrodden, feeble and hopelessly
vulnerable position of Marie Corelli herself who did not possess the Vote.
Despite his own habitually downtrodden position with the Vote, and the fact
that everywhere his mite of political power, through the Vote, is hopelessly
defeated by economic power, the average benighted Anglo-Saxon could not see
that the injustice in this picture of Marie Corelli and her gardener was really all
the other way round.
What was unjust and despicable was the apparently powerless and extremely
subordinate position of the man with political power as compared with the
woman

- p. 76 -
of economic power who had no political power. This should have been enough to
make the Anglo-Saxon male of the time rub his eyes and wonder. But his single
track mind did not reach as far as that, and the picture of poor Marie Corelli and
her ruthless and powerful gardener, using his vote to promote his own welfare
and trample Marie Corelli under foot, made thousands of male converts.
Thus, what with his ignorance of history, his lack of acumen and his
sentimentality, the degenerate Anglo-Saxon male readily became a helper in the
Feminist Cause, and with such men to appeal to and to help them, the Victory of
the Feminists was assured.
It should be remembered, moreover, that the triumph of Feminism in its
manifestations outside the home, was really only a reverberation, or logical
fulfilment, of what had already taken place in almost every home in England long
before the turn of the century. For there, round the domestic hearth, the will-
lessness, feebleness and general inferiority of the male had long since placed
women in the ascendant.
Through close and daily contact with the Anglo-Saxon male, his womenfolk
had ceased to believe in him and had begun to trust only themselves. The men
who could swallow the specious arguments of the Feminist leaders had, for two
generations at least, already lost the real respect of their sisters, wives and
daughters. They could be cowed into doing anything or accepting anything,
merely by their womenfolk's none too skilful use of such meaningless and
transparently silly reproaches as are implied by the words "selfish," or "no sense
of humour."
But if such obtuseness in psychology made them

- p. 77 -
pliant in their homes, it also made them an easy prey to trumpery reasoning
outside. And the blindest of the active male supporters of Feminism were
conspicuous for their use of just such shallow and meaningless phrases as women
were accustomed to in the home to use as lashes for their menfolk.
Miss Irene Clephane is one of the Feminists candid enough to acknowledge
the Anglo-Saxon male's contribution to the Cause. For although she could not,
without damaging her own side, ascribe his co-operation to his stupidity and
degeneracy, she is frank enough to admit its importance.
"It is the way with some Feminists," she says, "to imagine that all the credit
for the change in woman's status is due to the efforts of their own sex. So far is
this from the truth that woman would probably still be in the abyss of ignorance
in which she lay a hundred years ago if it were not for the stimulus the pioneers
received from their menfolk. Beings with untrained and undisciplined minds
could never have accomplished what they did, however ardent their desires,
however steadfast their will, unless they had been braced and encouraged by men
with trained and disciplined minds." 1
The most astonishing feature of male co-operation in the ultimate triumph of
Feminist ideals in Anglo-Saxon countries, however, really lies in its negative
aspects — the total lack of any forcible and unanswerable male reply, even from
the ranks of qualified medical men, to the Feminist advocacy of:—
Delayed Marriage, Celibacy, The Substitution of

1 TOWARDS SEX FREEDOM (London, 1935, p. 59). What Miss Clephane forgets is that
trained and disciplined minds, working on wrong first principles, or otherwise hampered, are no
better than untrained or undisciplined minds.

- p. 78 -
Artificial for Breast Feeding, the Partial or Total Sterility secured by Birth
Control, and Legalised Abortion.
Men by the score came forward to resist Feminism by emotional and
aesthetic appeals. But these were easily disposed of. Women were not moved
when such men told them with a lump in their throats, that they would lose their
charm, their beauty and their poetry by descending into the arena of public life
and politics.
 There were also plenty of men who, with doubtful scientific equipment,
questioned the validity of the claim of sex equality, or challenged the women to
show how the public and political life of the nation could be saved from ruin if
they entered it.
But, until I came on the scene in 1923, no Anglo-Saxon male, layman or
medical expert, ever grasped that the most cogent reasons for opposing the
Feminist programme, were all biological in their nature. Not one saw or pointed
out that the Feminist programme was hostile to the majority of women
themselves, and, if realized, must mean disease for hundreds of thousands of our
best women and premature death for a high percentage of them. 1
This argument was unanswerable. It was supported by the soaring figures for
deaths from lethal, or disabling, or merely harassing diseases of the female
genital organs (breasts, ovaries. Fallopian tubes, uterus, vagina) returned each
year by the Registrar General. It was also supported by the soaring, or else

1 Arabella Kenealy, in FEMINISM AND SEX EXTINCTION, certainly aimed at attacking

Feminism along these lines, but those who know her work will appreciate how far it fails to
concentrate on the main and statistically defensible attack on the Feminist programme.

- p. 79 -
stubbornly high level of, childbed casualties and the soaring incidence of mental
disease. Finally, it was demonstrated even in the steady deterioration in the
functioning of the normal virgin's generative apparatus the longer this was
allowed to remain idle after puberty. 1
Nor are the effects of the Feminist programme — curtailment of offspring,
late marriages for women, absence of breast feeding — felt by women alone.
Among the children whose births have had to be assisted by instruments, for
instance, owing to difficulties of childbirth in women too senior at their first
labour, or too stiff and masculinoid owing to athleticism, to enjoy normal
parturition, there is much insanity and paralysis caused by birth trauma due to
forceps; whilst among infants reared on artificial foods there is more invalidism
and death than among the breastfed. 2
In eight major works and a number of articles published between 1923 and
1937, I elaborated this biological reply to Feminist claims, with an ever
increasing documentation from scientific sources. And perhaps the best comment
on the power of my unique attack on the Feminist position is that, in the first
place, it has never been answered, and secondly, that everything has been done to
bury it in silence. 3
But the fact that, although I have consistently taken the stand that I represent
the cause of the nor-

1 See the evidence I have collected in my TRUTH ABOUT CHILDBIRTH (Chap. IV, pp.
109–120), to show the deterioration in the normal functioning of girls after puberty the longer
their generative apparatus is allowed to remain idle.
2 See data on this subject given in THE FUTURE OF WOMAN and THE TRUTH ABOUT
CHILDBIRTH.
 3 See, however, Appendix III.

- p. 80 -
mal woman, and have no other aim than to enlighten and defend her, I have,
nevertheless, always been represented as a misogynist, is a sufficient indication of
the extent to which I have antagonized the Feminists and damaged their position.
But in all my struggle, I have not merely received no support from
Englishmen, but have, on the contrary, had to suffer every kind of mean
misrepresentation, attack and hostility at their hands. Even, therefore, in the work
of trying to withhold my message from the nation at large and from women in
particular, the Anglo-Saxon male, both in this country and America, has again
made a further substantial contribution to the Feminist Cause.
(e) Finally, very few sociologists and sexologists have noticed the powerful
but quite unintentional support given by modern men, especially of the middle
classes, to the Feminist ideals of drastic family limitation and artificial instead of
breast-feeding owing, not purely to economic reasons, but chiefly to the peculiar
tastes reared in men by the life of modern cities.
It is obvious that to the average man, who sees little fun in multiplying the
demands on his income inevitably made by every child he has, and whose
children, in any case, are a liability rather than an asset, a drastic limitation of his
family seems to be indicated, not only by common sense, but also by every
argument that can be drawn from his own and his wife's desire for what is known
as having "a good time."
He knows nothing about the female's need of pregnancies, childbearing and
breast-feeding to complete her normal sex-cycle at optimal intervals during the
reproductive period of her life. Certainly nobody en-

- p. 81 -
lightens him on this matter. From the standpoint of his comfort and pleasure, and
also those of his spouse, he is, therefore, usually satisfied with just that number of
children — whether one, or at most two — which will give his world
documentary proof of his potency.
There appears to be no need to pile up the evidence. One child suffices for
this. Two children may, at most, dispose of any tendency to regard the one as
possibly an accident.
Thus, from the very start, the average man enters matrimony with a bias in
favour of at least one of the most cherished Feminist ideals — the drastic
limitation of the family.
But other motives actuate him in playing still further the Feminist game.
His income, not too severely strained by his family responsibilities, usually
leaves him a margin for some weekly entertainment. A dinner out with a show
becomes a habit. This habit is all the more insisted upon by his wife, because it
gives her, as she never tires of explaining, one day's respite from domestic duties.
There may also be bridge parties and dances. If the couple live in a
respectable London suburb, or one of the dormitory towns of Essex,
Hertfordshire, or Buckinghamshire, there will be tennis, supper, dinner, or
cocktail parties, either at home or at the houses of friends.
At all these entertainments the husband will insist on his wife's playing the
part, not of wife, but of mistress. She must be agile, well-dressed (even bony if
she is to be always smart) and able to leave none or his friends and acquaintances
in any doubt concerning his pecuniary prosperity.

- p. 82 -
The couple will even owe it as much to themselves as to the good opinion of
their world to spend a few week-ends during the year at one of the good hotels on
the coast, where they will have opportunities of showing off. Again, here, the
wife will be called upon to play the part of mistress pure and simple, or impure
and far from simple.
For the summer vacation they must be able to go for weeks at a time to some
fashionable watering-place where, once more, the wife will be enrolled as
mistress.
But a mistress, as Laura Marholm points out, is not expected to have
children. 1 Even if by accident she should have more than the limited number
required to establish the fact of her own and her husband's normal sexual potency,
she must not dream of giving any of them the breast — not even those that arrive
first and are wanted.
Thus, to the average man, even the breast-feeding of the one or two children
he needs for vanity purposes, is a practice to be avoided if possible.
His wife could not function as a mistress and breast-feed! Indeed, of all the
cases of either drastically curtailed or wholly suppressed lactation I have known
— and one was too near home to be flattering to my self esteem! — at least 75
per cent. have been due to the husband's impatience over the process.
A third party can always give a bottle. Only his wife can breast-feed his
infant. Therefore, the course is set for artificial feeding.
But this is precisely what Feminists demand!
The "serfdom" of woman's normal functions must be abolished! — As if
Man and not Nature had imposed it. As if it could be abolished with impunity!

1 Op. cit. Vol. I — p. 106.

- p. 83 -
A certain degree of stupidity is indispensable for this attitude towards
lactation; because, although science has only recently established the
harmfulness, both for mother and child, of artificial feeding, any man, or woman
for that matter, with the rudiments of a brain, might reasonably have been
expected to have discovered, by merely taking thought, that such an important
process as nine months of breast-feeding could not be wholly or even partially
suppressed without undesirable effects both on the giver and the receiver of the
precious secretion.
But the degree of stupidity requisite for overlooking all this is unfortunately
abundantly present in all classes of our population, and probably the so-called
"best educated" are not the least richly endowed with it.
 This is likely to be so because, as a rule, their negativeness towards all
manifestations of sex and the female physique and, therefore, their reluctance to
dwell on these matters, is usually proportionate to their culture.
To give but one example of the lengths to which ignorance of the "facts of
life" may go in certain groups of the educated in England, let me tell the
following absolutely true story:—
A few years before the outbreak of the Second World War, in a certain
village in East Suffolk, there dwelt in the best house of the neighbourhood a
family of middle-class town-bred people, consisting of father, mother and three
spinster daughters. The latter were all over thirty.
Now it happened that the three daughters decided to go in for poultry
farming on a rather ambitious scale and, to this end purchased a fine stock of

- p. 84 -
thoroughbred fowls. As there seemed to be no difficulty about money, they
housed and fed the birds in the best possible style.
They had heard that hens laid just as conscientiously and regularly without
as with a cock; so, as they had no wish to inflict on their birds an experience
which, so far, they themselves had contrived to escape, they decided unanimously
that their poultry-yard would be for ladies only.
And, indeed, all they had heard about the capacity of celibate hens to lay
turned out to be wholly and surprisingly accurate. Their hens laid with singular
regularity and thus, to their great relief, they were able, without any dire results,
to dispense with the strutting monster of sinfulness which defiled most of the
poultry-yards they had seen theretofore.
On the arrival of the season when most rural folk are thinking about
hatching, our three spinsters naturally wished to follow suit. The first of their
hens that went broody was therefore put to sit on thirteen of the largest and
freshest eggs they could find.
This done, in a state of wild excitement, they settled down to wait anxiously
for the twenty-one days to elapse, and never in their lives before had days seemed
to drag as they did then.
The sitting hens were lifted from their boxes every evening, fed, watered and
exercised, and returned to duty.
It was wonderful! The eagerness of these animals to be restored to their
boring drudgery seemed to the three women a miracle of self deception in the
Cause of Life. To witness Nature at her normal work of multiplication in birds
was a most edifying experience.

- p. 85 -
Judge of their amazement, therefore, when a locals farm-hand, with whom
they had sometimes exchanged notes, suddenly assured them most politely but
very earnestly that it was hopeless to expect their eggs to. hatch as they had no
cock in the yard.
This, coming on top of all they had witnessed in the form of assiduous
sitting on the part of their hens,. made them exclaim "Nonsense!"
What old-fashioned superstition lingered here? But they had no wish to hurt
the man's feelings. He meant well. They, therefore, beamed as kindly as. they
could upon him and after thanking him, assured him that they knew it would be
all right. They might even have said it would be "quite all right." In fact, we may
assume that this is what they did say.
He was, however, indelicate enough to insist!
They exchanged knowing smiles. He was becoming tiresome. Nevertheless,
he had so often been useful in the past, that they must overlook this one lapse.
After all, the man was only voicing what was probably a pretty widespread
superstition!
Once more they tried to reassure him and, without offensively exposing his
ignorance, conveyed to him that they knew what they were about and that it was
"quite all right."
In the circumstances, any normal farm-hand would have inferred that they
were politely informing him to mind his own business and would have held his,
peace.
Not our Suffolk yokel however! He took off his cap, scratched his head,
looked painfully embarrassed, and repeated his original criticism, but with some
added anecdotes to illustrate its point. It was his way

- p. 86 -
of avoiding what he thought would be indecent clarity.
They listened courteously and patiently but were not shaken. However, to
make sure they were right, they decided to ask father.
Mr. X., without any wish to spare his daughters' feelings, but speaking from
his own personal conviction, unhesitatingly supported their point of view and said
the man was talking rubbish. Mrs. X. was more emphatic. She said she did not
think the fellow could be altogether nice and advised her daughters not to have
too much to say to him.
Meanwhile, however, the news of the sittings had spread through the district.
Four or five villages were already discussing the matter, and one of the older
village women, who came to the X.'s house to work, and who could not be
suspected of wishing to indulge in salacious conversation, volunteered a homily
on the futility of setting hens to hatch eggs if the latter hailed from a yard wholly
deprived of male society.
This did not shake Mrs. X., but, as other opinions pointing in the same
direction, poured in from all sides, her daughters began to feel faintly uneasy.
They, therefore, decided to write up to London to the editor of some trade
journal and to implore him kindly to shatter once and for all the myth that had
apparently seized upon their countryside.
In due course a reply came back; but it confirmed every word the villagers,
pure and impure, had said!
There could be no doubt about it, and all the bewildered staring on the part
of Papa and Mamma and their daughters could not help.
 Here then, without any possible loophole of escape was the death-knell not
only to the myth of

- p. 87 -
parthenogenesis, so fondly cherished by middle-class English minds, but also to
the whole charm of poultry-farming!
It was a cruel blow and, not long afterwards, the family packed up and
returned to London, where fowls and eggs appeared, from heaven knows where,
in shops and stores, without any need for concern with the details of their
production.
I can vouch for this amazing story and know the name of the family
concerned.
It is difficult to believe, and yet it reveals a degree of stupidity and ignorance
less uncommon than many people might suppose. Bad enough indeed were the
spinsters! But what about Papa and Mamma X., who had had a family of three
without the aid of parthenogenesis? Only one factor mitigates the charge of
superlative stupidity which they seem to deserve, and that is the profound
reluctance middle-class English people always have felt, and continue to feel,
when called upon to dwell on sexual questions. This reluctance not only makes
them ignorant where Continentals are well-informed, but also makes them stupid
and obtuse where Continentals are intelligent and alert; because it makes them
feel virtuous in being unreasonable, illogical and blind about matters concerning
which clarity seems inseparable from indecency.
Can we wonder now that the average middle-class married man of our cities
is as ignorant and careless as he is of the realities relating to his wife, her sex, and
its peculiar functions? How could he be aware of the normal needs of her
constitution, seeing that he is able, year in and year out, to imagine that she

- p. 88 -
can be leading a full life while acting merely as his mistress, his hetaira, his
glamour girl?
His like is now recruited also from the so-called lower middle class,
composed of bank and insurance clerks, shopkeepers, higher mechanics, chain-
store managers, heads of departments in general stores, etc. Together with the
middle-classes, they now constitute a substantial body in the nation. For two or
three generations now these men have undoubtedly been influential in abetting
two Feminist errors — the advocacy of family limitation and that of artificial
instead of breast-feeding.
Their womenfolk, usually as ignorant as themselves of all the realities of the
female's normal sex-life, far from offering any resistance to the growing custom
of treating the wife merely as a hetaira, have been only too ready to promote it.
They never discovered for themselves, nor learned from anyone else, how hostile
to their true interests this custom was.
Corruptly indoctrinated both by the Feminists, male and female, and by all
the shallow opinions on this question which have filled the air in England for a
century, and, moreover, too ill-informed to know the truth about themselves, and
too squeamish to be enlightened, they succumbed all too readily to the lure of
pleasure and the so-called "freedom" which their husbands held out to them.
If anybody like myself attempted to enlighten them, they were so
conditioned as to regard him as their mortal enemy.
The result is that all of them, men and women alike, became active though
unconscious promoters of Feminism even when, as often happened, they could
not have told you what Feminism stood for.

- p. 89 -
Economic pressure undoubtedly played its part, but this part has been
grossly exaggerated. Certainly it could have exerted no influence in abolishing
breast-feeding almost wholly from this class, and it is here that the fundamental
bias of their philosophy of life is revealed.
A little thought on the nature of the female, on her differences from the
male, on the obvious incompleteness for her of a life of merely repeated sexual
orgasms, would immediately have revealed to the men of this section of the
nation the error of their attitude. A little thought even on the nature of the human
infant might also have brought enlightenment.
But no thinking along these lines is ever indulged in by the average man I
have been describing, and for this reason alone the plea of ignorance, of lack of
adequate information, is not a complete exculpation. True, they are ill-informed,
but there are other roads to knowledge besides information from outside.
That is why I submit that a certain modicum of stupidity in the male is a
prerequisite of his active participation in the promotion of Feminist ideals, and it
is pretty obvious that this stupidity exists in abundance among the men whose
way of life I have been examining.
But even among the male Anglo-Saxon publicists and advocates of
Feminism there is this same lack of information without any correction or
compensation from the quarter of mere thought on the whole problem. Nowhere
in their writings do we find a hint of the damage necessarily inflicted on the
female organism if it is treated like that of a male. Nowhere in their writings are
the biological consequences of the Feminist position squarely faced and
understood.

- p. 90 -
They too, therefore, cannot escape the charge of stupidity. Since their books are
in themselves demonstrations of the fact that they have at least tried to think on
the questions they discuss, they deserve the charge very much more severely than
their inarticulate brethren. I refer to such men as W. T. Stead, G. W. Johnson,
C.M.G., Eugene A. Hecker, W. Lyon Blease, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and
many others less generally known.

- p. 91 -
Chapter IV
The Influence of Women in Promoting Feminism.

(1) The influence of the virago.

In the constitution of man and woman, as I have already pointed out, male and female
components are mixed, so that each male has a certain amount of female, and each female a
certain amount of male elements.
Weininger, who was the first to popularize this fact, took it from Schopenhauer, though
even Dr. Magnus Hirschfield had also stated it long before Sex and Character appeared. 1
Thus, theoretically, a male need possess no more than 50.1 per cent. male, and a female no
more than 50.1 per cent. female, elements. But the higher the percentage of the other sex in
either, the less is the individual likely to be a well adapted member of society.
We must therefore accept the fact that, just as many girls are born who are predestined
viragoes — that is, congenitally masculinoid, who are unlikely to be happy when functioning as
normal females — so there are many boys born who are predestined effeminates.
The limit of male elements in a female and of female elements in a male, beyond which
either ceases to be a normal member of his or her sex and incapable of happy adaptation as such,
has not yet

1 See WELT ALS WILLE UND VORSTELLUNG, Vol. II, Chap. 44 and GESCHLECHTSKUNDE, Vol. I,
pp. 484–485. The relevant passages in these two books will at once reveal how unoriginal Weininger was on p. 29 of
SEX AND CHARACTER.

- p. 92 -
been determined. But two important facts have been established regarding the determination of
such types.
The first is the power of environment and bodily habits to influence the development of
male elements in the female. 1
And the second is the power of environment to make recessive those male elements in the
female which are not abnormally potent or prominent.
It has already been pointed out that in an environment like that of England and North
America, where the Greek male accent hangs heavily over every aspect of life, there is a
tendency in any case to favour the women with so-called "boyish" figures, with small hips, long
slim legs, and flat chests. So that in these countries females with a high percentage of male
elements in their constitution are likely to be born in unusually large numbers.
Provided, however, that these masculinoid females are morphologically still normal enough
to bear children without difficulty, their masculinity does not matter from the standpoint of their
happy adaptation, if only their sexual partners happen to be males of such overwhelming
masculinity that no male elements belonging to any female could possibly measure themselves
against this masculinity without the certainty of an absolute rout.
In that case, the presence of pronounced masculine traits in the women might be an
advantage, because it would support instead of diluting the overwhelming masculinity of the
male and thus produce a virile, metallic breed of men. There is no doubt, for

1 See the general discussion on this topic in my CHOICE OF A MATE (pp. 476–481), especially the findings
of Dr. Riddle, regarding the increased metabolism induced by athleticism in females, and its arrest of their normal
female development.

- p. 93 -
instance, that in certain peoples — the ancient Celts, Teutons and Slavs, whose women often
fought side by side with the men, and some American Indian tribes, whose women "were nearly
as good hunters as the men," 1 — it was an advantage for the females to approximate to the men.
Provided that the men easily outstripped them in virile qualities, no unhappy adaptation or
aggressive assertion of masculinity by the females need necessarily have resulted. For, no matter
how high within reason the male elements might be in the female in such cases, they would still
be made recessive by encountering vastly superior male elements in the male partner, a fact
which both Schopenhauer and Weininger wholly overlooked.
Where any degeneracy of the male may have occurred it must, however, follow that an
abundance of such masculinoid females would give rise to grave maladjustments. Since in such
circumstances, these badly adapted masculinoid women, finding no man able to make their male
elements recessive, would begin to assert themselves, it follows that in all countries producing
masculinoid women, degeneracy of the male necessarily leads to a powerful Feminist Movement
and to a large band of discontented and unhappy women.
This is to a great extent what has happened in England and America, where the masculinoid
woman is not nearly such a bane as the degenerate male with whom she tries in vain to find her
adaptation.
Weininger seems to have been approaching this truth for he says: "A woman's demand for
emancipation and her qualifications for it, are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness in
her." And,

1 See Journ. of Anthropol. Inst. Feb. 1892, p. 307.

- p. 94 -
in referring to the periodicity of Feminist movements in Europe, he says: "If it occurs it may be
associated with the 'secessional taste' which idealized tall, lanky women with flat chests and
narrow hips." 1
What he fails to see is the part necessarily played by male degeneracy in permitting the
male elements m even the least masculinoid of females to develop or to cease from being
recessive.
In this respect and on the basis of morphology alone, it is curious that there is a marked
disparity between Anglo-Saxon and French and South European women. For although women of
commanding intelligence have always abounded in France and Southern Europe, these regions
have never, as Weininger points out, 2 "had a successful woman's movement," and almost all
their women have a short leg-trunk ratio compared with English and North American women.
An unsophisticated Englishman, gazing on the women of such painters as Degas or Renoir,
is usually horrified by their proportions, and, accustomed to the masculinoid females popularised
by the Greek homosexual tradition, he thinks the Continental women must be deformed.
Nor is it without interest that a sculptor, like Auguste Rodin, distinctly philo-Hellenic in
taste, had the greatest admiration for long-legged English women and always had them as
models if he could. 3
A glance at the novels published in England during the last 50 years will leave little doubt
in the mind of any investigator that the boyish type of female is

1 SEX AND CHARACTER (pp. 64–65 and 73).

2 Ibid p. 74.
3 See my REMINISCENCES OF AUGUSTE RODIN, p. 122.
- p. 95 -
regarded as the most desirable 1 by the general taste, both male and female. Nor could it help
being so in any country so deeply influenced by the Greek homosexual male accent as England
has been ever since the Reformation.
Thus, I submit that, in Anglo-Saxon countries, there is a strong morphological tendency in
the females to include a high percentage of viragoes. As, in these countries, a marked decline in
masculinity has occurred among the males, these women can find no happy adaptation, their
male elements cannot be made recessive, and they all suffer from a sense of frustration and
disillusionment.
As inferior males, whose elements of another sex than their own have been allowed to
develop, they tend to suffer the pangs of the Adlerian complex, which is supposed to arise from
inferiority feelings, and they are inclined to be bitter and resentful, especially towards men. As
aberrants and fish out of water, moreover, they also tend to harbour a secret jealousy of their
more normal sisters, and strive to convert them to their own negative standpoint towards both
men, life, and the normal female's function. 2
Given, however, the subjectivity of all moderns, especially women, these viragoes would
not even need

l On pp. 30, 31 and 373–374 of my CHOICE OF A MATE, I have noted a few instances. But they abound. One
not yet given occurs in Howard Spring's O ABSOLOM! (p. 329) where a "desirable" girl is described as follows:
"She had a strong resolute look but was tall and beautifully feminine, with long legs and narrow hips." Beautifully
feminine with that build! This is possible only in a culture quite unconscious of its dominant masculine accent. See
also PEKING PICNIC by Ann Bridge, where the authoress's idea of a desirable girl approximates the male ideal.
2 For a woman's confirmation of the fact that negative women are increasing in England, see Arabella Kenealy:
FEMINISM AND SEX EXTINCTION, pp. 82–85, and many other passages.

- p. 96 -
to feel any secret jealously of normal women in order to try to convert them to a negative attitude
towards men, life, motherhood, and domesticity. For, thinking subjectively, they would, as
Socratics in any case, believe that their reasoning had no relation to their bodily constitution, but
was a "pure," intellectual process. As such, they would wish to impose its "rational" conclusions
on their normal sisters.
As schoolmistresses, University dons, and even as senior friends, such women can,
therefore, do an untold amount of mischief, 1 and when female education is made to follow
strictly male examples and patterns, as it has for many decades now in England, we may be
certain that one or more viragoes, together with some unconscious male Socratics (Professor H.
Sidgwick or Professor T. H. Green, for example) have been exerting their influence.
For since, as I have shown, environment and habit can modify constitution, and violent
sports can produce deleterious changes in the female's reproductive system, 2 the policy of letting
loose a body of viragoes to mould female education as they think fit and with eyes constantly
squinting enviously towards the male, must constitute a bane both to the girls who fall under
their influence, and to the nation as a whole. Simultaneously it greatly fortifies Feminism by
either adding new recruits to its ranks, or spreading its bias and its ideals throughout the women
of the country.
And in this respect a few extracts from a symposium

1 For a Feminist's confirmation of this point, see Amber Blanco White's frank criticism of English Girls'
schools in Chap. XX of her book WORRY IN WOMEN (London, 1941).
2 See my CHOICE OF A MATE, pp. 476–481.

- p. 97 -
edited by Graham Green, entitled The Old School 1 may not be out of place.
Elizabeth Bowen, writing about Downe School (The Mulberry Tree) hints at the ungirlish
demeanour deliberately cultivated there when she says: "In the week, curvilinear good looks
were naturally at a discount and a swaggering, nonchalant air cut the most ice." 2
E. Arnot Robertson, writing about Sherborne (Potting Shed of the English Rose) says: "'Run
about girls, like boys, and then you won't think of them!' — That was Sherborne."
Later on she writes: "If you have a daughter at a public school, which heaven or sensible
parent forbid, you will have seen a reassuring paragraph in the prospectus which reads in all
cases something like, 'Great and individual care is taken of the girl's health.' Imagine for yourself
the difficulty of taking great or individual care of the health of two or three hundred girls in a
lump, while encouraging the lump to be as refinedly boyish as possible; I have never heard of
any girls' public school that was not made a weak copy of a boys'." 3
In another passage she describes the atmosphere more narrowly. She says: "The School
Type, which was our pattern, was the epitome of the team spirit, and this, like prolonged
discussion of sports, just does not come naturally to the female." 4

1 Jonathan Cape, London, 1934.

2 THE OLD SCHOOL, p. 53.
3 Ibid., p. 176. This passage is a most striking confirmation of all I wrote in Chapter VI of my WOMAN: A
VINDICATION, published eleven years before THE OLD SCHOOL. See also LAURA MARHOLM (op. cit. Vol.
I, p. 39).
4 Op. Cit. p. 179.

- p. 98 -
"After I left," she adds, "it took me two or three years to get over my schooldays in health . .
. And it took me much longer than that to get over the horrible feeling with which we were subtly
innoculated about sex — that it was something so beastly lying in wait for us that we were not to
think about it (run girls run!)" 1
Finally, this paragraph spills the whole of the beans:
"It is very difficult to convey the atmosphere of an English public school for girls to anyone
who has the good fortune not to have been sent to one. They are — or at least this one was in my
time — run on a male system imperfectly adapted to female needs." 2
One could hardly be more explicit or more abundantly confirm my claim that, under the
male accent now dominating our civilization, the only question ever put is: "Is it right for the
Male?" and, if it is, without further ado, it is assumed to be not only right but also desirable for
the female.
Nor did it surprise me to read that all hints about sex and the sex life made to the girls by
their virago mistresses are calculated to create an aversion from it; for, on my assumption that
such women are bound to think and reason subjectively, what else could be possible?
Very rarely, however, does such a revelatory document as E. Arnot Robertson's essay in
The Old School fall into our hands and, as coming from a woman who is a first-hand witness of
the system she describes, it is invaluable. 3

1 P. 180.
 2 P. 174.
3 A good book on female education, written by a modern woman who was an experienced head-mistress, is
WASTED WOMANHOOD, by Charlotte Cowdroy (London, 1933).

- p. 99 -
Confirming the above in a striking manner, let me quote the following case:—
A normally grown girl of my acquaintance was, on the advice of the gymnastic instructor at
her public school, made to stand for some time every day with a dumbell between her knees
because, if you please, her normal female knock-knees (the feature Havelock Ellis and Dr.
Heilborn foolishly deplored) were considered a "defect" requiring correction! Presumably, the
less normal girls, with straight, masculine legs, were nor considered defective!
No wonder a sensible woman, like Dr. Esther Harding, writing on Anglo-Saxon female
emancipation, is able to exclaim: "They have been content to be men in petticoats and so have
lost touch with the feminine principle within themselves. This is perhaps the main cause of the
unhappiness and emotional instability of to-day." 1
In addition to the other evil influences of the virago in our midst, there must be reckoned
her radical, though often secret, loathing of men. The Frenchman, Proudhon, was aware of this, 2
and it can be discerned in all Feminist literature. Under the cover of agitating and working only
for the "good" of women, the viragoes thus spread their bitter hostility to the male wherever their
influence extends, and only the most obtuse of their victims can be blind to it.
It comes conspicuously to the fore when one of these viragoes happens to find the smallest
excuse for publicly assaulting a man. Then, trading on the crowd's old-fashioned chivalry, which
is a relic of pre-

1 WOMAN'S MYSTERIES (London, 1935, pp. 20–21).

2 AMOUR ET MARIAGE, Part II, Sect. XXVII, where he speaks of the Feminists' "jalousie et haine secrète
de l'homme."

- p. 100 -
feminist England, they will suddenly slash men with any handy stick or whip, feeling certain that
in the presence of a crowd, the unforunate man will not dream of retaliating. 1
The provocation in such cases is usually negligible. What suddenly bursts is the woman's
pent up loathing of men and her eagerness to vent it.
I am prepared to go a long way with anyone who, on the basis of Nietzsche's profound and
little known remark about the relationship of the sexes — "Love, in its foundation, is the mortal
hatred of the sexes" 2 — argues that, no matter what we may do, the sexes are bound to be at
daggers drawn, and that only the urgency of their sexual needs effects a temporary truce to their
warfare.
I would but reply to those who, on Nietzschean grounds, justify the attitude of the virago,
that Nature is one thing and human society another. The latter thrives and survives thanks to
certain conventions and fictions. Among the life-promoting conventions, is the poetic fiction of
human heterosexual love, and if we are to sweep it away because in the secrecy of the
philosopher's cell it is agreed that it is only a fiction, we must. immediately look to the
foundations of modern civilisation, because they will need to be completely reconstructed.
Besides, why should the virago alone be permitted to act and think on the basis of the
mortal hatred of the sexes? Why should she enjoy all the immunities, the safety, comfort and
privileges built on the fiction of the mutual love and respect of the sexes, and yet
 1 For instance, see DAILY MAIL, 31–12–29; article headed, Driver's Ears Boxed.
2 ECCE HOMO, CHAPTER III, Sect. 5.

- p. 101 -
disrupt and corrupt the order in her world by abusing her security and preaching and
demonstrating the mortal hatred between the male and the female?
Unless she is prepared to face and shoulder all the consequences of her fight for this
profound philosophic truth as against the life promoting fiction of heterosexual "love" — and the
consequences would involve a breach with all the traditional bonds of marriage, family and
parenthood — she had far better keep her loathing of man, with her other unsavoury dreams, to
herself, and turn her mind to more harmless considerations.
For the virago might be defined as the woman, who, deprived of any urgent need to satisfy
her sex impulses, and feeling no motive for believing in the poetic fiction about the love of the
sexes, comes out frankly and nakedly with that mortal hatred of man which is rooted beneath the
trustfulness even of the normal woman.
Unfortunately, in our civilization, the virago and her like find a philosophy ready to hand
which supports their most extravagant claims. For, whether they wish to preach the so-called
"equality" of the sexes, or woman's "right" and capacity to compete with man in all public
spheres; or to dissuade young, healthy and normal women from going over to the enemy — man,
and from living in normal heterosexual union, with motherhood and domesticity as their
accomplishments, they find all the necessary positions and principles established by Socrates
over two thousand years ago. They have only to apply them to current circumstances.

- p. 102 -
Nor do they even require to know of Socrates or his unsavoury doctrines in order to find
their philosophic support. For his most fundamental conclusions are all in the air we breathe. No
one can have grown up in modern England without having been polluted by them.
Thus the virago and her like find in the philosophy of the White Man, especially in Anglo-
Saxon countries, the most favourable soil for the prosperous growth of their school of thought.
This explains why, of all the Feminist phases of the post Socratic world, the present phase
has endured longest and has been marked with most success.
If, — and this consideration is important — Feminism has not met in Southern and Latin
Europe with the success it has in England and America, it is due, in addition to the more normal
morphology of the women in these areas, to the powerful Aristotelian tradition which is a
heritage of their long adherence to Catholicism. For, as I need hardly point out to the scholar,
Aristotle was the chief Greek influence in Catholicism, just as Socrates was the chief Greek
influence in Protestantism, and even the more normal morphology of Latin women may be due
to the healthier of the two Greek influences.
It is not denied that Christianity, as ultimately derived from Socrates, displays Socratic
features even in Catholic countries. All I claim is that, in Catholic countries, the extreme
application of Socratic principles, especially those involving contempt of the body, have been
traditionally neutralized by the wholesome influence of Aristotle, just as they were neutralized in

- p. 103 -
England and Scotland when Catholicism prevailed in these countries. 1
(2) The influence of normal Anglo-Saxon women on the progress of Feminism has been
restricted to the negativism towards the sexual life and motherhood, generated in large numbers
of them by the disappointing and often repellant sexual life they have led with the man who is
produced in Puritanical countries. Devoid of any mastery in the arts of love, behaving in sexual
matters always with a certain sense of guilt, and nearly always bereft of the fire that purifies, this
man makes the most heartbreaking sexual partner and, instead of convincing woman, as the
Continental does, of the absurdity of the Puritanical attitude to the body, does all in his power
(unintentionally, of course!) to nauseate her with the whole of "that side of life".
Now, wives whose sexual life has been anything but an experience of the joie de vivre
necessarily lend a willing ear to any propaganda about the unfortunate lot of women, the vanity
of matrimony, and the happiness of unmarried women. They become, moreover, ready
mouthpieces for the dissemination of these doctrines among their juniors, and since they speak
from experience, what they say with sadness carries even more conviction than the bitter
diatribes of the viragoes.
Moreover, there is this added woe to their married life: owing to their usually late
marriages, the imbecilities of modern dieting in pregnancy, and the incompe-

1 Many examples could be. given of this. They are to be found in the saner attitude towards degeneracy and
bodily health, towards bodily pleasures, and towards beauty, in the English Middle Ages. See, for some of these
examples my MAN: AN INDICTMENT and THE CHOICE OF A MATE.

- p. 104 -
tence of many medical practitioners, 1 even their experience of motherhood has often been little
more than agony and mutilation. As all this seems to confirm the anti-motherhood and anti-
domesticity diatribes of the viragoes, they tend to pass on to the unmarried all the worst that can
be said against the normal life for women.
Strange confirmation of this comes from a speech made by Dr. G. Dick Read at the Ministry
of Health on March 13th, 1936. This eminent gynaecologist said: "The number of women to-day
who are willing to tell their young friends of the joys and happiness of motherhood is extremely
few. Almost invariably they tell of the troubles, the dangers, the pain and risks that a girl must
endure." 2
The value to Feminism of such "experienced" adverse testimony to the joys of matrimony
and motherhood has, in Anglo-Saxon countries, been immense. One has only to think of the
number of married women in England and America who have become ardent and embittered
Feminists to appreciate that, even among those wives who have not ventured before the public
with their views, the steady work of promoting the Feminist standpoint must have been
formidable.
(3) As regards the influence of the old spinster in promoting Feminism, this, on the whole,
has exceeded even that of the disillusioned wife. For, although everything an old spinster says
against Life, Man and Motherhood, is naturally listened to with suspicion, there are other ways
besides hostile harangues, of pro-

1 See my TRUTH ABOUT CHILDBIRTH for all the factors which now conspire to make maternity an ordeal.
2 DAILY PRESS, 19–3–36.

- p. 105 -
claiming the nullity of married life and of advertising its unessentialness for women.
The very contentedness and prosperous appearance of a spinster of fifty, apart from
anything she may say, is, in itself, the best plea in favour of the celibacy recommended by St.
Paul. Especially is this so if those who contemplate her have recently seen a wife scarred with
motherhood, or else embittered by her sexual life with the average Anglo-Saxon male.
In this respect, the wholly different opinion of the middle-aged spinster, held in Latin
countries from that held in England and America, is not without significance. 1 For, in order to
survive as a contented spinster, two prerequisites are necessary which are seldom found in
conjunction abroad.
The first is a bodily equipment which is sufficiently lacking in temperamental vigour not to
suffer from non-functioning as a normal female, and the second is an environment in which the
female wrecks (either physical, mental or emotional, or all three) of matrimony and motherhood
exist in great profusion.
Both these conditions are fulfilled in the case of thousands of Anglo-Saxon spinsters, and
the survival of the latter, free from any of the ravages of frustration, instead of redounding to
their discredit as creatures below the norm, becomes one of the most eloquent arguments in
favour of celibacy for all the ignorant and uninitiated who meet them.
The hundreds of thousands of more positive spinsters, who do not survive, or who do so
with less success, and who owing to their psycho physical prostration, end in lunatic asylums, or
in lingering deaths

1 On this point, see my WOMAN: A VINDICATION, pp. 247–248, and THE CHOICE OF A MATE, pp.
249–250.

- p. 106 -
from cancer or some other ailment induced by the enforced idleness of their vigorous
reproductive equipment, all these are never seen or known except by students of the Registrar
General's returns. If seen, they are known only to a few relatives and friends.
On the other hand, happy, contented and negative spinsters of middle age compose probably
thirty per cent of the population of all our provincial hotels and boarding houses. They are seen
by multitudes every year, and they do not need to lift their voices in favour of the Feminist
programme in order to prove its eminent sanity to the simple-minded.
If, however, in addition they lend their influence, their financial help, and their voices to the
Feminist Cause, it must not be supposed that, in this country at least, this assistance is negligible
owing to its origin. On the contrary, it is very powerful, and the history of Feminism, from Mlle.
Scudéry to Christabel Pankhurst, teems with the figures of such spinsters who, besides being
adapted to celibacy, have strained every nerve to promote the success of the Movement.
Certain it is that the bitterest things against men, as can be seen from the literature, have
been uttered by negative spinsters. Their influence as teachers, matrons, dons, or
superintendents, enables them to impose their view of life on the female adolescent and thus to
be most helpful in the propagation of the Feminist ideology.
This was a fact not unknown to Dickens who, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, describing
Miss Twinkerton reading aloud, says: "She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of
celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring frauds." 1

1 Chapter XXII, penultimate paragraph.

- p. 107 -
(4) The influence of the Superior Female Feminist Agitator
In addition to the voices raised by viragoes and abnormal women generally in favour of
Woman's so-called "Emancipation," we have to reckon with the influence of those rare members
of the female sex who, like Charlotte Perkins Stetson, and a few others, have peered unusually
deeply into the present plight of their sisters, have certain useful things to tell us, and are not
necessarily abnormal because they happen to be both women and Feminists.
Such rare creatures in our Anglo-Saxon world dwell almost exclusively on some genuine
injustice borne by their sex, and to include these isolated figures roughly among the mass of
those who clamour blindly for Female Emancipation, the preposterous "Vote," and other
ridiculous supposed privileges, would be both unscientific and foolish.
Now there is one aspect of the unjust lot of women in European civilisation of which, even
as a boy, I was keenly aware, and perhaps the best way to introduce the subject vividly is to
describe the circumstances in which I first stood on tip-toe ready to proclaim it to my fellows.
The occasion was the dinner given in London to Auguste Rodin in January, 1904, by the
Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. I was twenty-two years of age and, sitting at one of
the side tables among the less famous members of the Society, I listened attentively to the
speeches. As I did so, and contemplated the faces or the men at the high table and all about me, I
could not help commenting inwardly on their air of self-complacency and smug

- p. 108 -
satisfaction. They had all achieved something in the world. There were Lavery, Howard,
Shannon, Tweed, and many others, including Rodin himself. All had worked hard and had
acquired some modicum of fame and even glory. And, as I observed them, my mind suddenly
became filled with thoughts of my mother; she was at home, probably mending, darning, or
preparing some cake or pudding for the next day.
She too had worked hard. She too had been conscientious and painstaking. She had, above
all, been what many of those about me had probably never been — thrifty and economical. She
had had to be both. And yet, where was her fame? My father's achievement, whatever its actual
merits may have been, would have proved impossible without her.
But she was not the only woman behind the scenes. Scores of the men about me had
probably left other women equally meritorious and essential to their achievement. Rodin
certainly had. Where was their glory and fame?
And, as I pondered thus, I suddenly felt an overpowering impulse to stand up when all the
toasts were over, and raise my glass to the women who had worked in private, in silence and
alas! in oblivion, to help all these self-satisfied men to achieve what they had achieved.
I secretly rehearsed my speech. I thought I would begin by pointing out that, all too
frequently, at such gatherings as these, when a general patting on the back was the rule among
men of some fame, there was a total disregard of the women, who behind the closed doors of
these men's houses, made the performance

- p. 109 -
which had led to their fame, both practicable and relatively easy.
Apprehensive and uneasy — for I had never yet raised my voice in public — I waited
impatiently for the last speech. It seemed hours before it was over. And then, alas! — and I
regret my failure to this day — when my opportunity did at length come, I hesitated until all was
lost. If only I had not been obliged to wait so long; had I only been able to stand up when my
inspiration occurred, I think I should have succeeded. But during the fatal wait, I had had leisure
to ponder my relative unimportance (I was the youngest male present), my position as no more
than my father's guest and other considerations which weakened my resolve.
Thus, to my undying regret, that contemplated maiden speech was never uttered, and when I
returned home, I could not help, for a little while, feeling as if I had rather betrayed my mother.
Now I at least, at the age of twenty-two, had quite spontaneously, without the aid of books,
perceived a gross injustice in the lives of the good women of our civilization, women not
numbered in thousands, but in tens of millions. I had perceived it through contemplating my
mother's existence relative to my father's and the whole family's.
I had seen that, in return for her mere keep, her security, her sustenance, clothing and
shelter, she had performed a life-long task of mighty importance, not only for my father, myself
and my brothers and sisters, but for the whole of society. She had, like millions of other good
women in Europe, striven day after day, year in and year out, without any sort of

- p. 110 -
public recognition, without even her name being whispered when my father's work was
displayed, although society owed her and her sex at least half of what it reaped from its menfolk.
Now it is evident that the merit in such cases is in inverse ratio to the number of domestic
helps that are paid to labour for the housewife. Among the poorest, who have and can have no
paid servants, it is, therefore, highest, and it diminishes pari passu almost to zero, as we rise to
the level where the lady is a mere figurehead to a household run by a paid housekeeper and a
staff of servants.
Thus, the housewife among the poor, who rears a family and discharges all her household
duties as well, is a heroine, and the extraordinary feature of our Western civilization is that,
while millions of such heroines have lived and died in each generation for centuries, they have
been passed over unhonoured, unrewarded — aye, unnoticed.
Havelock Ellis has said that in England "motherhood is without dignity." 1 He might have
added that domesticity is without dignity either. For, in a society where from the Western States
of North America almost to the confines of Asia, honour is vouchsafed only to wealth, it was
inevitable that unremunerated duties, like those of domesticity and motherhood, should be bereft
of dignity. 2 All the more reason, therefore, why the rulers ought everywhere to have

1 STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX, Vol. VI, p. 4.

2 Amber Blanco White, in her book, WORRY IN WOMEN (London, 1941), writing as a Feminist, bears me
out fully on this point. She says (pp. 18, 19 and 93), "In the first place the domestic arts are despised in England. The
average middle-class English girl dislikes housework and cooking and would very much prefer to employ a nurse to
look after her children.

- p. 111 -
made some attempt to raise the status of good wives and mothers by devising means of publicly
acknowledging their invaluable and, among the poor, heroic services.
That this should not have been done merely adds one more item, and perhaps the gravest, to
the long list of tasteless, stupid and inhuman acts of omission and neglect for which the rulers of
our materialistic and gold worshipping Western civilization have for centuries been responsible.
The reply to this usually takes the form of enumerating the many immeasurable and
intangible rewards which the good mother and housewife obtains through the love and devotion
of her mate and children. People say: "Look how she is loved and respected!"
But even if this were always true, it would not be enough! If one's functions are without
dignity, they inevitably tend to become undignified and lacking in honour in the eyes of one's
intimate circle, particularly where that intimate circle has enough intelligence to be emulative
without possessing very fine feeling. And, indeed, in countless poor homes to-day and in the
past, what is and has been noticeable is the cavalier manner with which the adolescents, as soon
as they begin to earn, treat the one member of the

The housework and cooking at least she does against the grain, and without any great effort to improve. . . . All the
time they are doing their work they (English women) are hankering after a different kind of life. . . Domestic work
in short is regarded as inferior work, servant's work, work for the stupid and unenterprising and unattractive . . .
much housework, as we are constantly told by our doctors and as few of us believe, is in itself a wholesome
occupation. Unfortunately its value is counteracted in many women by the low esteem in which it is held and the
consequent feeling that it is an unworthy, inferior, miserable sort of occupation." See also p. 99 Ibid.

- p. 112 -
household whose drudgery, whose glamourless routine duties, give her no economic power and
no pecuniary prestige in the home.
Filial affection there may be. Often this affection overrides the impulse to despise that
which is without dignity. But very often it does not. So that even the one reward which society
reckons will infallibly be hers is, in far too many instances, snatched from the hard-working and
conscientious mother and housekeeper. Without taking into account the potent impetus of sexual
passion, indeed, it is frequently difficult, especially in the working classes, to understand why the
girls marry at all. In their own homes they are and have been daily witnesses of the drudgery
which is without dignity. They have known themselves to have been lacking in respect and
kindness towards the drudge whom in their hearts they may love. And yet they plunge into the
very rut of life which will insensibly lead them to the self-same plight, the same rebuffs, the
same sense of glamourless, honourless slavery.
The flight from domesticity and motherhood, especially among the poor, would, therefore,
be a foregone conclusion, even without the Feminist agitator, were it not for the insuperable
potency of sexual attraction. But, where this is ever so slightly enfeebled or impoverished, it is
not surprising that it should fail to present an obstacle to the Feminist ideology and programme.
Indeed, among the poorer of the middle class or so-called "lower" middle class, where sensual
desires are either less powerful, or if powerful, more likely to be repressed owing to Puritanical
or sex-phobic promptings, the flight from domesticity is

- p. 113 -
widespread, and the Feminist programme very generally accepted.
It is probably true to say that, among the scores of Feminist agitators, the injustice to which
I allude, and which struck me forcibly even as a young man, is often harped upon without any
clear ideas either of its causes or its remedy, but merely as a stick with which to castigate Man,
and as a goad with which to turn ever greater numbers of young women away from marriage and
motherhood.
But in exceptional Feminist leaders like, for instance Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the case
against society, relative to this injustice, is argued not merely cogently and with great skill, but
also with much wit and a deep consciousness of the issues involved.
There is a good deal of rubbishy sociology, biology and anthropology in her book, Women
and Economics; 1 but as a whole, it is a splendid work and, above all, it was at the time of its
publication, a necessary piece of special pleading. She is too prone to ascribe all the evils of our
civilization to what she calls the "sexuo-economic relation" — that is, to the economic
dependence of the mother and housewife on her husband — and to overlook such equally potent
influences as the Socratic values, the purely monetary valuation of all merit, 2 performance and
virtue, and the sick and sex phobic values of the prevailing religion.
But what she does argue, and argues very well, is the present gross injustice of allowing one
half of the

1 London, 1900
2 See L. Wyatt Papworth's chapter in MARRIED WOMEN'S WORK (London, 1915, pp. 106–107), where she
writes: "In a commercial age work which is unremunerated and a worker who is unpaid are alike of small value and
little esteemed. . . Hence it follows inevitably that the domestic work of women . . . is despised and considered of
little worth even to women themselves."

- p. 114 -
world — the mothers and housekeepers — to perform, year in, year out, the most exacting and
trying duties, duties without which their husbands' performance and the preparation of the
nation's youth for society would be impossible, 1 without so much as a whisper of any reward and
without any sign of public recognition.
Thus she says: "The salient fact in this discussion is that whatever the economic value of the
domestic industry of women is, they do not get it. The women who do most work get the least
money, and the women who have the most money do the least work" 2 . . . "She is a worker par
excellence, but her work is not such as to effect her economic status." 3 I would add, "neither is it
such as to effect her social status, her rank, her meed of honour in the society in which she lives."
Not that Charlotte Stetson regards motherhood as woman's "sacrifice." She quite rightly, I
believe, stigmatizes this modern cry as the most arrant nonsense. "A healthy and independent
motherhood," she says, "would no more think of taking credit to itself for the right fulfilment of
its natural functions than would a cat for bringing forth her kittens, or a sheep her lambs." 4 And
in combating the exaggerated veneration of motherly love in modern times, she makes a
profound remark, the wisdom of which is too often lacking in Feminist literature, tinctured and
frequently prompted as it is, by the secret jealousy or

1 In stating her case thus, I am rather improving it, as the reader can discover for himself by glancing at p. 279,
of her book; but all the same the injustice she speaks of exists and has existed for generations, and whether she states
it well or badly does not concern me here.
2 Op. cit. pp. 14–15.
3 Ibid. p. 22.
4 Ibid. p. 21.

- p. 115 -
hatred of the male. She says: "If the race-preservative processes are to be held more sacred than
the self-preservative processes, we must admit all the functions and faculties of reproduction to
the same degree of reverence — the passion of the male for the female as well as the passion of
the mother for her young." 1
It is not the generally alleged "sacrifice" of women through motherhood, or the fact that the
wife secures the normal sexual adaptation of her husband, therefore, that Charlotte Stetson
regards as an injustice, because it goes unregarded and unhonoured. For, at all events in the
matter of normal sexual adaptation, the wife is equally beholden to her male partner, whilst to
regard pregnancy and parturition as a form of sacrifice deserving honour would necessitate our
honouring digestion, sweating, hair-growth, and every other normal function. No, what she
deplores is the fact that the twofold and incessant labour — that of the mother as educator of the
infant and young child, and that of the wife as a domestic servant, should go totally unrewarded.
For, in the first capacity she toils for society, and in the second, by making her husband's life and
performance possible, and by providing for the material wants of her children, she again serves
the community by very substantial and indispensable activities.
 So that her charge against the present treatment of women amounts to this — that in the
performance of duties essential to society, woman remains unhonoured and unrewarded, and we
come back to our original statement that domesticity in all its aspects has no

1 Op. cit. p. 194. On the subject of the undue veneration of the mother and of motherly love, see also Laura
Marholm, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 186–190.

- p. 116 -
dignity in our culture, a fact which, unfortunately cannot be denied.
Besides that forthcoming from the quarter of the housewife, there is other evidence to
support the charge.
Behold the lot of the paid domestic servant! In the lifetime of the writer, changes have come
over her position which leave no doubt whatsoever as to the lack of dignity and honour attaching
to domestic dudes even when they are paid.
The change in nomenclature from "servant" to "maid," which occurred about the beginning
of the twentieth century; the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain good
house servants, and the fact that the badge of this service, the cap, has become almost obsolete,
or else survives only in an ornamental or perfunctory form — all these modifications indicate
that a stigma is felt to be attached to domestic service. To dwell only on the question of the cap,
it is obvious that this once served a wholly utilitarian purpose and became a badge of domestic
service only, as it were, by subsequent rationalization. For a cap, worn in such a manner as to
cover the female head, is not only a protection to the wearer but also a protection to those for
whom she works. It protects the wearer's hair from the dust and din suspended in the air during
sweeping, dusting, grate-cleaning, and other household duties, and it protects those for whom its
wearer works, against long hairs in the wrong lairs.
Thus for a cook to wear no cap or to effect the foolish substitute for one which may often be
seen in good middle-class houses, is not only a practical anomaly and a disregard of elementary
caution, but

- p. 117 -
also a clear proof of how deeply despised domestic service must have become. For to drop
altogether, or to retain only in the form of a useless caricature, a necessary part of her equipment
as a domestic worker, simply because it has by association become a badge of domestic service,
shows how deeply the domestic servant must be conscious of the humiliation that badge implies.
Let anyone who doubts this try to reinstate in his household the wise and perfectly harmless
custom of our mothers and grandmothers, by suggesting that all his domestic servants, and above
all the cook, should wear caps.
Charlotte Stetson's remedy for all this will not, of course, bear a moment's scrutiny. But that
her charge is just, I knew long before I had ever heard either of her or of her book.
She suggests a reform of the home which will free women from domesticity and make us
dependent on communal kitchens and communal cleaners; whilst in urging women to find work
outside the home, she quite overlooks the biological aspects of women's life, as was the fashion
among the earlier Feminists and as it still is among the ill-informed rank and file of the Woman's
Movement to this day.
Whatever remedy may be recommended, it should take into consideration the biological
needs and functions of woman. The reason why, for thousands of years, women have been
regarded as the domestic workers, while their mates laboured outside the home, was surely that
the rearing and educating of children, although by no means a whole-time job, is, after all, one
that cannot be performed at stated hours of the

- p. 118 -
day, and then finished with. 1 While it may occupy a certain number of hours one week, another
week it may occupy more or less, and the same periods of the day cannot always be set aside for
the duties concerned. Moreover, during the periods of gestation and lactation it would be
inconvenient for women to have to leave the spot where they habitually reside. Thus domestic
dudes which need not be rigidly subject to a time-table, are ideal duties for anyone who has to
lead the kind of life led by the mother of a growing family. They keep her close at hand if she is
wanted as a mother; they entail no harassing rushes for trains, buses or trams, they do not usually
suffer from momentary interruption (except perhaps in some processes of cooking; But this is by
no means the rule in this occupation) and they impose no strain which is harmful to a pregnant or
nursing woman. They belong, on the contrary, to those soothing and gentle forms of exercise
which are distinguished by their capacity to maintain health and vigour and prevent degeneration
of muscle, without destroying nerves, debilitating the system, or overstraining the strength. On
the other hand, they do not compel the women who perform them to remain unoccupied or static
in any position for unconscionably long periods at a stretch, and apart from the element
consisting of the young family, are duties which may be described as free from anxiety.
In short, the home is the ideal place for the sexual adaptation of the female, and if she is not
to be idle

1 See the chapter contributed by B. L. Hutchins to MARRIED WOMEN's WORK, p. 137, where she writes of
the disadvantages of mothers having to be employed away from home: "Another grave evil is the almost inevitable
neglect of children. from babyhood upwards." See also p. 5.

- p. 119 -
for the greater part of the day, the performance of domestic duties is her natural occupation. 1
Communal restaurants, professional cleaners, menders and crèche attendants, with wives
occupied outside the home, do not, therefore, constitute the remedy for the unjust plight in which
I, for one, readily admit married women of the so-called working, lower-middle and poorer
middle classes now find themselves in our civilization. Nor do I imagine that many of them
would accept Charlotte Stetson's reforms, even if they could be guaranteed to remove the
injustice of their lot. 2
But surely there are other ways of improving their situation! For instance, since the injustice
under which they labour consists chiefly in the lack of dignity, honour and recognition, now
attaching to domesticity, why allow the condition to continue one moment longer?
Let us start to-morrow honouring and publicly recognizing and rewarding good motherhood
and good housewifery. When the relatives, neighbours, and authorities all agree in lauding a wife
as deserving and exemplary, let us make sure that she is publicly honoured and receives some
substantial reward.

1 One of the best and most eloquent treatises advocating this solution of the woman problem (but only from the
French point of view) is Le Solitaire's LA FEMME NE DOIT PAS TRAVAILLER (Paris, 1886). The late Mr. John
Burns apparently wished to embody this idea in some form of legislation, for he wished it to be illegal for married
women to work outside the home.
2 Indeed, in MARRIED WOMEN's WORK, the point is repeatedly emphasized that married women,
particularly when they are mothers, resent having to leave home to earn money, and that, without exception, they
would prefer to stay at home if only their husbands' earnings would allow them to do so. See pp. 4, 12, 109, 135,
138, 139, 146, 148, 151, 154, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162.

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The tests should be biological as well as educational and domestic. Are her children good,
desirable specimens? Have they been well trained at the only period in life when good training
tells — in infancy? Has her home been well and efficiently run? Has her husband been impeded
or helped in his work by her lieutenancy? Has she kept paid helps or not? Is her family a large
one? Has her knowledge of dieting protected her children and her husband from severe ailments?
Did her children have whooping cough, measles, etc.?
A wife whom the opinion of relatives and of the public generally upholds as exemplary on
all these counts might, in addition to receiving honour and rewards, enjoy certain privileges. For
instance, she might in London always have a good free seat at all public celebrations, such as
Lord Mayor's Show Day, Coronations, Openings of Parliament, the Trooping of the Colour. She
might be allowed to travel first-class on the railways at third-class rates, or third-class for half
rates. She might enjoy what soldiers enjoy on the Continent — admittance at reduced rates to all
theatres. music halls, concerts, etc. She would need to wear a badge of her Order, and the Order
would be reserved for wives and mothers, the holders of which would take precedence of other
women. Special Royal Drawing Rooms might even be held for such women, and the rule that
none could qualify over forty years of age would encourage early marriages.
No doubt any ingenious reader will be able to criticize, modify or add to this list of means
whereby exemplary wives could be honoured, and he might even suggest, and quite rightly, a
sub-Order for honouring domestic servants. But no matter what our civiliza-

- p. 121 -
tion may ultimately decide upon, any such measures will inevitably tend to raise the status of
domestic and wifely labours, and domesticity will once and for all be lifted from the low esteem
into which a culture, wedded merely to pecuniary values, has allowed it to sink.
For part at least of woman's sense of inferiority, and her indignation at the influences which
impose it on her, have arisen less from any careful computation of her capacities as compared
with man's, than from the fact that she has long been associated with a class of work deliberately
valued as inferior by a vulgar and purse-ridden culture. Hence the implied slight in the slogan
"Woman's place is the home!" — a slogan which, if domesticity were elevated to its proper rank,
would involve no slight whatsoever, but rather an honour to those of whom it was said. The
resentment which it provokes in women's breasts is due wholly to its present implied slight.
Now, there can be no doubt that, among the many forces which have lent momentum to the
Woman's Movement, this genuine grievance and injustice has played a major role. Although the
extreme conclusions to which it has led in the writings of a Feminist like Charlotte Stetson
cannot be upheld, the significance of such a writer's complaints, as apart from the remedies she
suggests, should not be overlooked.
So much for one grievance and injustice, the past and even present reality of which no one,
except a rabid misogynist, would venture to contest.
There now remains to be discussed what, in the minds of many readers, including a large
majority of women, will seem a less obvious grievance and injustice, although it happens to be
one which, in my view,

- p. 122 -
is probably more serious, because much deeper and less consciously felt than the first. It will be
less easily conceded as a grievance, even by Feminists themselves, and since it is more delicate
and intimate than the first grievance, will frequently be denied point blank as the mere figment of
a none too savoury imagination.
It is a grievance and injustice which only the few have recognised, and of which I may say I
have been aware for many a long year, although I came across it for the first time in print only in
1937, in James Corin's excellent little monograph on Mating Marriage and the Status of Women.
1
Dr. Fritz Wittels, in a book published a year earlier than Corin's, 2 also notices this grievance
and injustice; but I read this book only in 1942, although I had had it by me some time.
Let us consider the grievance as I first appreciated it through the circumstances that I had an
elder sister. She was an attractive girl with ardent sensibilities. But, although she was always the
centre of masculine attention, she was fastidious and hard to please. I knew pretty well the kind
of man of whom she approved, and I can remember two in particular for whom she would have
fallen. It struck me at the time, however, and has often struck me since in regard to other girls,
that in our civilisation, the fact that a respectable girl is unable to be a free mate — is unable, that
is, to offer herself and to profess her choice, and is limited to all kinds of wiles and artifices in
order to manifest her preference, places a severe and often

1 First published by the Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., London, 1910.
2 DIE SEXUELLE NOT. (C W. Stern, WIEN UND LEIPZIG, 1909).

- p. 123 -
insuperable obstacle between her and the man she would instinctively select.
It is said that all women can ultimately get the man they really want. But is this true of the
kind of girl whom we are prone to consider the best? Can we imagine, for instance, Emily Brontë
setting her cap at a man? As things are, at any rate, any number of accidental circumstances may
conspire to wreck even the best laid plans. And what if a girl does not wish or like to stoop to the
wiles or artifices of a covert man-catcher? What too if the man in the case happens to be timid
and diffident — two qualities which do not necessarily argue lack of passion, but often the
reverse.
Given such a situation — the girl proud, the man diffident — and add the circumstance of a
sudden separation due to illness, a change of work, a professional call abroad, or what not, and
an opportunity coveted by both parties may be lost never to return,
That is one aspect, and it explains how so many excellent women come to marry the next
best, or even the third and fourth rate.
In our civilisation, free mating for the female has become a practice associated only with the
prostitute It is the most despised class of women who retain the right to mate freely, and the price
they pay in repute and status is ruinous.
James Corin, who saw this grievance very clearly, argues with some cogency that, like the
female animal, the human female was until comparatively recently a freemater, but that only
powerful and royal females retained that right when first the others lost it. Thus, he argues the
wife was originally a despised creature, very much in the same position as the prostitute to day.
He points out that the very word "wife," which

- p. 124 -
according to its remote derivation means "trembler," or creature that chokes with fear in the
presence of her master, betrays the low and contemptible position once held by wives. 1
 "The wife," he says, "has developed since the time when man was a Simian, not from the
free-mate of a social animal, but from the despised slave of a lustful male." 2 And he adds: "What
then has marriage done for woman? Apparently it has destroyed her independence, taken from
her the control of her own body." 3 But while accomplishing this feat and making it an essential
part of a civilisation which has now lasted for thousands of years, man has gradually made the
wife respectable, while he has relegated the free-mating female to the lowest rung of the social
ladder.
Corin sums up his thesis as follows: —
"In the first period the human female rules. She dictates to the male in sexual affairs — this
is free mating. . . .
"In the second period the male captures foreign females for his use, because his own are too
chaste; these foreign females become his slave wives. He courts and mates with females of his
own tribe at yearly festivals like Australian corroborees.
"In the third period the institution of marriage has become the dominant form . . . so much
so that

1 This is the derivation suggested by Skeat. Sec his larger Etymological Dictionary. See also Karl Weinhold's
DIE DEUTSCHEN FRAUEN IN DEM MITTELALTER (Vienna, 1882), Vol. I, pp. 3, 4, and 5, where Corin's
derivation is confirmed, though the interpretation is different. Nevertheless, Weinhold shows conclusively that vif,
wife, and weib, were all words which once related to an inferior class of woman, and that, certainly in Germany and
northern Europe, Frau, or frowe, or frouwe, was the title of the free woman, whether married or single.
2 Op. cit. p. 95.
3 Op. cit. p. 126.

- p. 125 -
mating unions become regularised as marriages or are condemned as illicit. Of females, wives
are more honoured than free mates — in fact the latter become infamous except in a few cases of
royal princesses, etc." 1
Now Corin speaks of women consciously feeling this loss of the right of free-mating as an
injustice, and disliking our man-made civilisation in consequence. But here, I believe. Dr. Fritz
Wittels comes nearer the mark. He states more or less the same case as Corin, and argues that our
man-made civilisation, by lobbing women of the right of free-mating, gets to be hated By them.
He implies, however, that their hatred is largely or most often unconscious; that, in their hearts,
they are anarchists and in favour of revolution 2nd social upheavals, despite their reputation for
conservatism, because the whole weight of their unconscious impulses is constantly thrown in
the scales against man's summons to them to accept his cultural pattern.
Thus Wittels says: "Our social order has been nothing but detrimental to woman. When
chastity, fidelity and modesty were not demanded of her, her life was much easier to bear. And
that is why woman's unconscious mind does not respond to the appeal of our masculine order of
society. Her unconscious is anarchical. The orbit of her primitive being coincides but rarely with
the course plotted out for her by the laws and conventions man has imposed upon her." 2

1 Op. cit. p. 181. Had he been writing now, he would certainly have added film stars to princesses. For it is
significant for his theory that the freedom attained by the film star undoubtedly enables her to become a free mater,
and she generally seizes the opportunity.
2 Op. cit. pp. 137–148.

- p. 126 -
 Woman, Wittels proceeds, may rationalise this deeply unconscious protest against man-
made conventions, which rob her of sexual freedom. But whether her conscious protest takes the
form of a political sociological or merely domestic act of defiance, at bottom it always derives its
initiative and power from the deep unconscious loathing in all women of the masculine
restrictions placed upon their sexual freedom. 1
That such a deep and unconscious loathing of our man-made culture should, in exceptional
cases, manifest itself as a homicidal tendency against men as individuals, and, in a large number
of women, as mere hostility to men in general, ought not to surprise us. Indeed, Wittels goes so
far as to argue that even in the case of a Charlotte Corday, a Wjera Sassulitsch, a Tatjana
Leontiew and a Jeanne d'Arc, the ultimate interpretation of their acts of violence as "warrior
prowess," "political assassination," or "attempted assassination for patriotic reasons," was but a
last-minute disguise of their deep loathing of man, and of their longing to kill a man — any man
— or men.
This may or may not be so without in the least invalidating Corin and Wittels' claim that our
man-made civilisation has robbed women of a freedom they once possessed and cherished — the
freedom to mate when and where they chose. Deep down in their unconscious minds, this
deprivation, although centuries

1 Coleridge also hints at this in his TABLE TALK. On June 15th, 1824, he said:— "The fondness for dancing
in English women is the reaction of their reserved manners. It is the only way in which they can throw themselves
forth in natural liberty." He has here perceived the same fact recognized by Corin and Wittels; for although dances
may offer but a symbolized form of free-mating, they clearly provide the best substitute compatible with the
preservation of respectability.

- p. 127 -
if not millenniums old, continues to be felt as a motive for opposing, hating and, if possible,
disturbing our cultural pattern. And this is so even in those women who consciously are most
eager to preserve their respectability and would condemn free-mating out of hand.
Wittels does not unravel the tangle. He suggests no remedy for the situation in which
women are placed by our civilisation; while Corin, who saw the dilemma as plainly as the
Austrian doctor, merely shrugs his shoulders and declares the lot of women unalterable unless
we wish to wreck our culture. He says in effect: "It is the feature of human progress — woman
has to be sacrificed for the good of the race," and he shows how constantly success has attended
those races who have sacrificed their women-folk's coveted freedom in mating to the demands of
the male cultural pattern. 1
Corin's general argument, together with the conclusion just quoted above, has received
support in recent years from J. D. Unwin's sensational work, Sex and Culture; 2 but only in
regard to the alleged sacrifice of the female's free-mating impulse, not in regard to the
resentment, of the sacrifice still felt consciously or unconsciously by the female of our culture.
It may be, however, that at least the unconscious resentment of the female for the loss of her
free-mating privilege, as described by Wittels, is covered by what the Freudians regard as "penis-
envy," and that the latter is largely tinctured, if not strengthened by this unconscious resentment.
It may be difficult in the process of psycho-analysis to disentangle the two. Wittels, who is a
convinced Freudian, does not

1 Op. cit. See the whole of Chapter VIII.

2 Oxford University Press, 1934.
- p. 128 -
mention any possible connection between the two; but the chances of their having been
inextricably mingled in the unconscious mind of the human female are probably not so remote as
they may seem.
At all events, as one of the many forces urging women to revolt against their position of
restricted sexual privilege in our man-made culture, the resentment, conscious or unconscious,
due to their loss of mating freedom, seems to me likely to be a powerful one. Nor do I see how
the independent theses of Corin and Wittels can be rejected, unless it be from the quarter of the
psycho-analysts themselves. But even this possible source of refutation is rendered unlikely by
the fact that Wittels himself is a psychoanalyst, and therefore probably drew the evidence for his
thesis from his experience with female patients. 1
The fact that this force — the resentment felt consciously or unconsciously for the loss of
free-mating — is everywhere misinterpreted and disguised by leading Feminists and their
followers, and presented publicly only in the demand for political, professional, educational or
other kinds of "freedom," need not disturb us; because the only rationalisation of this kind of
resentment which would be acceptable, even to the Feminists themselves, would necessarily be
one as remote as possible from anything so indelicate and shameful as the true source of the
trouble. We now know enough about the process of rationalise "shameful" impulses emanating
from the unconscious to feel no difficulty in accepting as possible a degree of disfigurement or
distortion of the truth to the point

l It should be noted that Freud, himself, also recognized that women are prone to adopt a hostile attitude to
culture. See his CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS (London, 1939, p. 73).

- p. 129 -
of complete unrecognisability. When, therefore, we are satisfied that the impulses are
"shameful," or would at least be regarded as such by the cutural environment of women,
including the majority of women themselves, we may feel less hesitation in concluding that
much of the outcry for freedom which has characterised the Woman's Movement in all ages,
from Periclean Greece to modern times, has received substantial support from the unconscious
desire for sexual freedom or, to use Corin's term, free-mating, which lies buried in the
unconscious of the human female.
We may conclude with Corin that this sacrifice of the female's free-mating privilege is
essential to our progress and the successful survival of our culture, and we may bear with Unwin
when he supports Corin's position; but we may do this without in any sense wishing to deny that
probably, in the Unconscious of women, the sacrifice is still felt as a ground for deep resentment
and therefore for revolt against our cultural pattern. If, however, it is thus felt as a ground for
deep resentment, many of the features of Feminism which would otherwise call for explanation
and elucidation not Hitherto offered, become abundantly clear. We see that those paltry prizes
and doubtful privileges, of which the Feminists have made so much — the Parliamentary Vote,
Superior and Academical Education, Professional Equality, and Freedom of Access to Public as
well as every other Office — and which often seem to reflect an unfavourable light on women's
taste and judgment, are but a rationalisation, or subsequent clothing in respectable dress by the
conscious mind, of impulses which would shock even the most strident of the advocates, both
female and male, of Women's Freedom.

- p. 130 -
 For, when we consider the dangers, both physical and spiritual, which women run in
abandoning motherhood, and all that it means; when we reflect on the penalties paid by the
female sex for such side-slips from their allotted path as the present drastic limitation of
childbearing — acts of renunciation which form an integral part of the Feminist programme, and
without which the present activities of women outside the home would not be possible — we can
hardly account for such short-sighted and self-immolating policies except on the score of a
deeply unconscious impulse, stronger than conscious reasoning itself. This impels women
blindly to try to alter their present plight in the sense claimed by Corin and Wittels. They may
consciously interpret this striving in terms morally acceptable to their human environment and
above all to themselves, but fundamentally it probably remains what Corin and Wittels say it is.
So much for the second grievance and injustice under which women languish in our culture.
But, unlike the first, it can, as Corin points out, scarcely be redressed without forfeiting the
survival of our civilisation as such, although its power as a factor in social reform is not thereby
destroyed.
Further evidence, if it were needed, in support of Corin and Wittels' point of view,
confirmed as it is by Unwin, is forthcoming from such phenomena as the Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia, which very early in its career harnessed the influence of women to its leading chariots
by granting a sexual freedom which was little short of licence, and facilities for mating and
unmating which fell little short of promiscuity. Phenomena of the same sort can be detected in
most revolutionary movements, and if women are declared

- p. 131 -
anarchists by a thinker like Wittels, it is chiefly because, in every upheaval of society, their
unconscious resentment over their sexual restraints perceives an opportunity of at last bursting
their bonds, and leads them to take sides with the revolutionaries. Even to-day the Women's
Emancipation Movement is leading to a much freer relationship between the sexes — a further
significant feature in support of Corin's thesis.
I, who have lived through two World Wars, moreover, can testify to the obvious enjoyment
of both by at least the younger women, married and unmarried, of all classes in England. I have
observed them in large cities and in rural areas, and my considered opinion, arrived at after living
through ten years of hostilities, is that women below the age of the menopause are
extraordinarily happy in the conditions created by such major conflicts. Nor should their
conscious or conventional professions to the contrary be allowed to deceive one. War dislocates
the customary life of the nations waging it. Certainly in civil life it relaxes discipline, makes
vigilance and supervision on the part of elders more difficult than in peace time, and loosens
most people's — i.e., both men's and girls' — anchorage. The young and even the middle-aged of
both sexes thus find themselves not only more free, but also much more thrown into the
company of strangers, than is usual in times of peace. The very threat of danger, which lurks
everywhere, but more especially in the immediate future of the younger men, tends to impart a
temerarious spirit to the population. Prudence goes by the board; reserve is discarded, and
situations and actions which only the most daring would look upon as permitted in ordinary
times,

- p. 132 -
become almost a commonplace. Nor are the male nationals necessarily the only masculine
company to be found. War introduces thousands, if not millions, of strange young men, who,
owing to the large draughts of nationals sent overseas, find the latter's womenfolk more or less at
a loose end. These women and girls are the more easily approached and pursued, seeing that they
are usually displaced. Free-mating, therefore becomes possible on a grand scale; for it is not even
limited by the number of male nationals still remaining in the homeland.
Besides, the strange young men, consisting chiefly of soldiers, airmen and naval personnel,
who appeal in their various ranks to the women of all classes, are inclined to be even less
constrained than are their opposite numbers in the country over which they swarm. True, they are
not an invading army. But except for the fact that they are not expected to wage war on the
inhabitants of the allied country on which they land, there is in their position every possible and
essential feature of an adventure in which licence and conquest are certainly indicated. Although
they are allies, they behave as if the women of the country they are visiting were at least fair
game. What is more, they find these women ready if not eager to accept the situation as it
presents itself.
Free-mating is in the air. Everything is allowed. To-morrow? Who thinks of to-morrow
when to-morrow we may die? Can any one wonder that women love war?
Proust, like myself, was struck during the War of Belgian Independence, by the suspicious
fortitude with which women and girls would study the Roll of Honour over their hearty
breakfast, and between two

- p. 133 -
mouthfuls, as it were, announce the tragic fate of some relative or friend at the Front. 1
But when we consider the consolations at hand and, above all, the major consolation offered
by the magic restoration of age-long lost Free Mating, is their behaviour so very surprising?
Even if we knew nothing of the theories of Corin or Wittels, should we not be able independently
to reach their conclusion simply by watching what happens in a World War?
Both in London and in the rural areas of England — especially the latter — I have, of
course, seen many young female lives wrecked by these free-mating conditions. But, by and
large, and even reckoning among the evil consequences of war conditions the thousands of
young wives hopelessly debauched and alienated from their husbands, 2 I am still persuaded that,
at the

1 See LE TEMPS RETROUVE, Vol. I, p. 109. See also my WOMAN: A VINDICATION, p. 261.
2 In Italy, alone, British Army Chaplains found that 20 per cent. of soldiers' wives were unfaithful (see Daily
Press, 3–4–46). We were also told about the same time that services divorces in the spring of 1946 already
numbered 48,000. Not all these were necessarily due to the infidelity of wives; but certainly the majority must have
been. On May 22nd, 1946, for instance, at Leicestershire Assizes, Mr. Justice Cassels said: "There are far too many
women in this country who, while their husbands have been away as soldiers, have thought fit to take on with
another man and be unfaithful." (Daily Press, 23–5–46). Even free-mating with blacks was not eschewed by many of
the married women and girls of this country, and on Feb. 17th, 1946, under the heading of "Nation Faced with Big
Social Problem," the NEWS OF THE WORLD detailed the number of wives and unmarried women in various
countries who had borne coloured babies. "It is a problem," said the N.O.W. reporter, "the solution of which is
regarded as a matter of urgency to save the breaking up of homes where husbands are ready to forgive their erring
wives, but only on condition that they place the children in institutional or other care." Finally, to show how women
and girls enjoy war conditions generally, see the Daily Press of June 12th, 1946, which reported the clamour raised
by demobilized A.T.S. girls to get back into the Army. According to the report, 50 per Cent. of

- p. 134 -
end of hostilities, both in November, 1918, and May, 1945, the mass of the younger women of
England, looked back with profound feelings of nostalgia on the glorious, glamorous years of
war. As I have already stated, their professions to the contrary, especially if made before an
audience expecting civilised opinions from them, should not be taken too seriously.
Thus the theories advanced by Corin and Wittels concerning the deep and largely
unconscious detestation that all women feel for our man made "law and order," because of its
exclusion of a privilege long ago common to all females, animal and human, seem to be borne
out by the facts, and in reckoning the forces behind the Feminist drive for Freedom and
Emancipation, as also behind the Feminist hatred of Man, they cannot be wholly ignored.

applicants at recruiting centres consisted of girls who had already been in the A.T.S.

- p. 135 -
Chapter V
(5) The Influence of Urban Civilisation in Promoting Feminism.

I have already shown how exorbitant urbanisation in all Anglo-Saxon countries

has reduced male stamina, virility and general capacity, and has thus levelled the
sexes and made man less able properly to adapt woman. I have also shown how,
by creating thousands of epicene tasks, it has invited women to take up almost
every kind of town employment, and have pointed out that, far from denoting an
ascent of women, this means only a decline in the abilities of men.
What I have not so far discussed, however, is the indirect effect of urban life
on woman's sexual functions, through:—
(1) The uselessness of children in towns so that, after one or two have
sufficed to prove to all and sundry that a couple is sexually potent, and vanity in
this matter is satisfied, further children have no raison d'être. All are mere
burdens, even the first and often only child. But at least the latter has safeguarded
its parents' vanity by giving neighbours documentary proof of its progenitors'
sexual potency. Here, the utility of town children, except among exceptionally
philoprogenitive people, actually ceases; for, except in unusually enlightened
circles, there is no appreciation of the normal female's psycho-physical need to
have more than one or two pregnancies for health and well-being.

- p. 136 -
(2) The growing difficulty of housing large families in towns. With the turn
of the century, landlords both of houses and flats, appear to have become
increasingly aware of the damage and nuisance created by children in towns,
where their leisure, being quite useless and usually associated with a complete
lack of discipline, serves only to make them a pest. Hence the difficulty of
finding accommodation for large families, and the tendency everywhere in towns
to limit the family at most to three or two, if possible to one.
(3) The stampede after a respectable or even lavish display of prosperity
among all town-dwellers, resulting in an accumulation of possessions which,
because they are expensive, become badges of pecuniary prestige for which
families are curtailed. The passion for conspicuous spending in our culture ruled
by the yardstick of Wealth, thus comes into conflict with the normal functioning
of the female.
 (4) The general loss of a realistic view of life, through artificial, replacing
natural, conditions. Thus the most elementary facts of biology, health, food
production and normal functioning, are forgotten or lost sight of. Food becomes a
"shop" product, and human life merely a matter of smart appearance and good
employment. The elementary conditions of good selection in mating are so far
unknown that unessentials, if pleasing, are allowed to weigh against essentials,
even if these happen to be faulty.
The result of these four indirect effects of town life is so to divert attention
from the basic animal needs of man that in urban communities it is difficult to
convince ordinary people that they belong to the animal kingdom at all. Except in
the privacy of the conjugal

- p. 137 -
alcove, they are merely figures displaying faces and certain fashions in clothes.
No thought is given to much beyond that.
In such an atmosphere the alternative of possessing a small car, or piano, or
wireless set, or else of adding to the small family, is never decided on other
grounds than comfort, display or the desire for more immediate "happiness." To
suggest a longer view comprising the ultimate health of the wife and a better
environment for the family in the form of children, would seem all the more
fantastic, seeing that in towns children are utterly useless, and, through the
dominance of the urban outlook in modern England, have been made almost
useless even in rural areas.
Thus, in towns, the whole ground is prepared for the Feminist programme,
even in its most extreme form — the legalisation of abortion. Women regard it
not only as self-evident and almost too obvious to be stated, but also eagerly
desire its prompt realisation. As no one, except myself, has ever given them a
realistic view of their natures, or reminded them that they have needs and
instincts incompatible with the Feminist programme, they find in every syllable
uttered by the Feminist agitator, the very wisdom they have been blindly groping
after. Feminism, in fact, dots the Is and crosses the Ts of their traditional
artificiality so accurately that they regard as insane anyone who questions its
conclusions.
As an instance of this, I was never so much astonished as on an evening in
April, 1939, when, in opposing an ardent Feminist in a debate on women's rights
and the Modern Woman's ideals, after pointing to the harmfulness to women of
the

- p. 138 -
curtailment of families, 1 I was met with cries from the audience of townswomen
of "Sit down! Sit down! We don't want any of those Nazi views in this country!" 2
But, when the limited, wholly artificial and unenlightened outlook of the
English urban female is thoroughly grasped, can such an outburst appear strange
or unnatural?
To them, everything the ardent Feminist had said was the quintessence of
wisdom. What I said, because it was realistic and more profound, sounded
monstrously unreal and far-fetched.
Thus, to advocate, as I had been advocating ever since 1923, a deep concern
about the normal woman's psycho-physical need of a full sexual life and the full
employment of her genital apparatus, was to be guilty of Nazi propaganda — the
Nazis having been heard of only since 1933!
Ignorance and stupidity could hardly combine with more disastrous results.
But the incident proves my point about the vast and dangerous distance urban
women have travelled from a realistic view of life and especially of themselves.
Incidentally too it sheds a light on the "democratic" and "free" people of England.
"Free" certainly to exert their ignorance and stupidity in going wrong, and
"democratic" to the extent that their freedom to go wrong may be exploited by
demagogues.
I did not, however, need this experience to convince

1 I had made a fairly long speech based on the data collected in my FUTURE OF WOMAN,
and THE TRUTH ABOUT CHILDBIRTH.
2 Quite naïvely the women who raised this clamour paid an unintended tribute to the Nazis.
For, if the views I expressed that night really are exclusively Nazi, it would seem that, here at
least, they had the monopoly of wisdom.

- p. 139 -
me of the lamentable condition of urban women in this matter; for anyone who,
like myself, knows the literature of Feminism and Birth Control propaganda, with
all its glaring non sequiturs, false assumptions, illogicalities and appeals to heated
emotions, could not hold a very high opinion of those who can be convinced by
it.
In an urban population, however, any racket is a feasible undertaking, and no
absurdity or incredibility can be too great to prevent its being accepted by the
average town crowd, if only it be propounded with enough "humour," enough
emphasis, and enough humbug.
In regard, however, to the actual development of urbanism and its exorbitant
growth, the influence of women upon their will-less and humorous menfolk
should not be underrated.
It is a fact little recognised by sociologists, but one which I noted as long
ago as 1924 (at least in regard to dairy work) 1 that women in the country — the
wives, sisters and daughters of farmers, small-holders and cottagers — lead very
much busier lives than do their sisters of the towns and cities. A farmer's, like a
smallholder's wife, may be said to be always busy. If it is not the fowls, then it is
the dairy, the kitchen, the children, and sometimes even the calves, goats, and
pigs. The wife of the bank or insurance clerk, and the wife of the City man, has in
comparison a life of almost complete leisure. She does not, moreover, have to
tend lamps and candles, fetch water from the pump or the pond, find and chop her
own fire-wood, etc.,
 1 See my novel, THE TAMING OF DON JUAN (Hutchinson, London).

- p. 140 -
whilst she also has in plenty the shops she loves, her fellow creatures, and
entertainment of all kinds.
There can be little doubt, therefore, that wherever, as in Anglo-Saxon
countries, the women begin to get a firm hold of the guiding reins of civilisation,
there will immediately follow a strong leaning towards town life; and behind the
frantic, not to say, insane, multiplication of cities and towns in England, and
particularly behind the migration of the rural population to the urban districts
during the last hundred years, a wise posterity will ultimately appreciate that
feminine influence was not lacking.
Mr. Fred D. Smith or Miss Barbara Wilcox evidently seems inclined to
support my view in this matter; for in a book published by them four years ago,
one of them says: "I am inclined to think that women have sought the town more
than men." 1
Thus it seems probable that, whilst urban conditions may be said to favour
Feminism, the influence of women in a culture supported by feeble men may be
said to favour urbanism.
I say above that "through the dominance of the urban outlook in modern
England children have been made almost useless even in rural areas."
By this I mean that, in the old economy of the countryside, children were an
asset. The more a man had, the wealthier he could become, because anything

1 See LIVING IN THE COUNTRY (London, 1940, p. 15). See also Alva Myrdal's NATION
AND FAMILY (London, 1945, p. 31). "It is certain that men are more rural and women more
urban."
Confirmation of this point of view is forthcoming from the Countess of Keranflech-
Kernezne's LA FEMME DE LA CAMPAGNE (Paris, 1933), where, on p. 13, she speaks of
woman making man desert the country; on p. 24, she identifies the problem of rural exodus with
the feminine problem, and, on the same page, declares, "D'un bout à l'autre de l'Europe la jeune
fille se détache de la terre."

- p. 141 -
in the nature of complete self-sufficiency is out of the question for the family of
the small farmer if he has to meet a wage-bill every week. Where there are
children, however, whether girls or boys, they can so soon be employed usefully
in agricultural work, and their training to such work is so early perfected, that
outside labour can be dispensed with often before they reach late adolescence,
and a self-contained unit, working for its own sustenance, and independent of the
outside world, becomes a possibility much more nearly realisable than when it is
necessary to have recourse to paid labour. True, in our modern world of tractors,
taxes, ready-made clothes, boots, rates, coal, etc., certain outgoings in cash are
always necessary, no matter how small the farm. But whereas such cash
outgoings are limited, in the case of the farming family, to those products, goods
and services which cannot be home-provided; in the case of the farmer without
children, they extend to labour about the farm which normally should be
performed by the farmer's or small-holder's children. 1
But even this ideal state of affairs is no longer possible to-day because,
owing to the influence of the town outlook on all legislation — an influence
which, as I say above, has made children in rural districts almost as superfluous
to their parents (except as a means of gratifying parental vanity) as they are in the
towns, the small farmer, who might wish to form with his family a self-contained
unit, living as independently as possible of the outside world, cannot now achieve
his object. For, during the whole of their

1 For an excellent description of the ideal family farm, though it sheds little light on the
forces which make it impracticable today, see Adrian Bell's THE FAMILY FARM, in
ENGLAND AND THE FARMER (London, 1941, Chapter IV).

- p. 142 -
post-infant years and their early adolescence, the children who might help him to
be self-supporting are kept at school, and are really only free to help him when
they are beyond school age. Meanwhile they are taught nothing that can possibly
promote their usefulness to him in later years but are, on the contrary, influenced
by all they learn to incline more to urban than to rural life.
In this sense, the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and later were actually
misunderstood by the rural population. The education they offered may well have
been regarded by the urban sections of the country as "free"; but it was certainly
not free for the country men; and for them to suppose, as they have long
supposed, that their children were educated "free" by the nation, was a piece of
purblind folly.
Truth to tell, they paid heavily for the so-called "free" education of their
children under the Elementary Education Acts passed in the last decades of the
19th century. Their cash outgoings increased to the extent to which outsiders had
to be recruited for work on their farms and small-holdings, and they had to make
good, either in time spent or else in labour substitutes, the delay caused in their
children's agricultural training. Moreover the urban bias given to their children's
minds and characters by an education bearing no relation to the occupations and
interests of the rural population, often alienated their children from farm life.
Thus, while the urbanite might possibly congratulate himself on the free-gift
of education for his children presented to him by a generous and paternal
Government, the countryman only had to dive more deeply into his pocket for
this alleged benefaction, and

- p. 143 -
it drove the ideal of a self-contained, self-supporting unit ever further and further
away.
In this sense urban conditions, leading to the undesirability of children, may
be said to have spread to rural areas through no fault of the countryman himself,
though whether now that these conditions have been firmly established, rural
wives are sufficiently foolish to imagine that the changes which have made
children cease to be wholly assets are such as to have redounded to women's
advantage, is a question which I fear it is impossible to answer except in the
affirmative.
The rural woman has now, unfortunately, very much the same outlook, as
regards offspring, as her urban sister. And, since the appeal of such Feminist
doctrines as those of Birth Control and Family Limitation are no longer resisted
by the countryman himself, because rural children have been rendered useless
and superfluous elements in the home, the spread of the urban outlook to the
countryside is now playing as much into the hands of Feminism in our rural as in
our urban population.

- p. 144 -
Chapter VI
(6) The Influence of Economic Conditions in a Growing Nation that cannot
Spread; Industrialism.

In all discussions on economic conditions it is important to remember that little

about them is unalterable, or inevitable. There are very few so-called "economic
laws" which it is not within man's power to alter to his advantage, and therefore
economic conditions, which appear to be hostile to biological needs are so only
because they are allowed to be so.
But there is a limit beyond which human multiplication cannot go, and it
might be argued that there is a law to the effect that population cannot normally
exceed the power of the soil to support it. On the whole, however, it betrays a
better historical sense and a deeper knowledge of past and present economic
systems to regard economic conditions as more elastic and more susceptible to
control than they were believed to be in the 19th century, and it is wise to discuss
economic conditions with this in mind.
Where economic conditions can and do adversely affect women, is in
sacrificing their sexual functions.
There are five possible ways of restricting population:—
(1) A proportion of the males may be castrated and their sexual function
sacrificed. This has never been tried by any State for restricting population. Only
slaves or servants have been castrated to meet special requirements, but then only
on a small scale.

- p. 145 -
(2) Homosexual practices may be encouraged among males so as to preclude
traffic with the other sex. This was a means advocated by Plato and Aristotle. It
might succeed in its object, but the consequences to the nation would be more
disastrous than those of a redundant population.
(3) Infanticide. This has been tried by most peoples, civilised and
uncivilised. But it is a foolish and wasteful practice unless allowed only in the
case of monsters, infants so injured by birth as to impair their mental faculties,
inferior biological specimens, etc. Selective infanticide, however, wise as it
would undoubtedly be, will be possible only when, if ever, mankind is much
more enlightened than it is at present.
(4) Women may be spayed and their sexual function sacrificed. This has
never been tried as a consistent policy for restricting population. In any case the
effect of spaying is much more disastrous than that of castration and would,
therefore, be impracticable, even if, as a practice, it were tolerated by certain
groups of women.
Women, when pregnant, may, it is true, be aborted. This has recently been
tried on a large scale in Russia. But it involves the sacrifice of a large part of the
female sexual function, results in grave endocrine and other disorders, 1 and it
was abandoned in Russia because it caused too much havoc among the mothers
concerned.
This does not mean, however, that the policy of sacrificing the sexual
function of woman is not actually practised in a disguised form; for, as a matter
of fact, it is pursued on an almost national scale at the present moment by the
method known as Birth Control. In

1 See my essay on ABORTION (Allen and Unwin, London, 1935).

- p. 146 -
hundreds of thousands of cases to-day, this method is restricting the sexual
functioning of normal women to three or at most six years, when their capacity
for sexual functioning extends over a possible twenty-one to twenty-five years.
This means that, in the case of hundreds of thousands of English wives, who to
day have a completed family of only one or two children, the capacity for a full
and normal sexual function, which endures for eighteen to twenty-two years after
the birth of two children, is being sacrificed by an enforced sterility. Nor should it
be forgotten that even of those women who have one or two children, only the
fewest suckle them. So that, in addition to the sacrifice of the uterine and ovarian
function for decades of their lives, there is often the total sacrifice of the breast
function.
The strange part of it is that the Anglo-Saxon woman has been so
unscrupulously indoctrinated with false principles, and her mind has been so
completely diverted from the sound biological attitude to life and her own nature
that, as a rule, she wholly supports the policy which is sacrificing her sexual
function for varying periods of her life, and thinks that the Feminists who
advocate it are her best friends.
(5) Women may be encouraged to practise homosexuality. This, however,
would also imply a complete sacrifice of their sexual functions, and although
female homosexuality has flourished at various times, it has never done so as a
State-organised practice for restricting population, and is not to be thought of as a
practical method of securing that end.
Thus the only solution so far discovered by Anglo-Saxon wisdom for
restricting population under the pressure of economic conditions has been the
sacrifice,

- p. 147 -
total or partial, of the female sexual function through Birth Control. And, despite
the fact that it has caused, and is still causing, widespread havoc among the best
and most normal of Anglo-Saxon women, it has fitted admirably into the
Feminist programme, and has thus helped to secure the realisation of the latter.
For, if it seems wise to restrict population by sacrificing women's sexual
function; if, moreover, women are thereby freed from domestic and maternal
duties; if, too. Feminists preach both greater "freedom" for women and the
advantage of Birth Control methods; and if women themselves, in their ignorance
of the cost in minor and lethal ailments, are led to imagine that both less
motherhood and more freedom are eminently desirable and are being
recommended by their "best friends" (the Feminists), then it follows that the need
for restricting population under economic pressure has played into the hands of
the Feminists, and has made their negative and inhuman programme seem both
plausible, sensible, and admirable to the ignorant and corrupted womenfolk of
modern Anglo-Saxon States.
The question is whether any policy not involving the sacrifice of the sexual
function of woman can be accepted.
Let us be quite clear about the facts. The sacrifice of women's sexual
function, in the disguised form offered by Birth Control, is the only policy so far
discovered by Anglo-Saxon wisdom to meet the need of restricting population.
But although, as a policy, it is erroneously supposed by thousands of modern
people, because it avoids overt sacrifice, to be better than infanticide, or
castration of the male, or female

- p. 148 -
spaying, it actually constitutes the sacrifice of a section of the population
notwithstanding.
The extent of this sacrifice is hidden because, in the first place, cancer of the
breast, ovaries. Fallopian tubes, uterus, and vagina, not to mention other ailments,
whether lethal or not, but in any case crippling and harassing, are not connected
in the popular mind with the deprivation of normal functioning in these organs.
Secondly, because although most Anglo-Saxon families can now boast of at least
one female victim to one or more of these diseases, the total national sum of such
victims, together with their steady annual increase, is never brought clearly to the
attention of the women of the country as a whole.
They do not know, for instance, that breast cancer is on the increase, and that
unmarried women suffer from it at a higher rate than the married, and that even
among the latter the less fertile are at a disadvantage. This fact, at least, would
show them the connection between non-functioning and disease.
They do not know that, in America, States with a high birth rate have a low
mortality from breast cancer, or that England and Wales, the Paradise of
Feminists, heads the list, among fifteen other countries, with the highest mortality
from breast cancer and lowest birth rate. They do not know, and are never told,
that breast cancer is nine times as frequent in England and Wales, where only
one-third of the married mothers suckle their children, and where thousands of
women have no children, than it is in Japan where female celibacy is rare and
breast feeding and large families are the rule.
I could tell them, and have told them in several books, similar facts about the
uterus, the tubes, the

- p. 149 -
ovaries and the vagina. But as no one else tells them the facts, and my books are
never noticed in the Feminist Press of this country and America, they do not
know and cannot learn the widespread havoc the non-functioning of their sexual
apparatus causes among Anglo-Saxon women.
Moreover, they are never candidly asked, "Do you wish to sacrifice your
sexual function?" by anyone who lays before them the known consequences of so
doing. On the contrary, without any reference to the fact that Birth Control
methods and the decline of breast feeding (both of which mean greater female
"freedom") do in fact sacrifice their normal sexual function, they are invited to
adopt the Feminist programme and are encouraged to do everything to realise it.
More fools they!
Yes! But it is a Government's duty to protect the ignorant from their
foolishness, and if people are carefully and regularly warned not to step on live
electric rails, or to climb pylons, or to cross thoroughfares without watching the
traffic lights, why are the women not told the dangers of sacrificing their sexual
functions?
The answer to this question would reveal the extent to which Feminist
influence prevails in official, medical and Press circles in England.
What are the alternatives?
There are various possible alternatives, but all must involve sacrifice of
some kind, because sacrifice of some kind is implicit in organic life as it is found
on this globe. The only rational policy, however, is to sacrifice along creative and
selective lines, so that the sacrifice

- p. 150 -
amounts to scrapping, as the farmer does, the less valuable plant.
Thus:—
(1) An increasing population, which is the only healthy population, may be
spread abroad, at the expense of lower races, or merely at the cost of the
emigrants' love of their home-land. This has never been systematically tried by
Anglo-Saxons, although they had the means to hand to effect this policy. Where it
has been tried, the attempt has been largely haphazard and not deliberate.
(2) The policy of rigidly eliminating degenerates at birth and prohibiting the
marriage or multiplication of degenerates. In our heavily infected and deteriorated
population, this would have provided relief for many years, and given us time to
look round and devise other measures. It would also have had the further
advantage of removing many of the heavier overhead charges caused by
degeneracy, which now act indirectly through taxation in such a way as to compel
sound couples to limit their families.
(3) The policy of rigorously prohibiting immigration of all stocks, even
Colonial and Dominion. Naturalisation should be abolished, and many of the
existing naturalisations revised and cancelled, if necessary with money
compensation. The fact that, while Birth Control has for the last forty years been
energetically advocated to the masses of England, hundreds of thousands of
people of foreign origin have been allowed to come in to swell the population of
the country, is one of the many scandals for which only the prevalent stupidity of
the nation enables the authorities to escape punishment.
At present, economic pressure is allowed to play

- p. 151 -
into the hands of the Feminists and their propaganda and since the latter leads to a
flooding of all employments with female recruits, the position is made
unnecessarily acute by throwing men out of work, delaying marriage for women,
and making even family support difficult. In this sense, the Feminist programme
is really a vicious circle, and since its effects redound with greater ultimate
severity on women than on men, the sooner women appreciate this the better for
them. Women must learn that family restriction through contraception, which is
the only solution of the problem of economic pressure which fits in with Feminist
aims, constitutes the sacrifice of the female sexual function.
Economic pressure also plays into the hands of those fathers who tend to
rationalise their reluctance to get their daughters married by pleading that their
first duty is to make them independent earners. In this way, too, economic
conditions indirectly help the Feminist Cause.
But if the importance of an early marriage for girls and a normal sexual life
for women as a whole were properly appreciated by the nation at large, and if the
masses of the people could be cured of their present Socrates sodden outlook and
made to think about human beings more biologically, there is no doubt that
economic and other conditions would be made to bend to satisfy these two needs.
The fact that the present solutions of the problem of economic pressure are
allowed to persist can be ascribed only to the prevailing state of the public mind It
is not only Socraticised to the last degree, but also left in complete ignorance of
the true needs of women It is, therefore, easily deceived by the Feminist appeal

- p. 152 -
and led to believe that it is really concerned with the true welfare of women.
No better proof could be adduced of the general ignorance of the true needs
of women in England to-day than the incident related above at my debate with the
ardent Feminist, and the readiness with which the wildest inaccuracies about
women's natures and requirements, in both Birth Control and other Feminist
literature, are accepted by the populace at large.
 All this, while it reveals the low level of intelligence generally displayed by
the Feminist leaders themselves, also reflects very unfavourably on democracy
and democratic methods of settling important national policies. It makes one
wonder whether any good can possibly come of a political system which, while it
presupposes an ill-informed, short-sighted, and emotional mass of people on the
one hand, provides no means of ensuring that those who guide and direct them in
forming their ultimate decisions shall be wise, well-informed, scrupulous and
honest.

The Influence of Industrialism.

The flight from domesticity and childbearing are probably the major features
of the Feminist programme in Anglo-Saxon countries. But, in the realisation of
both these aims, Anglo-Saxon industrialism has done the Women's Movement an
enormous service. both by anticipating the Feminist drive of women from the
home into factories, offices and warehouses, and by supplying its economic basis
when once it became a formulated plan.
It further promoted Feminist schemes by appropriating many of the civilised
female's home industries,

- p. 153 -
and rendering her either idle or proportionately impoverished. It thus lured her
from home by offering her a means — a mere shadow of a means, as it turned
out! — of recovering some of the occupations which, while they satisfied her
human and laudable desire to produce creatively, also brought her the personal
credit inseparable from such production.
These aspects of Industrialism may now be examined separately.
(1) Industrialism drove women from the home very early in the history of
the so-called Industrial Revolution. Not later than 1800 an observer in
Manchester reported on the loss by female factory workers of all knowledge of
the domestic arts. He also pointed out that, when these women became wives,
their ignorance of culinary matters condemned their families to such articles of
food as are the most easily acquired (bread and cheese in particular). 1 This
charge against female factory workers continued to be made throughout the 19th
century. 2 But, at any rate, the fact that it is recorded as early as 1800 shows that,
even at that date industrialism had already encroached on the homes of the
masses in a direction opposed to feminine domesticity.
By 1835, according to one authority, of the factory hands over 18 years of
age in Britain, 102,812 were women and 88,859 men. 3 By 1931 the figures for
women and girls had risen to 2,235,020.
The effect of married women's labour on the

1 ENGLISH WOMEN IN LIFE AND LETTERS, by M. Phillips and W. S. Tomkinson.

(London, 1927, p. 394).
2 See, for instance, VICTORIAN WORKING WOMEN, by W. F. Neff (London, 1939, pp.
47–48), and WOMEN AND WORK, by A. A. Bulley and M. Whitley (London, 1894, pp. 103–
104).
 3 Neff, Op. cit. p. 26.

- p. 154 -
viability of their offspring already began to be discussed in the novels and official
reports of the first decades of the 19th century, and the increase of infant
mortality in industrial areas constantly caused alarm. Nor can this occasion any
wonder, seeing that, in a Parliamentary Paper of 1853, we learn that mothers
among factory hands — at least in the textile trade — went back to the mill about
ten days or a fortnight after their confinements. 1 If moreover, we turn to Adelaide
M. Anderson's Women in the Factory, 2 we find that, even in the early days of the
20th century, this was not unusual, especially where unmarried mothers were
concerned.
To soothe their neglected infants, it was a common practice, early in the 19th
century, for working mothers to give them a mixture of laudanum and treacle,
known as Godfrey's Mixture. This alone, apart from any other adverse
circumstance, must have accounted for much of the infant mortality, and it is not
surprising that this scandalous abuse provoked indignant protests in works of
fiction and elsewhere.
What might presumably cause us some astonishment, however, is the fact
that, in the fourth decade of the 20th century, a similar practice, common among
Indian female factory hands, was countenanced by the British rulers of India. 3
Presumably, therefore, an obviously disgraceful abuse, long forbidden in the

1 Vol. XX, p. 860. See also Bulley and Whitley (op. cit. pp. 103–104, and 145); also
WOMEN'S WORK AND WAGES, by E. Cadbury, M. C. Matheson, and George Shann (London,
1909. pp. 23–24 and 219), whilst Mr. Titmus's much later BIRTH, POVERTY AND WEALTH
(London, 1943) implies similar charges.
2 London, 1922, pp. 154–155 et seq.
3 See THE WHITE SAHIBS IN INDIA by Reginald Reynolds (London, 1938, pp. 286–7
and p. 295 notes 73 and 74).

- p. 155 -
home country, appeared in a less reprehensible light when transferred to a part of
the Empire where female labour could count on less public protection!
It is not germane to my present inquiry to relate all the horrors connected
with the employment of women and particularly mothers, in our industries
(especially the mines) during the 19th century and later. It is sufficient to record
the fact that the manufacturers and colliery owners did actually put the more
extreme Feminist doctrines into practice long before these were formulated, and
thus established among the largest section of the population, the so-called
"working classes," social habits and traditions which were to fit admirably into
the framework of Feminist policy in later years.
The reasons for the employment of women, married or unmarried, whether
in the factories or in the mines were primarily cheapness — hence their use in
undercutting men and, in early times, as a means of breaking strikes. There is
overwhelming evidence of this in all the literature and records, especially after
children had been excluded from such work. But there were also other factors
which, although they should have attracted the attention of the authorities and a
wide public never actually did so. These factors were:—
(a) The greater docility and conscientiousness of women, especially of
mothers, owing to the greater sequaciousness of the female in general and, in the
case of mothers, to the greater fear they must always entertain lest any failure on
their part should redound to the disadvantage of their offspring.
The fact that this characteristic of the average affectionate mother was
indeed exploited was openly

- p. 156 -
admitted at least by one manufacturer to Lord Ashley (afterwards Seventh Earl of
Shaftesbury).
"Mr. E., a manufacturer," said Lord Ashley in his speech on the Ten Hours
Bill (March, 1844) "informed me that he employs females exclusively at his
power looms; it is so universally; he gives a decided preference to married
females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for
support; they are attentive and docile, more so than unmarried females, and are
compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessities of life! Thus,
sir, are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female character to be perverted to
her injury — thus all that is most dutiful and tender in her nature is made the
means of her bondage and suffering." 1
This is the classical example and it is famous. But no one acquainted with
the literature and with the individual testimonies given by working women and
recorded in the various symposia and compilations published by women social
workers, need doubt its general truth throughout the industrial history of the 19th
and 20th centuries.
(b) The inadequate remuneration of male married workers in almost all
industries throughout the period covered by the industrial development.
The literature abounds in evidence of the fact that the reluctance of both
working-class mothers themselves and of their husbands to accept the principle of
work outside the home for married women has been consistently overcome only
by the pressing need, existing in the vast majority of working homes, to add

1 HANSARD, 3rd series. Vol. LXXIII, March 15th, 1844. See also WOMEN'S WORK
AND WAGES for similar later testimony.

- p. 157 -
to the family income. And this need has resulted either from the consistent and
scandalous underpayment of male workers, or the lack of employment right up to
the opening of the second World War. 1
Thus Industrialism scored both ways. With the business men and factory
owners of the 19th, and 20th centimes, it was always "Tails we win and heads
you lose!" in their attitude towards the working masses. For, by underpaying the
men, they forced at least the wives of the working classes into the factories and
warehouses, and by employing the women were able still further to bargain to
advantage with the men, or else to leave them without employment altogether.
 This is true of the whole of the century and a half preceding the second
World War, 2 and the recent effects of the policy are well summed up by Joan
Beauchamp as follows:—
"Ministry of Labour Inquiries into the average earnings of men and women
show that women's earnings are usually only approximately one-half of those of
men, and it is therefore clearly to the advantage of the employers to substitute
women for men wherever possible. In a vast and growing number of cases the
housewife thus becomes the only wage-earner, and with the operation of the
means test her wages are taken into account in fixing unemployment relief for the
displaced man of the family. The net result is that the Unemployment Assistance
Board is subsidising the employer, who is getting the same amount

1 See for instance, Adelaide M. Anderson (Op. cit. pp 156, 161 and 162); also MARRIED
WOMEN'S WORK where the fact is emphasized almost on every page; also W. F. Neff (Op. cit.
pp. 49–50), and Bulley and Whitley (Op. cit. Preface, p. x).
2 The consequences of this state of affairs came as a shock to all decent-minded people when
they were revealed in a brochure entitled OUR TOWNS (Oxford Univ. Press, 1943).

- p. 158 -
of goods produced at half the wages, but — and this is the disastrous feature of
the situation — the unfortunate housewife-bread-winner is doing a double job at
the unemployment relief level." 1
And, incidentally, it is here, as I point out elsewhere, that Feminism adopted
so shortsighted a policy as wholly to forfeit all claim on the worker's regard. For,
had friendliness and loyalty to the mass of normal married women in the country
been the mainspring of the movement — which, of course it never was — the
only desirable and merciful reform to agitate for, and one which would have
defeated the ruses of all the mere profiteers in the land, was higher wages and
security of employment for the married men. Not better and better conditions for
women workers, not women police, women M.P.s., women diplomatists, and
women barristers, but a sufficient wage for the working man to allow him to keep
his wife at home and, above all, to have security of employment. 2 Nor can any
rational being read a compilation such as Married Women's Work, for instance —
to mention but one record of the facts — without being convinced that, had the
Feminist agitators worked in this direction, they would have had all working class
England behind them. 3
Besides, this policy for the Feminists was all the

1 WOMEN WHO WORK (London, 1937, p. 12).

2 Thus, Miss Wilma Meikle (op. cit. pp. 12, 16, and 46) remarks, "The militants soon lost
interest in the working man," and speaks of "the failure of the suffragists to champion insistently
the needs of women workers." She also says, "It was the misfortune of the suffrage movement that
for the most part its leaders were women whose minds had never been winnowed by personal
experience of economic need."
3 It should not be supposed that prevailing poverty with all its evil consequences is a
phenomenon only of the remote past in

- p. 159 -
more indicated seeing that, like the political leaders of Anglo-Saxon civilisation,
they never wearied of repeating that they stood for Freedom, the Freedom of the
Freedom-loving Peoples! And yet, as the Misses A. A Bulley and Margaret
Whitley declare (and the charge was true up to the very outbreak of the second
World War) "there are masses of workers in England who are no more free to
choose their work, or to make terms for it than were the slaves on a Virginian
plantation!" 1 And of the masses of workers, at least a third are women!
It was to this fact that the authorities, and a fortiori the Feminists, should
have turned their attention. From the standpoint of the health of the women
themselves, their children and their husbands, and thus ultimately of the nation at
large, it was clear that the crying need from 1800 to 1939 was an adequate wage
for the married working man.
So maniacal, however, was the Feminist longing to "free" women, and above
all themselves, from domesticity, that they never once challenged a supine
legislature to redress the most tragic grievance of the English labouring classes —
a grievance that endured long over a century.
And why was this? Chiefly because the Feminist Movement is and always
has been an essentially middle class affair, supported by more or less idle
spinsters and disgruntled wives, who thought only of

England; for Sir John Orr (Food, Health and Income) estimates that as late as 1936 one tenth of
the population, including nearly one in four of its children could spend only 4s. a week per head
on food. Thus, he adds, one child in four could not be adequately fed on its parents' income
1 WOMEN'S WORK, p. ix.

- p. 160 -
establishing themselves and their like in the limelight. 1
Thus, by the time the most extreme Feminist claims and ideals were
formulated and largely realised by the phalanx of middle class women who led
the Movement, the whole nation of workers was schooled to regard the Feminist
programme as no more than commonplace. For, by 1931, in addition to the
2,235,020 women and girls in factories, there were 443,738 saleswomen and shop
assistants, 657,396 clerks, typists, etc., 170,551 warehouse, store and packing
employees, 134,407 hospital nurses, 206,024 teachers, 1,630,857 domestic
servants and charwomen, 106,009 barmaids and waitresses, and 139,801 laundry
workers? — i.e., 6,266,100 women and girls gainfully employed outside the
home!
No whisper of regret came from the Feminists concerning the loss of the
domestic arts by all this army of female workers. They made no sign that they
appreciated the biological or the purely demographic consequences to the nation
of all this condemnation of girls and women, in their best years, either to sterility,
dangerously late marriage, or, in the case of the married, the drastic curtailment
or neglect of their families.
Even to mention these matters was to incur ridicule

1 See Wieth-Knudsen, FEMINISM (London, 1928, p. 235), also WOMAN AND

CIVILIZATION by Miss E. M. White (London, 1940, pp. 44–46. "It must never be forgotten that
Woman includes all women and not merely the middle class, which is chiefly in the mind of so-
called feminists." Also, Th. Joran, LA TROUEE FEMINISTE (Paris, 1900, p. 173). ("Le
féminisme est un sport à l'usage des classes riches ou oisives . . . dans les milieux non pas même
ruraux, mais simplement modestes, dans la petite bourgeoisie, à plus forte raison chèz l'ouvrier et
chez le paysan, le besoin 'd' émancipation' féminine ne se fait pas sentir." Also Wilma Meikle
(Op. cit. opening pages of Chapter II).

- p. 161 -
and, after 1935 — incredible as it may seem! — to be accused or at least
suspected of Nazi sympathies!
Thus did Anglo-Saxon Feminism find most of its spade work performed for
it by Industrialism, and its leaders had neither the acumen, the originality, nor the
humanity to see that the free gift Industrialism had made it, was one rather to be
eschewed than embraced.

The Influence of Domestic Service.

Before leaving this first section on Industrialism, there is one other point to
be considered — the part played by the female industry of 1,630,857 domestic
servants and charwomen in promoting the Feminist Cause. This is a convenient
place to consider the relation to Feminism of this female industry, especially as it
is to some extent arguable that the wide employment of domestic servants, as we
are familiar with it from 1800 onwards, is not unconnected with a multiplication
of a powerful middle class, and that the matter is largely the outcome of
Industrialism.
What I shall be concerned with here, however, is only the relation borne by
domestic service to the rise of Feminism.
Familiar as I have been ever since my childhood with the kind of domestic
trained in the households of Latin countries, where the relationship between
mistress, master and servant still savours of the old patriarchal family unit, I can
speak as one who has the data for comparing two systems. In the Anglo-Saxon
system the patriarchal tradition had wholly vanished long before I was born. In
the Latin system it survived up to the time of my last sojourn south of the
Channel in recent times, and it is a peculiarity of this Latin system that the Anglo-
Saxon exile on the

- p. 162 -
Continent, or even the Anglo-Saxon visitor who stays there for a fairly long
period each year, usually falls in with it, tolerates and even enjoys it. Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt is a case in point, as I need hardly point out to anyone who has
read his account of the period he spent in Paris at the outbreak of the Franco
Prussian War. 1
To anyone familiar with the patriarchal type of domestic service, nothing
could seem more chilling, more inhuman and less calculated to cultivate devotion
than the relationship commonly established between the servant and her
employers in Anglo-Saxon communities right up to the outbreak of the second
World War.
 It was a relationship based, not merely upon an assumption of rigid class
distinction, but also on feelings of permanent strangeness, as if two different
species were daily confronting each other for the first time.
The reason why this strangeness never melted into something more genial
and familiar, and the servant continued to live within the family as an unfamiliar,
was that there lay constantly behind her employers' minds the fear lest the
slightest step towards humanising the relationship might ruin the tacit
understanding that they were in some way irreducibly superior, whilst she was in
some way irredeemably inferior.
As to the reasons why this fear of ruining the said tacit understanding
existed, it resided chiefly in the fact that the fiction of a superiority sufficiently
exalted to command menial and often bemeaning services seemed to the Anglo-
Saxon middle class, especially their womenfolk, the only means of imparting an
air

1 See his DIARIES.

- p. 163 -
of justification to these services. For when only a thin margin of actual elevation,
usually merely a relatively slight economic advantage, separates the two parties, a
hardening of barriers is necessarily insisted upon by those enjoying the
advantage, especially if menial services are expected of the other party.
In other words, to drop the fiction of superiority by stooping even for one
moment a day to the friendliness of a common humanity would seem like
removing the only reason why the servant should continue uncomplainingly to
empty her mistress's chamber pot.
But the fact that this insistence on a hard barrier need not arise is shown by
its absence in similar circumstances on the Continent.
Ask me why the French or Italian bourgeoise continues to expect her bonne
to empty her chamber pot and is never disappointed, despite the friendly chat they
have had together five minutes previously, as well as yesterday and the day
before, and I find it difficult to explain. I also find it difficult to explain why the
same bonne at times accepts an expostulatory gifle, and is happier having
accepted it than the Anglo-Saxon servant whose whole existence consists of
much more wounding and resounding gifles in the face of her pride.
Is it a matter of warmth? Is there an ardour in the Latin mistress which sheds
a perpetual glow on her relationship with her menial and insensibly makes a
minion of her? Or is it due to a difference in the national attitude towards manual
labour? That is to say, where a cash yard-stick is paramount, as it is in Anglo-
Saxon communities, and manual labour of all kinds thus comes to be despised, is
the distance between mistress and servant really felt as much

- p. 164 -
greater and more insuperable among Anglo-Saxon peoples?
Or, to offer a last suggested explanation, is die different and much more
human relationship between the Latin mistress and her servant made possible
owing to the fact that the former is much more frequently a busy or business
woman, engaged in highly skilled or, at least, highly exacting activities? The
servant knows she could not perform these duties for her, whereas the Anglo-
Saxon servant is much more often confronted with a spectacle of idleness and
pleasure, a life which she feels she could live as effectively as her mistress?
If this were so, then the meek and cheerful acceptance by the Continental
servant of a role much inferior to that of her mistress would be understandable.
This presupposes, of course, a degree of intelligence in the working population of
— say, France, superior to that in our own. But I submit that there is this degree
of superior intelligence in the working population of Latin countries.
As I wrote many years ago, "Where the yard-stick of cash, alone, tends to
measure the difference between classes, there is a danger that economic 'inferiors'
may one day argue that they would be as competent and suitable as their
'superiors' to spend week-ends at the best hotels on the coast, and to obtain their
clothes and house appointments from the most expensive firms."
And, whereas in Anglo-Saxon countries, comparative idleness is too often
the only feature in their mistress that distinguishes her from her servants, it is
possible that they may be more ready to span the

- p. 165 -
factitious chasm separating her from them if ever she showed the slightest
tendency to unbend.
Be all this as it may, the typical relationship of servant to mistress in Anglo-
Saxon society was, up to the outbreak of the second World War, one based on a
convention which made their life under a common roof a reason for aloofness,
and this aloofness bore all the features of a clash between a higher and a lower
order of living.
Thus, where youth, naïveté and ignorance combined to make the servant
eager and willing, it is no exaggeration to say that her willingness was usually
exploited, and for the simple reason that, when services are not rendered between
equals, there is a danger lest they be accepted from "inferiors," not with gratitude,
but with fatalistic calm, as if a normal reaction of low to high. But this attitude
towards them, instead of inspiring thankfulness, merely augments self esteem in
the receiver.
What a tale could be told of this kind of hidden exploitation between the
four walls of countless homes throughout the length and breadth of England, ever
since a middle class became a substantial element in the population! Dickens
gives stirring snap-shots of it in his time. But it was not an abuse that vanished
with the demise of the great novelist.
Both my paternal grandmother and her daughters showed themselves adepts
at it, and my French mother whom, by the bye, I have often seen smack her
servants (all wholly devoted to her) always commented on it in horror.
Now, apart from the fact that an intelligent, sensitive working class girl,
fresh from the warmth of her family circle, would, in such circumstances, feel
both

- p. 166 -
chilled and affronted by the constant implication of some fundamental and
insuperable inferiority in herself, what was the effect on those for whom she
worked?
It is questionable whether it can be wholesome, especially for the growing
girls in such a household, to have constantly at hand, under their own roof,
women who are treated in every respect as members of a caste so far inferior as to
constitute almost a different order of beings. And when, in addition, they behold
these "inferiors" daily performing duties which, in the tradition of our own and
even of more primitive civilizations, are associated with the housewife, the lesson
can hardly fail to be pernicious.
By their connexion with inferiority, the duties themselves acquire an
undeserved stigma, whilst the young ladies who are relieved of them can hardly
help entertaining wholly distorted notions of their own personal importance. As
mere children they are addressed as "Miss" Harriet or "Miss" Mary. The activities
of the household centre around them. They learn a caste distinction with their first
breath. And, seeing that the difference and distance between them and their
parents' menials is too often only a matter of money and that economic
superiority all too frequently outstrips human superiority in all directions, they
inevitably grow up snobs.
Nor is this the whole story. For they also grow up idle snobs. They often
reach maturity not knowing the most elementary facts about cooking, house-
cleaning, shopping, fire-lighting, mending, sewing, etc. They are not potential
housewives in any sense of the word, and unless the system which has reared
them lasts their life-time and, like their mother, they

- p. 167 -
find themselves called upon to perform only the ceremonial parades of
housewifery, they soon betray their utter uselessness. Nevertheless, let them
receive a suitable proposal of marriage, and without the slightest hesitation they
will spring straight from College, the Conservatoire, or even the High School,
into matrimony or domesticity!
Thus, with the women of the middle classes able to scorn domestic arts, and
the women of the working classes driven from these arts by Industry, England has
become a nation in which the domestic arts are dead. Only 1,630,857 domestic
servants and charwomen know anything about them!
Moreover, in these middle class homes, both the daughters themselves and
the servants about them are constantly and vividly reminded of the sensational
differences that are wrought in human destiny by even relatively slight variations
in material possessions, So that both are schooled to use wealth as the only yard-
stick with which to measure human worth. True, in this they fall into step with the
rest of their nation! But it is surely in the home, the place where years of contact
and scrutiny between fellow beings should lead to saner conclusions, that the
barbarity of the cash yard-stick should first be learnt!
This crop of evils arising from the past and present status of domestic
servants suggests the question whether they are not perhaps but the inevitable
outcome of what is in itself an evil institution. For out of evil only evil can come.
Except for the aged, incapable of self-help, therefore, might it not be a good
thing if the institution were wholly abolished? For the various evils I have
enumerated by no means exhaust the list. They do

- p. 168 -
not even include the major evil which must to some extent be ascribed to
domestic service. I refer to Feminism itself.
Without a leisured horde of well-to-do women, with none but the Devil to
find work for their idle hands to do, where would the Feminist Cause be? Who
have the female pioneers, scribes, exponents, propagandists, militants and
"heroines" of Female Emancipation been? Without exception daughters from
homes overstaffed with house-servants! All of them "ladies" taught by their daily
life at home that domesticity is "slavie's" work. All of them indolent and trained
in idleness. All of them itching to experience before the public eye the false
prestige and glamour with which they were surrounded under their father's roof.
And all of them conditioned snobs, totally unfit to use their power for any other
purpose than that of increasing their false sense of their own importance! 1
Thus although, as we have seen, this is by no means the whole story of the
rise of Feminism, it is an important contributory factor. And if Feminism is a
mischief, as I believe it is, and as I believe enlightened posterity will regard it as
having been, then domestic service as evolved by England in the last three
centuries must be held partly responsible for it.
But the fact that domestic service is involved in the complex of causes that
have given rise to Anglo-Saxon Feminism explains one arresting feature about
the Movement, which otherwise would remain wholly mysterious. And that is,
how it has come about that, in the whole history of Anglo-Saxon women's rise to
prominence and power, nothing has been done to im-

l Again, for confirmation of this, see Wilma Meikle, op. cit. pp. 16, 24, 71.

- p. 169 -
prove the status and to humanize the position of female domestic servants.
Under the pressure of need, confronted by the threat of a total lack of
domestic help, the wages of house servants may have been augmented
substantially since the days of Dickens. In face of the danger of losing your
domestic help to a kindlier or more generous employer, a curb may now be set on
the readiness to exploit willingness in young domestic servants. But what has
been done by Feminism as a whole to raise their status, to break down the
inhuman barriers erected within the home by snobbery and mere pride of purse
between the exalted and the inmates below stairs?
Literally nothing!
As one feminine observer 1 has stated, to the type of woman who has lead
and formed Feminism, it has seemed far more important to clamour for the right
of women to be ambassadresses, or to occupy the higher grades of the Civil
Service, or to duplicate men in the liberal professions, than to concern themselves
with the real needs of the working class mother or spinster not to mention the
domestic servant on whose labours the Feminists' "freedom" to be glamorous so
much depends!
Thus, I repeat, why should not domestic service be abolished? For 999,999
families in a million in modern England it would be a godsend if it were. Is it
possible that signs are already apparent that this happy consummation is on its
way?
I hope and pray that it may be so!
2. Industrialism has further promoted Feminist schemes by appropriating
many of the civilized fe-

1 Wilma Meikle.

- p. 170 -
male's most satisfying occupations — those, I mean, which brought her the
natural reward of skilled labour well done, which is kudos, credit, esteem and
honour.
In all the propagandist literature of Feminism it is usual to find the protest
that women are not mere child-bearers or infant nurses, but that they are, above
all, human beings.
Distorted and caricatured as this plea may have been by the more unthinking
advocates of Feminism, it contains a very solid truth, and this truth is that women
share with men that part of the best human equipment which consists, not only in
the ability to be productive, but also in the desire to produce.
The exercise of some skilled art is as much a female as it is a male necessity,
and especially when child-bearing and childnursing have ceased to make a more
or less whole-time claim on an intelligent and efficient woman's energies, it is
natural, if she is normal, for her to wish to display her capacities in fields that are
both productive and capable of earning for her the esteem of her circle.
Even during the reproductive years this longing to display her aptitudes may
still find abundant opportunities and, in the history of her sex, these opportunities
have, as the relevant literature shows, been consistently used.
The reader need only dip casually into such works as Dr. O. Tufton Mason's
Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, 1 or Ploss and Bartels monumental work
Das Weib, 2 or Dr. Briffault's The Mothers, 3 or any one of the countless
ethnological monographs containing the

l London, 1895.
2 There are various German editions, but an English translation was published by Wm.
Heinemann in 1935.
3 London, 1927, Vol. I.

- p. 171 -
study of a primitive people in order to be convinced that woman has enjoyed
throughout the ages a tradition, not merely of productiveness in the material
culture of all races, but also of highly skilled and artistic capacity in the
contribution she has made to such material culture.
Nor is it any longer admissible to regard this feminine share in the material
culture of mankind as the result of coercion, or bondage. We now know how
voluntary and spontaneous it has been, and those who still entertain doubts on
this point will find them quickly dispelled by reading a work such as that by Dr.
Briffault, for instance. 1
Thus in fishing, the making of preserves, the gathering or growing and
distillation of medicinal herbs, the seasoning of meats kept for consumption at a
date long after the kill or catch, basket work, pottery, corn milling and bread
baking, spinning, weaving and netmaking, clothing etc., there is hardly a
domestic utensil or need — at least in primitive times — which the eager and
voluntary labour of women did not provide. And it is noteworthy that many of
these cultural contributions could be made without such undue claim on a
housewife's time as would prevent her from performing all the duties required of
the mother of a normally spaced family.
When once the reproductive period had passed, however, many of these
duties became one of the chief titles of prestige and honour among the middle-
aged women of the community and, what is more, they could then be performed
as a whole-time occupation.
The gradual extension of mechanized industry, however, not only robbed
women of these opportunities

1 See especially Chapter IX, Vol. I, of THE MOTHERS.

- p. 172 -
for the display of skill and art, but, owing to the relative facility with which a
machine can be minded. also, as it were, indicated women as the machine
minders par excellence. Thus, at one blow, mechanized industry deprived women
of almost all the more glamorous occupations of the home — those best
calculated to make a demand on skill and art and, therefore, to arrest attention and
earn esteem, 1 and at the same time offered her the merest shadow of these
occupations by giving her, at most, the task of a machine-hand. Meanwhile,
however, it had left feminine labour in the home only the dullest drudgery which,
by its relatively small demand on skill and art, easily came to be ignored as a
substantial social science and ultimately to be accepted as a matter of course.
This highly grievous situation could hardly have been acquiesced in by a
gifted and sensitive female population, without at least some form of vehement
protest in certain quarters. The fundamental need of all human beings to earn
credit through their capabilities or, to put it on the lowest plane, "de se faire
valoir", had, in the very heart of the home, received such a stinging rebuff that it
is hard to estimate the extent of its repercussions.
Nor, in considering the relatively low grade labour? to which mechanized
industry reduced the mass of working women both in the home and in industry,
should it be forgotten that their men-folk suffered by machinery a blow to their
self-esteem wholly equivalent to that levelled at their wives and daughters.
This has been so admirably stated by Dr. Ananda

1 This is well brought out in J. Langdon Davies's otherwise mediocre and shallow work A
SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN (London, 1928).

- p. 173 -
1
Coomaraswamy that I need not here enter into the matter with any detail.
Suffice it to say that, whilst the discontent created among men by the insulting
relegation of their human dignity, skill and artistry to the rank of machine
auxiliaries in a factory, became obscured by and confounded with the discontent
arising out of their intolerably low economic conditions (in the middle class mind
all labour discontent was ascribed solely to economic distress! 2), in the case of
the women, the discontent lent plausibility to the advocacy of Feminism and
swelled the ranks of those in the working class who were beginning to lend a
friendly ear to middle class Feminist claims.
Thus, once again, Anglo-Saxon Industrialism played into the hands of the
modern Woman's Movement and, although it offered the working class woman
nothing that might have ameliorated her lot, it gave the false impression that
something was being attempted in this direction. For, after all, the money the
married woman earned in the factory at least added a trifle to the wholly
inadequate family income.
All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the fundamental
economic mischief was the underpayment of the married working man. It was
this that wrought havoc in his home by turning his wife out of doors and
condemning her to pitiable drudgery. The fact that Feminism, whether aspiring
to, or possessed of, power, never concentrated on this evil, is one

1 See his WHY EXHIBIT WORKS OF ART, (London, 1943).

2 Masses of quotations could be given supporting the general truth of this statement. Indeed,
it may be said that, taking the nation as a whole, England throughout the 19th and early 20th
centuries never once suspected that discontent might be partly caused among the working
population by the insolent assumption on the part of the employer class that they were as a rule, fit
only to be machine auxiliaries.

- p. 174 -
of the severest charges that can be brought against it.
It may be forgiven for not having perceived the spiritual mischief of
Industrialism — the affront which, as Dr. Coomaraswamy shows (and as I did in
1921 1 and 1934 2), mechanized industry administered to the higher sentiments
and aspirations of every decent working man and woman by robbing them of
their various skills and arts, and condemning them to idiocy. I say, it may be
forgiven for this; for there was no vociferous male lead in the country in this
matter. Ruskin and Morris had been ignored — at least as regards this aspect of
their teaching, and the Socialist Movement, including even its more intelligent
members, men like Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, were wholly obsessed by
the economic aspect of social unrest.
But this is only one more feature of Feminism which shows how unoriginal
its programme and policy were. 3 It followed slavishly in the footsteps of male
Radicals and Liberals in all its approaches to social problems 4 and, boiled down
to its essentials, is seen to have agitated and clamoured only for a more
glamorous existence for the idle middle class female. 5

1 See THE FALSE ASSUMPTIONS OF DEMOCRACY, Chapter IV.

2 CREATION OR RECREATION.
3 See Wilma Meikle (op. cit. p. 145). "It is possible that a future generation may discover
that women are fitted to use their minds finely rather than originally."
4 Ibid. p. 141. "In a movement which existed to emancipate women it was a great loss that
even its leaders failed to break away from the masculine idea of the objects of emancipation and
the methods by which emancipation should be secured."
5 Ibid. p. 23. "They [the New Women] wanted to be of conspicuous use." See also p. 71 for a
similar view.

- p. 175 -
Appendix I
My Main Divergence from Nietzsche

My principal divergence from Nietzsche arises out of my attitude to Socrates.

For the reasons stated in the chapter on The White Man's Philosophy above, I regard
Socrates as the greatest transvaluer of all time, the man who, out of resentment and inferiority
feelings, was responsible for the fundamental demonetization of the old healthy values regarding
man, and for the successful establishment of new principles which excluded biological
considerations from judgments affecting human nature, which created a new and imaginary
centre of gravity in man — the soul, and which relegated the body to an inferior and despised
rank.
My view is that the moment the old healthy biological attitude towards man, which
regarded his visible aspects as essential factors in forming an estimate of him, was contradicted
and invalidated by Socrates, every sort of degeneracy, and of apology for degeneracy, became
possible. Every sort of nobility was made difficult of achievement, if not impossible. For
nobility, like every other order of rank in the human heirarchy, is inconceivable without bodily
components of a certain quality. So that Socrates, at one stroke, tried to make not only health but
also nobility a thing of the past.
With the denigration of the visible, the body, in short, and the exaltation of the invisible, the
soul,

- p. 176 -
every kind of canaille, by making certain verbal protestations and adopting certain airs, could
prove its worth. For whereas a man cannot by speech improve his profile or his figure, he can by
assurances and pretences about his invisible soul, secure prestige among any Socraticized group.
I could not, for instance, enter a strictly hereditary peerage, except through the bodily portals of a
noble woman's birth canal. But I can enter any Christian society by merely persuading those who
belong to it that my invisible self conforms with their ideal of such invisible selves and holds the
particular views prescribed by their society.
Now it was Socrates and those of his followers who were besotted by years of their master's
debating points — in other words, it was a none too respectable group of homosexual Greeks of
the late fifth century and early fourth century B.C. — who popularized and successfully "got
across" the doctrine of the supreme importance of man's invisible side and of the despicableness
of the body, the flesh and the world, as compared with the high and unique value of the soul and
the world of souls. And Socrates, as I have shown, led in the performance of this feat of
transvaluation, owing to his resentment, or, to what Dr. Adler would have called, his inferiority
feelings. For, as the ugliest man of his Age in a city of beauty, among beauty lovers, many of
whom were beautiful, and all of whom believed in the equation "good-looking = good" (
), he was at a grave disadvantage as long as the biological or bodily aspects of a man
continued to be regarded as an essential factor in the estimation of his worth.
But, although Nietzsche perceived much that was degenerate in Socrates and emphasises his
passion for

- p. 177 -
dialectics as a proof of his inferiority, he nowhere makes it clear, as I have done, that Socrates
was the great transvaluer at the very beginning of our history, the man who, by discrediting the
biological standpoint of ancient man, opened the door to every form of decadence and
degeneracy, and every excuse for both, and thus did most to undermine the stamina, health and
noble traits of the White Man.
On the contrary, Nietzsche never tires of repeating that it was the Jews who were the great
transvaluers, the great fertilizers of other peoples in the matter of ideas and values.
For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 248) he maintains — erroneously, to my
way of thinking — that whereas the Greeks were a feminine race who suffered fertilization in
ideas and who bore fruit after being fertilized, the Jews were a virile race which preferred to
fertilize. But I submit that this is to underrate the Greeks and their influence; for they have
fertilized the whole of the White Man's world with their philosophic views ever since 500 B.C.!
It also amounts to misrepresenting the Jews who, in whatever feat of fertilization they may have
performed through Christianity, borrowed heavily from the Greeks and especially from Socrates.
Again, in Beyond Good and Evil (Aphorism 195) Nietzsche declares that "the Jews
performed the miraculous feat of turning values upside down . . . . Their prophets welded into
one the notions 'rich', 'godless' 'evil', 'violent', and 'sensual', and were the first to stamp the word
'world' with the idea of reproach."
He speaks of this topsyturvification as imparting a new and dangerous charm to life "for
two thousand years."

- p. 178 -
Clearly, then, he is referring to Christianity! The figure "two thousand", during which this
topsyturvification has prevailed, suffices to establish this point apart from his description of the
transvaluation
In The Genealogy of Morals (Aphorism 8) he again speaks of the transvaluation of all
values as Israel's work.
In the Antichrist (Aphorism 44) he speaks of Christianity as the final masterpiece of the
Jews and identifies the Christian with the Jew.
These passages make it dear that when Nietzsche speaks of the first "Transvaluation of
Values" he means that which was effected by Christianity, and he holds the Jew responsible for
both.
I have shown, however, that all the principal positions established by Christianity had been
fought for and won by Socrates and his followers four hundred years before Jesus.
What is the meaning of this disparity between the view of Christianity, as stated in the first
chapter of this essay, and Nietzsche's view?
There are various explanations.
In the first place, we should remember that the power of tradition and of long schooling at a
traditional school, even with so independent and original a thinker as Nietzsche, is frequently
overwhelming, and that the traditional view of Socrates as held by all European scholars is
incompatible with the view of him which I advance.
I have always encountered in Greek scholars a profound veneration for Socrates, as a man
and an innovator. This feeling, handed down from teacher to pupil for generations in all
European Universities is quite capable, in itself, of having prevented even a

- p. 179 -
daring thinker, like Nietzsche, from taking the leap which I, with my fresh and unbiased mind,
took without effort. Just as my fresh and unbiased examination of the Prometheus myth led me to
make a discovery about it, not suspected by scholars before my time, 1 and a discovery which, as
The Journal of Hellenic Studies acknowledged, 2 constituted a contribution to Greek mythology,
so it is possible that, in regard to Socrates, my freshness stood me in better stead than Nietzsche's
early and prolonged association with traditional Greek scholarship.
Furthermore, it is an easy pitfall for a Greek scholar, biased in favour of the Greeks and,
therefore, against the religion whose early Fathers vilified them, to make the mistake of
supposing that an opposition shown by the Fathers of the Church to Hellenic culture must imply
an anticipated opposition of Hellenic culture to the thought of the Church.
Truth to tell, there is that opposition in Hellenic culture. But it is pre-Socratic.
Nietzsche was, besides, a great lover of Greek culture and a deep admirer of the Greeks, and
in spite of the suspicions he could not, as an acute thinker, help harbouring about Socrates and
his period, he hesitated to lay the scene both of the tragic regenerate values, and the decadent
transvalued values, on Greek soil.
Thus, in seeking the origins of Christianity, he was more prone to light on the supposed
resentment and vengeful feelings of a race like the Jews which had suffered contempt, than upon
similar reactions in a despised and perverted Greek thinker.
When discussing my views of Socrates with classical

1 See my MAN'S DESCENT FROM THE GODS (London, 1921).

2 Vol. XLI.

- p. 180 -
scholars in England and Germany (and in the latter even after the advent of the National
Socialists to power), I have always encountered horrified surprise when I denigrated the "father"
of Greek philosophy; and the idea that he, in order to save his self-esteem, should have
unwittingly transvalued antiquity's healthy values, was indignantly resisted.
One Nazi scholar even went so far as to say, "But don't you see what your theory involves?
It involves the debasement of one of the greatest glories of Aryan thought, in order to rescue
from debasement a people like the Jews!"
 He implied that Nietzsche was right and that I was wrong.
And yet the evidence is all in favour of my claim. Four hundred years before the Jewish-
Christian transvaluation, every essential principle which made it possible had been established
by Socrates!
But, in this matter, I am justified in charging Nietzsche with confusion and a lack of
consistency. I am able even to show that tentatively he actually occupied my position with regard
to Socrates — he was, indeed, too clear-headed not to have done so. But he occupied it with
evident misgiving and a lack of certainty.
For instance, he refers again and again, and quite rightly, to Socrates as a decadent (See The
Twilight of the Idols); but, except for the Greek philosopher's mania for dialectics and his attack
on instinct, nowhere shows in what way his decadence was transmitted ideologically, in the
stupendous manner I claim, to posterity. He sees that Socrates "vanquished noble taste", and that
from Socrates onwards "the moral bias", the "outcome of a pathological condition",

- p. 181 -
began to prevail in Greek philosophy. He also recognizes the change from an aesthetic (a
biological) to a moral valuation of man through Socrates; 1 but he never takes the complete
plunge, and thus never brings Socrates out clearly as the founder of Christianity.
This is all the more extraordinary, seeing that he got so near. Was he perhaps too strongly
wedded to his parti pris about the Jews as the first transvaluers? Can it be possible that, while he
thought he saw the abundant motivation for resentment in them, he failed to see it in Socrates?
Or was he reluctant to abandon his view of the role played by the Jews in the first transvaluation
because of his reverence for the Greeks as a whole? In any case, to me, as an independent
thinker, only initiated into Greek thought and the mysteries of the Greek language comparatively
late in life, Nietzsche's love of the Greeks and their culture seems a grossly exaggerated and
over-wrought passion in him.
The staggering feature about Nietzsche's attitude to Socrates, however, is this, that he too,
comparatively late in life, apparently showed himself ready to accept the view I advance. And as
I have found Nietzsche scholars who were unaware of this, it shows how very tentatively he set
about revealing this new point of view, so alien to the traditional standpoint.
Thus, in June, 1885, a little over three years before his ultimate breakdown, he wrote, but
only in the form of a question: "Did wicked Socrates really corrupt Plato, and was Socrates after
all really a corruptor of youth and deserved the hemlock?"
Here we see the lover of the Greeks, the classical scholar side of him, that side which had
been taught to regard Socrates as a martyr to truth and to

1 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS.

- p. 182 -
independence of judgment, still struggling with the conclusion forced on any investigator by the
facts!
But there follows an even more striking passage, a passage which, although unique in the
whole of the Nietzsche opus, constitutes the most complete vindication of my view of Socrates.
For Nietzsche says:—
"Christianity is Platonism for the mob." 1
Thus, after all, he admits it! He sees Christianity is really Socrates for the mob, and, in
saying this, gravely impugns all his previous utterances about the Jews, both as the first
transvaluers of values, as fertilizers in the realm of ideas, and as the founders of Christianity.
It was impossible for Nietzsche's brilliant intellect to miss this conclusion, especially as he
had had. all the facts before him much longer than I have ever had. As, however, he recognizes
that the ugliness of Socrates was "terrifying" 2 and that with him Greek philosophy became
obsessed with morality, 3 it is all the more strange that he should not, from the first, have
perceived the truth as I state it, and that, having seen it, he should have allowed it to take up such
a small space in his writings.
So that whilst my difference with Nietzsche is, on the whole, composed, by his latest
utterances, however brief they may be, I can at least claim that, in my treatment of the problem
of Socrates, I have been more consistent, and have all along been in a better position historically,
than he was. For, although the dialectical method of Socrates and his attack on instinct are
important, they are not, as Nietzsche himself seems to

1 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. Preface. See also THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, last chapter, section 2,
where he describes Plato as "pre-existently Christian."
2 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, Aphorism 9.
3 Ibid. Aphorism 10.

- p. 183 -
believe, in his main treatment of the subject in The Twilight of the Idols, the most important
aspects of his influence. When, therefore, I claim that the history of values falls into two halves
— that previous to and that subsequent to Socrates, I think I state an actual fact. For, although
strangely enough Nietzsche makes much the same claim as early as 1869–1871, 1 he does not
make it for the same reasons.
There are many inconsistences and contradictions in Nietzsche, but this I consider the
gravest of all, because it, occurs within the same period of his thought the third period, which is
rightly considered the most important.
As regards the question how the Jews of Palestine including both Jesus and St. Paul, and the
Jews of Alexandria became imbued with Socraticism — that is another story. Suffice it is to say
that there were numerous channels through which Greek philosophy was able, during the four
hundred years following the death of Socrates, to spread over the whole of the Near and Middle
East, and that it did spread to these areas is abundantly demonstrated. Even the eschatalogical
views of the Jews became modified by it, and on account of this alone, apart from other facts,
Nietzsche's contention that the Greeks were a feminine and fertilized race (ideologically), whilst
the Jews were a virile and fertilising race, can hardly be sustained.

1 See THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, p. 117.

- p. 184 -
Appendix II
"The Martyrdom of Man"

It is remarkable how imperfectly the sex-psychology of the male is understood in north-western

Europe and north America. I do not much like the term "sex psychology", but use it to embrace
the whole of the psycho-physical reactions of the male to his internal and external sex-stimuli.
Now, platitudinous as it may seem to state that the male's part in sexual congress is possible
only under a sufficient stimulus which ensures tumescence, I submit that both this simple fact
and its important implications are consistently overlooked by all those concerned with setting the
tone and upholding "law and order" in the nations of north-western Europe (excluding France)
and north America.
Although he may know nothing of the psycho-physical mechanism involved, every alert
male is more or less aware of the circumstances within and without his person which must
combine in order to ensure a satisfying experience of his sexual cycle, from tumescence to the
orgasm. Without needing to be told, he knows that whilst some women with whom he is
acquainted, or only sees, would be adequate detonators of his sexual explosive material, numbers
of others on the other hand, far from being able to serve even as adequate detonators, would act
rather as dampers or neutralizers of it. Between these two extremes he is aware also of a half-
way group which, although they leave him more or less indifferent, might nevertheless

- p. 185 -
be just possible as partners in sexual congress. It is always his object, however, to choose his
life-partner from the first group.
All these are facts within every alert male's knowledge, and he appreciates that if he is to
lead a normal sexual life he is as much committed to a woman who can adequately stimulate him
as vegetation is to the rays of the sun.
What he also knows in middle age, but what he neither knows nor is ever told while still
adolescent or in his twenties, is that the same stimulus repeatedly applied inevitably and
insensibly loses its effect. The speed with which this loss occurs varies widely in different men.
In some comparatively rare individuals it is admittedly so low as to be hardly perceptible in a
lifetime. But these exceptions apart, the fact that the stimulus necessary to the normal sexual
reaction of the male must wane after repeated applications, remains undeniable. Even in the
exceptional individuals referred to above an appreciable decline in effectiveness could doubtless
be registered if such imponderabilia were amenable to precise measurement.
A further fact revealed to the alert male as he advances in years as a married man (or as a
man who has merely lived with the same women for a long time), but which he neither knows
nor is ever told in adolescence or in his twenties, is that pari-passu with the weakening of the
stimulus supplied by his sexual partner, there will also occur in his own psycho-physical sexual
equipment an abatement of vigour which will call, not for a diminished, but for an enhanced
stimulus.
So that the mature male, observant of his actions and reactions, learns about his sexual life
two facts

- p. 186 -
which, as a rule, he neither knows nor is told as an adolescent and a young man when he first
seeks a normal adaptation of his sexual impulses:—
I. He learns that the sexual stimulus (the wife or mistress he has chosen) in due course
insensibly but surely loses her power adequately to detonate his sexual explosive material, and
—
II. He learns that as he ages he needs not a diminishing but an increasing stimulus if he is to
function with adequate normality as a male in sexual congress.
 Thus he arrives at the important but disconcerting conclusion that, given an inadequate
stimulus, or reduced to one that has ceased to be effective (although originally selected as such),
he, as a perfectly potent individual, may find himself relatively impotent. He knows, however,
that, given a fresh adequate stimulus, he will recover his potency and with it normal functioning.
All this amounts to a commonplace. It is no more than a frank description of the average
man's sex-psychology.
And yet, if in the interests of accuracy and truth, and before a modern English audience,
anybody stated that a perfectly potent man could be impotent vis-à-vis of certain female types,
and — what is much more important — could and usually does in time become impotent even
with the woman of his choice, the reaction would be one of astonishment increasing to horror
and indignation. And this will apply more especially to the women amongst them, who, without
attempting to understand, and, above all, not wishing to understand, would immediately assume
that the I speaker's purpose was not to seek the truth, but to

- p. 187 -
attack and undermine the sacred institution of matrimony.
Such an audience, especially the women in it, would not know that the above description of
male sex-psychology is tacitly accepted as part of the natural scheme in all countries — France
and Italy above all where a realistic attitude is maintained towards the fundamental problems of
human life. Least of all will they know that more than glimpses of its truth may be gathered from
such writers as Stendhal, or the Austrian, Anton Wildgans, and others; though there are certainly
no English authors that I know of in the list. I say, "no English authors". There is, however, one
exception, if exception it can be called For although Lady Mary Wortley Montagu mentions facts
which testify to the truth of my description, she nowhere indicates that she regards them as
illustrating a principle. Indeed, she states them without understanding, with evident
bewilderment, and with no sign of having learnt anything from them
Writing on Dec. 8th. 1751 about the divorces which to her knowledge, were taking place in
Genoa, she says:— "The constant pretext is impotency, to which the man often pleads guilty, and
though he marries again, and has children by another wife, the plea remains good by saying he
was so in regard to the first." 1
This is remarkable evidence in favour of the arguments I am advancing and is adduced quite
innocently by a woman who clearly regards the circumstances she relates as aberrant. For her to
connect what she witnessed in Genoa with the general sex-psychology of the male everywhere, it
would obviously have been neces-

1 THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE (London, 1898, Vol. II, p.
224).

- p. 188 -
sary to explain to her that, whereas with the highly organized, sensitive and passionate Italian,
the stage of impotency vis-à-vis of a once adequate stimulus arrived comparatively early in
married life, with the northerner and especially with her own countrymen, it was usually reached
later. This fact probably obscured for her the underlying relationship between married Italians
she saw in Genoa and the married Englishmen she knew in her own country. She had not the
scientific erudition to perceive that, after all, the difference was less one of kind than of degree
— i.e., the degree of speed with which the state of impotency was approached when the male is
restricted to the same stimulus over a long period.
 People laugh at the French adage: "Faute de mieux on couche avec sa femme", and think it
merely an example of Latin cynicism and debauchery. But in the light of a realistic masculine
sex-psychology a genuine hardship lies hidden in the words. For, when they come as a cri du
coeur, they imply conditions in which the man, having ceased to enjoy an adequate sexual
stimulus in his wife, is already approaching relative impotence with her.
Now, Protestant civilisation, especially in the classes where side-slipping is forgiven neither
socially nor morally, makes no provision for this state of affairs and indeed refuses to recognize
it. As a result, there exists among the respectable — whether the clergy, the legal and medical
professions, and the employees of all institutions of trust such as banks, insurance offices,
Government bureaux etc. — an enormous amount of secret and often exasperating misery. For,
when it is remembered that, unlike women, men complete their whole sexual cycle with every
sexual embrace, and that

- p. 189 -
the latter is their only sex expression, there is no need to emphasize that to them the first
essential is an adequate sex detonator or stimulus throughout the years of potency if they are to
lead a normal sexual life. The respectable and the respected, therefore, who never venture a kick
over the traces and maintain not only a facade of fidelity, but also abide strictly by their marriage
vows, necessarily endure severe privations.
The refusal to recognize this gradual drift towards relative impotence in all men dependent
for decades on the same sexual stimulus, is not restricted to the conventions of a Protestant
civilization. Women as a whole and of what country soever, seem quite incapable of grasping it.
Their habitual subjectivity, which renders them unable to imagine the male's attitude towards
sex, also prevents their perceiving with any understanding — not to mention sympathy — the
male's ineluctable dependence on an adequate stimulus to the sex function; whilst every emotion
rooted in their vanity makes them resist with ferocity the very idea that their effectiveness as
their own male's only stimulus could ever decline, no matter how long he has been exposed to it.
Least of all will they be inclined to concede the point that as the male ages, a stronger rather than
a weaker stimulus becomes necessary to him.
As to the aggregate effect of these regrettable features of marriage or "collage," women will
probably continue for all time resolutely blind to it.
A typical example of the average woman's reaction to the discovery that her male partner
(husband or lover) has, after decades of intimacy with her, ceased to find her an adequate sexual
stimulus, occurs in a

- p. 190 -
narrative of certain episodes in the life of Mrs. Harding wife of Warren Harding, President of the
United States from 1920 to 1923. When she learned that her husband had been enjoying the
favours of other women, she said:
"There is some excuse perhaps — if there is ever excuse, for other men to be unfaithful to
their wives. But — there is no excuse for Warren Harding. Now — is there Mr. Means? . . . I am
never ill! I have never been ill — in my life except when it was brought on by mental worry.
That's God's truth! And I have kept myself young and attractive. . . . Our union has been ideal —
for more than thirty years. There never has been the slightest excuse for Warren Harding to ever
look at another woman! Never! Never!" 1
So that, apparently, Mrs. Harding could see no excuse for a husband's infidelity — even
after thirty years! — unless the wife had been always ill or if she had not kept herself young and
attractive. No one could have persuaded her that, despite all the advantages she claimed over
habitually sick women and women who did not keep themselves young and attractive, she must
inevitably, in due course, have become, in the thirty years of their married life, an inadequate
sexual stimulus to her husband. The whole of her speech proves her total inability — an inability
she shares with all her sisters in every clime — to understand that even in the best possible
circumstances, the average male's sexual mechanisms will not stay the course if he depends on
the same sexual detonator over a protracted period.
This is the female's classical response to the male's

1 THE STRANGE DEATH OF PRESIDENT HARDING by Gaston B. Means (New York, 1930, p. 102).

- p. 191 -
compelling drive, when one sexual stimulus loses its force, to seek a fresh stimulus. She never
appreciates that it is for him a question of leading a normal sexual life — therefore, almost a
question of continued sanity.
When a man settles down and marries, what he actually does in socio-biological terms, is to
provide the mise-en-scène and optimal conditions in which the normal woman may at stated
intervals experience the whole of her sexual cycle from conception to the hour of weaning. The
"Home" is, in fact, the woman's essential environment for the full expression of her psycho-
physical equipment.
In return for the financial and other responsibilities the Home imposes on him, the man
procures a degree of comfort and privacy not usually accessible to him outside his own walls,
plus — and above all — the means of normally securing detumescence.
By far the most important aspect of the arrangement as far as his continued health and
sanity are concerned, is and remains the means the Home provides of leading a normal sexual
life.
It is precisely this "most important aspect of the arrangement," however, which
unfortunately for millions of average men in the Protestant civilisation of north-western Europe
and North America, usually proves quite illusory — at least after a time. The length of time that
has to elapse before it proves illusory is, as I have stated, extremely variable. But to argue from
the exceptions to whom it does not prove illusory that strict conjugal fidelity is possible for the
male without great hardship, would be both romantic and inhuman.
The only rational and merciful attitude in this matter is to face the facts and allow for them.
They

- p. 192 -
may be unfortunate, regrettable facts — facts which in the eyes of even the most humble
Christian reflect unfavourably on divine wisdom. But since, even in the eyes of such a humble
Christian, Man, after all, did not make himself, it would seem more humane to blame his Maker
and not him for his constitution, unamendable as it is to the conception of the world formed at a
mother's meeting.
There are, however, in our civilisation, several additional difficulties, all of which aggravate
rather than alleviate the condition of the man of whom absolute conjugal fidelity is expected for
life.
The first most significant one is, that the same Protestant civilisation which enjoins male
conjugal fidelity in the respectable and the respected, is essentially a civilisation of large
hypertrophied cities. It is, in fact, co extensive with widespread industrialism and commerce, and
is characterised by urbanism.
Unfortunately for the institution of matrimony, urban conditions favour the multiplication of
schizothymes — i.e., a human type notoriously unstable in their sexual adaptations. In plain
English, the community fostered by towns and cities tends to throw up a high proportion of men
who reach comparatively quickly the state of relative impotence I have been examining.
We have but to think of the image of the Devil as depicted in the popular iconography of
Europe for centuries, in order to see before us a typical schizothyme; and it is probably not a
mere accident that the figure of his Satanic majesty should have been thus conceived by the
popular imagination.
It is probable, therefore, that with increasing urbanism and the multiplication of
schizothymes

- p. 193 -
among men, there has been not only a substantial augmentation of secret suffering among
respected and respectable males, but also a notably higher incidence of side-slipping and of so-
called "unhappy marriages" among those classes which are not averse from experiments in
naughtiness. I submit that the statistics relating to wrecked marriages in the civilisation under
notice, whether they relate to separations or divorces, bear this surmise out.
A further difficulty arises out of the fact that women as a whole prefer the schizothyme
before other male types. They like his litheness, resilience and recuperative power. They
probably divine instinctively the customary excellence of his endocrine balance, and fancy him
as the sire of their offspring. This may well be another reason why Satan, as the proverbial
seducer, is generally depicted as of this type. The trouble is they neither know nor are ever told
how speedily this type succumbs to restiveness and relative impotence when the stimulus they
offer him has been responded to over a period more or less protracted.
The culminating difficulty arising out of the unstable sexual balance of men as a whole and
above all of the schizothymes among them, is the considerable change in physical appearance
which often overtakes women relatively early in the course of a so-called "happy marriage." The
male knows better than anyone else what best stimulates his sexual activity, and chooses his
mate accordingly. If, however, within a few years of married life, the sprightly, agile and lissom
maiden he deliberately chose becomes, as she too often does, a heavy, adipose and inflexible
figure of eight, the motives which first inclined him to her as a desirable sexual partner cease

- p. 194 -
fatally from operating as a further directive. In plain English, she is no longer the mate he chose.
Confronted with a group of Rubens women he may be a man who would be revolted. Yet time
alone compels him to cohabit with a woman so nearly resembling the Rubens type that to
differentiate between her and them would partake of splitting hairs. Added to the others already
enumerated, this fact can but hasten the approach of that relative impotence I am discussing. Nor
would it be fair in these circumstances to so much as think of the words "volatile" or "wanton" to
describe his change of attitude. He chose a compound of attributes which he knew stimulated his
sexual activities. Can he reasonably be expected to conform to a different compound which, of
his own free will he would never have chosen?
Whether the wives who become thus transformed are wholly blameless or not — i.e.,
whether by observing disciplines which they gladly adopted as eligible spinsters in order to
remain attractive, they would delay or permanently postpone the untoward changes which so
frequently disguise them after marriage — it is not for me to say, nor is it to the point. All that
concerns me here is to record the fact that these untoward changes do occur in a very large
proportion or contented married women and that they must contribute to the general body of
factors which ultimately induce relative impotence in their males.
Thus a vicious circle is formed. There is the convention enjoining conjugal fidelity on all
respectable males who are the backbone of every Protestant civilisation. There is the fact of the
dependence of male sexual potency on an adequate sexual stimulus. There is also the fact that the
same stimulus repeatedly

- p. 195 -
applied loses its effectiveness and thereby reduces the potent respectable male to relative
impotence. Over and above this, there is the lamentable rule that, as be advances in years, every
male requires a stronger rather than a feebler stimulus in order to function normally. Finally,
there are these three facts: that schizothymes, who are notoriously unstable in their sexual
adaptations, multiply in the urban conditions of Protestant civilisation; that women prefer
schizothymes, and that a high proportion of married women rapidly lose the very physical
characters which originally made them seem adequate sexual detonators to the men who chose
them.
There is at present no way out of the vicious circle formed by the aggregate effect of all
these factors, except through the misery of millions of males in the respectable and respected
classes (who incidentally forfeit much of their sanity as their misery increases), and the wreckage
of marriages (and incidentally of lives) in the classes given to profligate excesses of naughtiness.
But the injustice done to the majority of the martyrs in the former class, consists not merely
in condemning them, after twenty years of marriage to a life of quite inadequate sexual
expression, but also in allowing them no credit whatsoever for the misery they undergo in the
cause of "decency" and "propriety."
On the contrary! So benighted, so ignorant of the true facts, have the Feminists been and
still remain, that they have tried to indoctrinate an ill-informed public with the belief that the
Home is a setting chiefly contrived for the convenience and benefit of man! Obsessed by their
phobia of every aspect of the reproductive life of the female, they actually failed to see

- p. 196 -
a truth which stands out with the conspicuousness of a clock-tower — namely, that the Home is
the essential setting for the female's experience of her complete sexual cycle. They even went so
far as to advocate a policy, the principal features of which have been to lure women out of
domesticity and to convince them that their best interests are served by keeping as much out of
the Home as possible! Nor have they missed any opportunity of decrying and ridiculing the old
adage about "Woman's Place. . . ."
Delirium could hardly have gone further. But when we are concerned with the distillations
of an infantile mental trauma as rank as that which produces the castration complex (penis envy),
there is no telling to what monstrous distortions of the plainest facts it will resort.
In the light of the all too brief analysis given above, it is hard to imagine anything more
insensate than the Feminist programme and policy, and it is a sad reflection on the intelligence
and critical faculty of modern men and women that millions of English and American people
should have been completely taken in by them. Even if there were no other reasons for trembling
at the thought of democratic government, the spread of Feminism during the last century and the
light it sheds on the value of "public opinion" in all democratic countries, would surely suffice to
provoke alarm.
 This, however, by the way. What is important, especially in connection with the discussion
in Chapter III ante, to which this appendix refers, is to bear in mind the essential facts of
masculine sex-psychology as outlined above, and, when the day comes for revising our social
conventions, to allow

- p. 197 -
these facts their full weight in estimating afresh the nature and value of such institutions as
monogamic marriage, the Home, and the marriage vows. The present policy of ignoring
altogether the essential facts of masculine sex psychology and of not providing for them, has two
major consequences, both of which are mischievous. It leads to either great misery or to
precarious illicit relief among millions of married men, and among the merely miserable, it
produces a condition of chronic sex-starvation which in its turn imperils sober judgment and
sanity. Among the more serious of the consequences arising from the latter of its effects, we may
reckon all those deviations from the path of wisdom which we constantly observe in our rulers,
judges, medical men, prelates and other public figures, and above all that romantic attitude
among respectable men to both women in general and to their daughters (if they have any),
which abets and protects the worst extravagances of Feminism.

- p. 198 -
Appendix III
Feminist Replies to My Books

To call by the name of "Replies" the few attempts made by the Feminists to meet my arguments
would amount to using a polite euphemism for something which often deserves a cruder
expression. For, as I have stated, no "replies," in the sense of invalidations of my claims and
contentions, have yet been attempted. I have been subjected to attack and, by some, to personal
abuse; but few male or female writers have offered me even serious and courteous opposition. 1
The first of the only four writers to attempt a reasoned and civil reply to my charges against
Feminism and to my contributions to the problems of sex, was Mrs. Bertrand Russell with her
book Hypatia, published in 1925. In my Future of Woman (1936) I answered her principal
arguments and, I believe, disposed of them. So that I shall not return to them now. These matters
apart, however, there was little new in her book, and it repeated without fresh evidence, almost
all the Feminist pleas which it has been my business to repudiate and expose. She dragged out
once more the unfounded grievance about the "masculine repression" of women through the
ages; confounded me, as Miss Beatrice Kean Seymour was to do two years later, 2 with the
misogynists; displayed the usual benightedness of modern women about the sup-

1 I shall not refer here to newspaper and magazine replies and criticisms. They would take me too far afield.
2 In her novel, THREE WIVES.

- p. 199 -
posed priceless benefits of the Parliamentary Vote; tried to prove that, because I insist on
pregnancy, childbirth and lactation as essential parts of the female sexual cycle, I therefore
denied women any delight in sex; emphasised, as all Feminists do, the inevitability of "pain and
agony" in childbirth, irrespective of age, condition and constitution of the mother; and denied the
importance of diet for the gestating female with a view to normalising parturition.
 Those who know my work will hardly need to have the errors of Mrs. Russell's Hypatia
pointed out. Every blow she delivered will be found adequately parried in one or the other of my
sexological books, especially The Future of Woman and The Truth About Childbirth. It is only
necessary to add that, where Feminists assume from the start, as Mrs. Russell did, that I am
prompted by misogyny, they necessarily see in all my contentions, however rational and sound,
an effort to denigrate women as such. This initial error, by representing me as a hostile witness in
everything I say about women, leads them to resort to any debating point, however trivial or
specious, if only they can thereby appear, before an ill-informed public, as presenting a bold and
determined front to my purely anti-Feminist attack.
This comment applies also to the late Mr. Austin Harrison's Pandora's Hope 1 — a wild and
disconnected work. In it the author's advocacy of Feminism à outrance is marked by such
strenuous efforts to be epigrammatic and arresting at all costs that, unfortunately, sense is almost
wholly subordinated to sound. Just as in a poor poet the exigencies of rhyme often determine the
ideas, so here the constant straining

1 Heinemann, 1925.

- p. 200 -
after effect is felt to dominate the reasoning, to the point of tedium. This does not prevent many
glaring errors from being clearly discernible; but the whole battery of journalistic wiles
employed — even the attacks on myself — too frequently miss fire for the book to deserve a
serious answer; and to this day I have never troubled to meet any of the author's arguments.
A more praiseworthy effort was that of Mr. Ralph de Pomerai who, like Mrs. Bertrand
Russell, thought it worth while to write a whole book in order to refute me. 1 In his preface, he
says: "In that year [1924] I encountered in the Far East a copy of Mr. Ludovici's Woman: A
Vindication, and a perusal of this undeniably clever work on sexual relationships induced me to
attempt a refutation of some of his generalisations with which I found myself in almost complete
disagreement."
In my Truth About Childbirth, I replied to the gravamen of his criticisms. Suffice it to say,
therefore, that, apart from relishing the extreme courtesy with which he dealt with me, and
although I always keep an open mind and am ever ready to be convinced against my will (i.e.,
through my intellect), I cannot say I derived much benefit from Mr. Pomerai's strictures, and saw
in his arguments no reason to modify one tenet of my faith or doctrines. He certainly does not
strive after effect as Austin Harrison did. But, throughout his book, he makes it only too clear
that he cannot rid himself of the Englishmen's profound belief that woman is only "a peculiar
kind of man," and this influences his every conclusion.
To look on woman as a being radically different from man, requiring a different sexual life;
to regard

1 In his MARRIAGE, PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE (London, 1930).

- p. 201 -
her as a creature whose sexual cycle touches that of man only at one point, and that the briefest
in its course, and to provide for her accordingly, seems beyond the power of the modern English
thinker, whether scientific or philosophical, no matter what his sexological scholarship may be.
Now Mr. de Pomerai's sexological scholarship is of a high order. He has, moreover, made every
effort to think rationally on the basis of it. It is all the greater pity, therefore, that in attempting to
answer me, he never once awakened to the fact that, even if I had achieved nothing else, I had at
least performed the feat of abandoning, lock, stock and barrel, the notion that woman is "a
peculiar kind of man." This notion is the sin against the Holy Ghost in all thought about the
relation of the sexes and, until it is rejected, the full value of my contributions to sexology will
not be appreciated.
Not that Mr. de Pomerai is unappreciative! Indeed, he throws flowers where he thinks they
are deserved and admits that many of my generalisations are useful and justified. But my
principal contribution to the whole subject of sex escapes his notice. He does not even derive
help from it and thinks and writes as one not yet outside the phenomena he is examining.
The last of my courteous and serious critics was Mr. R. B. Kerr who, in Our Prophets, 1
devoted one of the six chapters of his book to me and my work. Everything I have written on the
sex question since his book appeared, however, provides an abundant reply to his criticisms. He
is a Feminist. He still believed in 1932 that the Parliamentary Vote had value and that Female
Suffrage was, therefore, worth a fight. He is

1 London, 1932.

- p. 202 -
also a Birth Controller. He cannot concede my demand for a regular repetition of the complete
female sexual cycle at optimal intervals for the normal woman, and thinks that she can remain
healthy and sane without it. He is, moreover, an egalitarian. He cannot appreciate the extent to
which the female's psychology, her estimate of man and her taste, lie under the dominion of her
reproductive system.
In all such matters, and many more besides, he cannot, therefore, see eye to eye with me.
On the other hand, no publicist has paid a greater tribute to my achievements, whether as a
thinker, a public speaker, or a writer and, although our differences are fundamental, I naturally
feel grateful for the effort he has made to understand me.
The first to denigrate my work, without in the least answering my arguments or disputing
my facts, was John Langdon-Davies. In his Short History of Women, 1 which appeared after the
publication of my Woman: A Vindication, Lysistrata, The Night Hoers and Man: An Indictment,
he referred to me as a writer of "impertinent subjective books." His work is an attempt to parry
the kind of thrusts made at Feminism in my Woman: A Vindication, and as such would seem to
call for a more elaborate reply than I propose to give it here. When, however, it is remembered
that the Short History, rather after the fashion of Hypatia, opposes the point of view of anti-
Feminists as if it were based on misogyny, and recklessly, therefore, contradicts without
weighing carefully the justice of the contradiction, my brief treatment of it will perhaps seem
adequate.
The reader who knows my work might agree that it

1 London, 1928.

- p. 203 -
is "impertinent" in the sense of being out of the context of the Age, or so much ahead of it as to
appear at first sight not to pertain to the matter in hand, just as if some one in 1890 had declared
of a bachelor that he had a "mother fixation." But no such reader will readily concede that my
writings on Woman and Sex are subjective.
For a treatise to be subjective it must deal wholly or chiefly with the personal reactions of
the writer to the object he is discussing. Can Langdon-Davies have read my books? This is
unfortunately something of which a criticised author can never be certain. At least a painter or
sculptor knows, when be reads a criticism of his work, that it has been seen. No such assurance is
vouchsafed the publicist. The internal evidence of The Short History offers no proof that its
author ever read the books he attacks — on the contrary, as we shall see!
In any case, to make the sweeping assertion that my treatises on sex, published up to — say,
1927 — were subjective, was no answer to them. For even if they had been what Langdon-
Davies supposed, they still challenged serious criticism. Coleridge has pointed out, for instance,
that poets are usually subjective. Does that mean that they never state truths which are
susceptible to verification by the investigator? Goethe read the correct evolutionary history of the
human skull merely by handling it as Hamlet did generations before him. It was a pure intuition.
And what is intuition but a subjective reaction to a phenomenon? So that even had my treatises
on Woman and Sex been wholly subjective, the statement that they were so did not dispose of the
claims and doctrines they contained.

- p. 204 -
Truth to tell the statement was nonsense, as anyone can discover for himself who chooses to
examine the relevant books I had published up to 1928, when the Short History of Women
appeared. Thus no argument, no reply, was even suggested by this intended vilification of my
work. It was simply abuse and, in order to pass muster as fair criticism, it relied on the emotional
response of the Feminists.
When Langdon-Davies's own book is examined, however, it becomes evident why he used
precisely the term "subjective," to describe the work of his opponent. For his History has
numerous assertions and claims which relate to no objective reality whatsoever. There was, then,
perhaps at least the justification of sound tactics in his charge. For attack is the best kind of
defence.
It would be impossible here to enumerate all the "subjective" statements, which amount to
mis-statements of fact and products of "wishful thinking" in his book. Let me take only two from
the first few pages.
He says on p. 21, for instance: "The more warfare has been regarded in any society as the
highest form of male activity, the more the position of women has been degraded in that
society."
This is completely unsupported by the facts, at least of European history. In Athens, for
instance, when warfare was not nearly so highly esteemed as a male activity as in Sparta, women
were more degraded (in Langdon-Davies' sense) than in the latter City State. In Ancient Rome,
as every scholar knows, it was not during the period of the greatest military conquests, but rather
during the constructive early period, before

- p. 205 -
the Punic Wars and the Empire, that women lay under the dominion of their male relatives.
When once war became the principal pursuit of all able-bodied Romans and Roman legions
spread all over the known world, i.e., from 264 B.C. onwards — women steadily rose to
independence and emanicipation. Throughout the Middle Ages, when warfare was the only
pursuit of men of gentle birth, and therefore enjoyed the highest prestige, women were
everywhere greatly respected and allowed to attain to the highest honours and administrative
posts. In fact chivalry was the creation of this period.
If Langdon-Davies had read my "subjective" work, Woman: A Vindication, he would have
found on pp. 290–294, the documented proof of this statement. Nor did women's privileges
decline until long afterwards. Throughout the Renaissance period, when the prestige of arms still
had the priority of all other forms of honour, women all over Western Europe, including above
all Italy, attained distinction in medicine, letters and local administration! In England itself,
where for centuries the noblest and most coveted calling was the military, women have been
increasingly exalted. Had Langdon-Davies read my "subjective" Man: An Indictment, or even
Aristotle's Politics, he would have learnt all this. At least he would have acquired some inkling
of the necessary connection between the pursuit of arms as a national ideal and the progressive
power of women.
Six pages further on, Langdon-Davies, among many nonsensical statements, writes the
following: "It was not when women began to desire men's work, but when

- p. 206 -
men began to usurp women's work, that feminism was born."
Where is the evidence of this alleged fact? Certainly not in the history of Greece prior to the
Feminist movement there; and if Langdon-Davies had read Ivo Bruns' Frauenemancipation in
Athen, one of the authorities on whom I rely for Greek Feminism, he would have avoided one of
the many mistakes that mar his work. There was, as a matter of fact, in ancient Greece no male
encroachment on women's work prior to the Feminist movement. Exactly the same applies to the
Feminist movement in ancient Rome. When we come to later times also — i.e., the French
Feminist movement of the 17th century and the English Feminist movement of the 18th and
early 19th centuries — we find their origin, not among the class of women who worked, but
wholly among the idle and well-to-do women of society. It is only in the late 19th century, and in
England, that any evidence can be found of a connection between masculine industrialism and
Feminism, and even there the root-doctrines of Feminism had already been public property for
generations before masculine industrial inroads on women's work began to promote the wider
acceptance of the Feminist standpoint.
And it is the author of this so-called "History," in which there is hardly a page that does not
contain some statement or alleged fact that can be hotly contested, who thought fit to stigmatise
the books I had published up to 1928, concerned as they were with well-documented facts in
support of my argument, as "impertinent and subjective!"
The last of the critics who try to dispose of me less by reasoned argument and facts than by
misrepresent-

- p. 207 -
ing my standpoint and the evidence I adduce in support of it is Doris Langley Moore in her book
The Vulgar Heart. 1
Although she may be the last, however, she is by no means the least interesting, for her
perversion of my actual standpoint impressively confirms all that I have alleged above about the
female Feminist's hatred of all arguments or facts that are calculated to dissipate the myth of
woman's "sacrifice" in childbirth
I have given my reasons why Feminists cling as resolutely as they do to the fable of the
inevitability of "pain and agony" in childbirth, even when all conditions are normal. They know
the power they have acquired over man by means of it, and treat as a mortal foe anyone who
challenges the truth of it.
Now towards a mortal foe, all means are permitted. Hence, perhaps, Doris Langley Moore's
tactics when she deals with me. For she is presumably an Englishwoman who, in every moment
of her life, except when she confronts one who questions the inevitability of "pain and agony" in
childbirth, not only boasts of her fairness, but is really fair. Nor is mere unfairness the limit to
which she goes. She not only gives a false impression of what I have said, she also foists upon
me statements which, although not authentically mine are conveniently made mine because they
are easily refuted and, what is more, appear on the face of them pure nonsense.
I do not ask the reader to accept this in good faith. I invite him to study carefully the three
pages devoted to me in the lady's book and to collate them with the two books of mine to which
her strictures refer. And if, after this exercise of his critical faculties, he is not

1 London, 1945.

- p. 208 -
persuaded that all Feminists see red when cogent reasons are advanced for questioning the
normal woman's "sacrifice" in childbirth, at least he will be persuaded that one Feminist, Doris
Langley Moore, was profoundly annoyed. What, above all, testifies to the cogency of my
arguments is the fact that she is not only very angry, but also that she refers to my books at all.
For, if they had contained only the obvious nonsense which she makes of them, they would
certainly not have been worth noticing.
It will be remembered by those who have read my Truth About Childbirth that, with
massive and irrefutable documentation, I plead that childbirth, as a function now performed by
the average civilised woman, is attended by intolerable pain and often by mutilation, injury, or
death, because it is now in most cases abnormal. The principal abnormality about most women's
first childbirth, I point out, is that they have their first baby too late in life, i.e., when they are
already too stiff in bone and muscle. Secondly, they are, in this country at least, often impaired
for normal childbirth, by excessive athleticism. Thirdly as I am not alone to point out, the present
mixture of types in our random-bred European populations causes dystocia owing to the
frequently marked disparity of the parents. Fourthly, owing to the female's tendency to greed,
which leads to over-eating during pregnancy, most babies are born too large and heavy. Fifthly,
as a result of most women's indolence during pregnancy (pregnancy being regarded as a form of
illness and therefore indicating rest), there is a great prevalence of overcarrying, which again
leads to babies which are too heavy and too large. Sixthly, owing to the generally imperfect
health of modern women, even before they

- p. 209 -
start childbearing, together with their usually unwise dieting and bad state of bodily co-
ordination, normal conditions cannot be expected in a function which demands the highest bodily
efficiency.
All these causes of difficult childbirth I examine with care, and the discussion of each is
supported by documentation from authoritative sources. In conclusion, I point out that, when the
above adverse conditions are not present, childbirth is both easy and uneventful, and I adduce
much evidence to prove that among healthy women in primitive and even in civilised
communities, easy childbirth is the rule.
How does Doris Langley Moore write about all this for a public she knows to be
uninformed on the subject, and who can safely be acquitted of any knowledge of my Truth About
Childbirth?
She says: "Where he [A. M. Ludovici] meets with any evidence which conflicts with his
theory (that normal parturition is thoroughly health promoting, joy-giving and psychologically
necessary) he tosses it briefly and angrily aside. Thus he disposes of the figures of maternal
mortality and invalidism by the suggestion, made without credentials, that they are partly due to
previous histories of criminal abortion, although they are irrefutably the lot of most women."
Will the reader believe that this is not only a travesty of my thesis, but actually a deliberate
perversion of it? Any sensible person reading this paragraph would infer that I lay the blame of
"ordinary maternal mortality and invalidism" chiefly on "previous histories of criminal abortion."
Because to say "partly" and mention only "previous histories of criminal abortion,"

- p. 210 -
leads the reader to suppose that this alleged cause holds a prominent place.
Now I challenge anyone to read my Truth About Childbirth from cover to cover and to
report to me one instance when I speak of "previous histories of criminal abortion" as being even
a minor cause of "ordinary maternal mortality and invalidism."
Of course, when I deal with the case against legalised abortion, as I do in the Symposium on
that subject, 1 I point out that women who have been aborted are likely to display abnormalities
in subsequent childbirth. But I am dealing there, not with the generality of cases of maternal
morbidity and invalidism, but only pointing out one of the dangers of induced abortion.
Surely one must be very angry, almost to the point of frenzy, to make such a grave
suggestio falsi to the reader, and to base an attack upon it! And yet this is what Doris Langley
Moore has undoubtedly done! Of course, it may be, as I imply above, that in making me appear
to say what she would have liked me to have said, she facilitates her task in making my
contentions appear ridiculous. But this does not excuse, it merely explains her method.
She goes on, "With typical sentimental idealisation he [A. M. L.] throws out nostalgic
allusions to a state of nature (which has never existed since written records began) in which
labour and delivery are altogether pleasurable. Now this most egregious piece of illusionism has
been elaborated by him in a book called The Truth About Childbirth. . . . Ludovici has created an
agreeable fantasy of the past (he speaks of 'restoring' the experience of 'pleasantness in child-

1 Published by Alien and Unwin, London, 1925.

- p. 211 -
bearing') and urges us to make maternity less painful by making it 'more generally normal,'
whatever that may mean. 'The solution,' he insists cannot be more anæsthetics. The solution is
the normalising of a natural function. How this undefined aim is to be achieved remains totally
obscure."
I devote exactly 150 pages of my Truth About Childbirth (all of it authoritatively
documented) to show how childbirth can be made "more generally normal." So that Doris
Langley Moore's "whatever that may mean" is either a deliberate piece of misrepresentation to
lead her reader to assume that I used the words quoted quite irresponsibly and thoughtlessly, or
else — and this is I suspect what happened — she may not have troubled to read the book she
has tried to denigrate.
As for her comment, "How this undefined aim is to be achieved remains totally obscure,"
which she makes upon my conclusions to the effect that "the solution is the normalising of a
natural function;" in the first place the aim is not undefined — on the contrary I go to great pains
to define it very precisely; and the means of normalising the function constitutes the burden of
the 150 pages already mentioned!
That I am right in this matter any reader can discover for himself by procuring my Truth
About Childbirth. But what are we to think of a female Feminist who reports as inaccurately as
this on a book whose principal object is to clarify the whole problem of present day maternal
invalidism, suffering and mortality? Is it too much to suggest that only very great anger could
have driven her to such lengths?
But why be so angry over the most arrant nonsense?

- p. 212 -
Because, according to her version of it, my thesis is no more than that.
Truth to tell, she has lost her temper because the claims I make about childbirth threaten to
despoil both the Feminists and the other sentimental and "vulgar hearts" among the female public
of their most cherished illusions. They know how important it is to perpetuate the myth that
childbirth, even under the most favourable conditions, is "woman's sacrifice," and anyone who
dares at this hour to debunk this myth (although, as I have shown in the body of the book above,
sensible women will have nothing to do with it) is deserving of any treatment, however unfair.
One last word. Doris Langley Moore appropriates to herself and her sympathetic readers the
title of "genuine realists." Is realism then best served by giving unreal accounts of books that
upset our cherished illusions?

- p. 213 -
Index
Adler, on inferiority feelings, 4, 5
Alcibiades, praises Socrates, 6
why Socrates loved, 7
Anglo-Saxon countries, and Feminism, 24 et seq.
and Feminism, 51 et seq.
male in, and woman's nature, 57 et seq.
fathers in, and attitude to daughters, 59 et seq.
Puritanical tradition in, 68
Anti-Feminism, differs from misogyny, i
Anti-Feminists, not misogynists, i
regarded by unconscious Socratics as misogynists, 22
Aristophanes, despised and ridiculed Socrates, 5
witness in case of Socrates versus Healthy Man, 9
Aristotle, opposed the Socratic attitude to the body, 13
the chief Greek influence in Catholicism, 13n, 102
his sane view disregarded by Feminists, 16
advocated homosexuality to restrict population, 145
Art, Greek, and the female form, 32 et seq.
Athenians, health of traditional beliefs of the ancient, 1
Athens, homosexuality prevalent in, 1

Beauty, male and female cannot be compared, 33, 34

Bell, Adrian, on the ideal family farm, 141n
Besier, Rudolf, a fearless writer, 59
Birth Control, flagrant example of masculine accent over our culture, 42
 men in modern cities in favour of, 80, 81
advocated by Feminists, 130
no longer resisted by the countryman, 143
sacrifices women's sexual function, 145 et seq., 151
Black, Clementina, her symposium on married woman's work, 29n
Blanco White, Amber, her criticism of English Girls' Schools 96n
on domestic work, 110n
Blease, W. Lyon, and the age at which women marry, 21
mentioned, 90
Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, his account of his life in Paris, 162
Bolshevik Revolution, granted sexual freedom to women, 130
Bridge, Ann, her idea of the "desirable" girl, 95n
Brontë, Emily, would not have set her cap at a man, 123
Brun, Ivo, an authority on Greek Feminism, 206
Buckle, his mind clouded by sex-starvation, 51
Burns, John, wished to make it illegal for married women to go out to work, 119n

Caesar, man of type of, hated by Anglo-Saxon women, 70n

Canada, favours exaltation of women, 52

- p. 214 -

Cancer, in women as a result of childlessness, 144

Cassels, Mr. Justice, on the unfaithfulness of wives during the War, 133n
Castration Complex, Dr. Helene Deutsch on, 67
Celts, the masculinoid women of the ancient, 93
Childbirth, favourable age for, disregarded by Higher Educationists, 40
difficulties of, aggravated by late marriage, 41
exaggeration of its dangers, 55, 56, 58
causes of its terrors in modern life, 103, 104
now nearly always abnormal, 208
Children, appalling casualties among, through motor-cars, 29
these increased in war-time, 29n
adversely affected by feminism, 79
neglected if mother goes out to work, 118n
useless in large towns, 135, 137
almost useless in the country, 137, 140, 143
their value on a farm, 141
now rendered useless through education, 142
Christianity, doctrines of Socrates became basic principles of, 10, 102
Nietzsche's view of, 182
Church Fathers, misogynists, i
Clephane, Irene, acknowledged debt owed by Feminists to men, 77
Coleridge, on dancing, 126n
Condorcet, unbalanced by abnormal features in his sexual life, 51
Coomaraswamy, Dr. Ananda, on low grade labours resulting from
 mechanization, 172, 173, 174
Corday, Charlotte, her alleged deep hatred of man, 126
Corin, James, his excellent monograph, 122
argues that women were originally free-maters, 123, 124
and resent no longer being so, 125, 126
declares lot of women unalterable, 127–129, 133

Dancing, a symbolized form of free-mating, 126n

Degas, his women not admired by Englishmen, 94
Degenerates, elimination of, advocated, 150
Deutsch, Dr. Helene, on the castration complex, 67–69
Dickens, his description of railways in U.S.A., 52
on the deceit of the old spinster, 106
on exploitation of domestic servants, 165
Divorce, a romantic expedient, 65
Doctors, their scandalous support of Birth Control, 42, 43
made no reply to foolish claims of Feminists, 77, 78
Domesticity, without dignity in Western civilization, 110–113, 116
Domestic servant, the stigma attached to, 116, 117
should be honoured, 120
Domestic service, helped rise of Feminism, 161, 168
different attitude towards, in Latin and Anglo-Saxon countries, 161–165
should be abolished except in rare cases, 167, 168, 169

Economic conditions, to-day sacrifice women's sexual functions, 144

play into hands of Feminists, 151
led to employment of women in factories and mines, 155

- p. 215 -

Education, so-called Higher, of Women ignores fundamental bodily interests of women, 20

some prominent advocates of Higher, for women, 39
their disregard for women's bodily welfare, 40
modern insane, of girls, 64
so-called "free", a myth, 142
gives children an urban bias, 142
Ellis, Havelock, condemned the female leg, 38
advocated Birth Control, 43, 44
explicitly stated masculine bias in Feminism, 44
on motherhood's lack of dignity in England, 110
Emigration, at expense of inferior races advocated, 150
Empedocles, laid stress on the soul, 3
England, contrived to wean women from their principal adaptations, 45, 46
the degenerate male the greatest bane in, 93
motherhood's lack of dignity in, 110
what "free" and "democratic" mean in, 138
Englishman, the chaste young, often driven into disastrous marriage, 47, 48
difficulties of the middle-aged, in marriage, 48, 49, 51
as a rule knows nothing about women, 53, 57
and so is fooled by them, 53, 54
Englishwomen, often terrified of childbearing, 55n
Environment, its influence on sex, 92
can modify constitution, 96
Epicene occupations in modern England, their result, 70–72

Factories, women in, 153

Farm, can be made self-contained unit by child-labour, 141
this impossible to-day, 141
Fathers, English, owing to sub-conscious jealousy favour late marriage of daughters, 21, 22, 59,
60
abet aims of Feminism, 59, 60, 62
their excuses for keeping daughters unmarried, 60, 61
Feminism, suffering caused by, i, 19
reasons for rise of Anglo-Saxon, ii
championed by sexually low-powered women, 17
is hatred of man and of women in the care of men, 24n
made no attempt to raise the status of domesticity, 28
has led merely to self-aggrandisment among women, 29
promoted by tumescent men, 50, 52
and Anglo-Saxon civilization, 53
influence of male degeneracy on progress of, 62
finds important source of strength in degenerate males, 69, 93
Anglo-Saxon males incapable of seeing through hoax of, 73, 74
and readily support it, 76, 80
using its meaningless phrases, 77
debt of, to men pioneers, 77
opposition to, all biological, 78
hostile to majority of women, 78
adversely affects children, 79
unconsciously supported by both men and women, 88
Anglo-Saxon advocates of, unaware of its dangers for women, 89

- p. 216 -

Feminism, Weininger on the periodicity of, 94

fortified by viragoes, 96
progress of, through normal women mishandled by incompetent men. 103, 104
Birth Control aids, 147
essentially middle class, 159, l60n
agitated only for more glamorous existence for idle middle class female, 174
Feminists, eagerly seized on doctrines of Socrates, 14
 French seventeenth century, claimed sex equality and "higher" destiny for women than
motherhood, 15, 16
argue that life of all women can he complete without normal functioning, 18
delighted by Orlando, 19
the Author's books ignored by, 19n
not interested in normal childbirth, 56
legend of woman's sacrifice in motherhood precious to, 57, 58
their mistaken interpretation of women's employment in epicene work, 72
their foolish claims unanswered by men, 77, 78
insist on abolishing woman's "serfdom" to her normal functions, 82
some well-known foolish advocates of, 90
their low degree of intelligence, 152
never tried to redress main grievance of working classes, 159
maintain that the Home is run for the benefit of the man, 195
Film-star, the, a free-mater, 125
Freedom, myth of, of Freedom-loving Peoples, 159
Free-mating, denial of, to decent women, 123
this strongly resented by them, 125
and leads to hatred of man and man-made culture, 126
but essential if our culture is to be preserved, 127, 130
the loss rationalized by Feminists, 129
under Bolshevism, 130
during war enjoyed by women, 132, 133
Freud, on women's hostility to culture, 128n

Girton, all reference to Greek homosexuality suppressed at, 32

Godfrey's Mixture, a pernicious drug given to babies, 154
Goethe, betrayed unconscious bias in favour of male beauty, 36
Greece, responsible for masculine accent over our civilization, 31
Greeks, the ancient, their rigid monism, 3
their idea of the "good" man, 3
their love of male beauty, 4
their healthy view of good looks, 7
ardent homosexuals, 31
obtained little stimulation from women, 32
made the male form the standard of human beauty, 33, 34
the influence of, has favoured a Feministic or virago civilization, 35
their masculine bias spread to every department of our lives, 38
Green, T. H., an unconscious male Socratic, 96
Grote, regards Xenophon as best witness against Socrates, 9

- p. 217 -

Harding, Mrs. Warren, on her husband's infidelities, 189, 190

Harrison, Austin, a fanatical Feminist, 199
strove after effect, 200
Heilborn, Dr., his unscientific nonsense regarding woman's knock-knees, 37
Hirschfeld, Dr. Magnus, on elements of the opposite sex in men and women, 92
Holland, Dr. Eardley, on the increasing age of all mothers, 21
Holtby, Winifred, in favour of late marriage for intelligent women, 21
Home, the ideal place for the sexual adaptation of the female, 118
Homosexuality, prevalent in Greece, 31, 32
reference to this suppressed in histories and encyclopaedias, 32
as a means of restricting population, 145, 146
Husband, regarded as a beast, 23
Housewife, the good, among the poor a heroine, 110
gets no public recognition, 114, 116
society's obligation to her, 115
should he publicly honoured, 119
the tests required for this, 120
some suggested rewards for, 120
Humour, sense of, women's silly reproach of lack of, 76
Hutton, Dr. Laura, on late marriage among wage-earning women, 41, 42

Ibsen, unbalanced by abnormal features in his sexual life, 51

Immigration, condemned, 150
Incest, in the population, 60
India, drugging of infants by factory workers in, 154
Industrialism, of great use to Feminism, 152
drove women from the home, 153
caused increase of infant mortality, 154
led to underpayment of men, 157, 158
has appropriated many of the civilized female's most satisfying occupations, 170, 171,
172
Infanticide, one means of restricting population, 145
Inge, Dean, declares Sacrates should be reckoned a Christian 11n

Japan, cancer rare in, 148

Jeanne d'Arc, her alleged deep hatred of man, 126
Jesus, on the impossibility of altering the body, 13
Jews, Nietzsche's view of, 178, 179, 183

Kenealy, Arabella, her attack on Feminism inadequate, 78n

on the increase of negative women in England, 95n
Keranflech-Kernezne, Countess, on women's flight from rural life, 140n
Kerr, R. B., devoted a chapter of Our Prophets to the Author, 201
Kipling, describes a typical Englishman, 54
Kistermaecker, Henry, on the Feminists' hatred of man, 24n
Knox, John, a misogynist, i

Lactation, opposed by Feminists, 82

danger of suppressing, 83
Langdon-Davies, John, his History of Women, 172n
his History discussed, 202–206

- p. 218 -

Logan, Dr. Dale, on the exaggeration of childbirth difficulties, 55

Love, heterosexual, a poetic life-promoting fiction, 100, 101

Mahaffy, a specious apologist of fifth century Greeks and their homosexuality, 32

Man, regarded as "the beast" in Anglo-Saxon countries, 24
requires adequate stimulus in sex, 185–197
Marholm, Laura, on the barren role of the mistress, 82
on undue veneration of the mother, 115n
Marriage, age of, for women in England, 20, 21
late, due to nineteenth century Socratics, 41
difficulties for men in, 47, 49, 184 et seq.
Martyr, Justin, implies Socrates was a Christian before Christ, 11
Meikle, Wilma, on failure of suffragists to champion needs of women workers, 158n
on women being fitted to use their minds finely, 174n
Men, when they are sex-starved most prone to sentimentalize over women, 47
total chastity of, makes them idolize women, 51
the insistence of modern, on pecuniary prestige, 81
Middle Ages, sane attitude of, towards degeneracy and health, 103n
Middle Classes, their ignorance of the "facts of life", 83, 87, 88
an almost, incredible example given, 83–86
and domestic servants 162–167
Mill, John Stuart, his mind clouded by sex-starvation, 51
on the Englishman's ignorance of human nature, 53
Milton, unconsciously voices Greek bias in favour of male beauty, 35, 36
Monogamy, makes no provision for decline in sexual stimulation, 48
Montesquieu, on avoiding subjection to women, 50
Moore, Doris Langley, her angry distortion of facts, 207–210
Motherhood, its lack of dignity in England, 110
Mothers, working class, reluctant to work outside the home, 156
Myrdal, Alva, on women's preference for urban life, 140n

Naturalization, should be abolished, 150

Nazis, unintended tribute to, by women, 138n
sane attitude towards Feminism interpreted as sympathy with, 161
their admiration of Socrates, 180
Newnham College, founded by Henry Sidgwick, 39
Nietzsche, an anti-Feminist, i
on the fundamental hatred between the sexes, 100
perceived much that was degenerate in Socrates, 176, 180, 181
regarded the Jews as the transvaluers, 177,178,181
his view of Christianity, 182
 his inconsistencies, 183

Orr, Sir John, on malnutrition of working classes 159n

Orphic Cults, laid stress on the soul, 3

Pankhurst, Christabel, her promotion of Feminism, 106

Paul, St., advocated celibacy, 105
Pecuniary prestige, the main concern of modern urban men, 81, 82
Plato, unfortunately survived to perpetuate Socratic dualism, 5

- p. 219 -

Plato, on the superiority of the soul, 6

witness in case of Socrates versus healthy man, 9
advocated homosexuality to restrict population, 145
Pomerai, Ralph, his reply to the Author's Woman: A Vindication, 200
his sexological scholarship of a high order, 201
Population, ways of restricting, 144
means of dealing with increasing, 150
Protestant countries, most subject to influence of Socrates, 35
hence exaltation of boyish figure in women, 35
Protestantism, supports the android female, 25
self-contempt among women acute in atmosphere of, 26
refuses to recognize man's sexual requirements, 188, 189
Proust, on heartlessness of women in war-time, 132
Puritanism, condemns Man owing to sex-phobia, 23
leads to self-contempt among women, 25
makes woman's sexual life a misery, 103
Pythagoras, laid stress on the soul, 3

Registrar-General, on harassing diseases of female genital organs, 78

on diseases of spinsters, 106
Renoir, his women not admired by Englishmen, 94
Riddle, Dr., on effects of increased metabolism, 92n
Rodin, Auguste, chose English women as models, 94
dinner to, in London, 107, 108
Rural life, attitude of women to, 139, 140
Ruskin, his mind clouded by sex-starvation, 51
Russell, Mrs. Bertrand, on the merits of "Free Love", 18
on man's part in sex, 54
her attempt in Hypatia to reply to the Author, 198, 199
Russia, abortion in, 145

Schizothymes, dominant in urban communities, 49n,192,195

the Devil typical of, 192, 193
women prefer., 193
Schopenhauer, a misogynist, i
his absurd diatribes against women, 36
unconsciously dominated by Greek masculine accent over our civilization, 37
on elements of the opposite sex in men and women, 92
one point overlooked by, 93
Schreiner, Olive, dissatisfied with her womanhood, 45
Science, modern, favours pre-Socratic view of Man, 2
subject to Greek influence, 37
Scudéry, Mlle., adapted to celibacy, 106
Sévigny, Madame de, a convinced Socratic, 18
Sexes, equality of, established through Socratic doctrines, 14, 15
dormant components of opposite, should be kept recessive, 63–65
Sex-phobia, the result of Socratic doctrine, 7 et seq.
Seymour, Beatrice Kean, confounds the Author with misogynists, 198
Shaftesbury, Lord, on the exploitation of female virtue by unscrupulous
employers, 156
Slavs, the masculinoid woman of the ancient, 93

- p. 220 -

Shaw, Bernard, obsessed by economic aspect of social unrest, 174

Sidgwick, Prof. H., an unconscious male Socratic, 96
Socraticism, encourages androphobia, 22
and latent self-contempt of the female, 23
Socrates, modern science opposed to his dualistic doctrines, 2
his ugliness, 3, 4
the male concubine of Archelaus, 4
his dualism, 4–7, 10
governed by his inferiority feelings, 5, 6
condemned to death, 5
on the superiority of the soul, 6, 7, 10, 176
on his love for Alcibiades, 7
made bodily defects seem respectable, 8
his doctrines made familiar by Christianity, 11
the first great transvaluer of values, 12, 177
his dishonesty regarding Xanthippe 12, 13
his teaching became dominant doctrine of the White Man, 13, 14
established the principles supporting viragoes, 101, 102
the chief Greek influence in Protestantism, 102
made nobility a thing of the past, 175
Spencer, Herbert, an anti-Feminist, i
on fundamental difference between men and women, 15, 19
Sports, deleterious effects of violent, on female's reproductive system, 96
Spring, Howard, his description of a "desirable" girl, 95n
Stetson, Charlotte Perkins, not abnormal though a Feminist, 107
her fine book, 113–115
 her charge just but her remedy useless, 117, 118, 121
Strindberg, a misogynist, i
Symonds, J. A., a specious apologist for fifth century Greeks and their homosexuality, 32

Teutons, the masculinoid women of the ancient, 93

Tolstoy, unbalanced by abnormal features in his sexual life, 51
Towns, reduce male stamina, 135
make children useless, 135, 137
difficulties of rearing large families in, 136
whole ground prepared for Feminist propaganda, in, 137
any racket feasible in, 139
schizothymes multiplied in, 192

Unwin, J. D., on the alleged sacrifice of the female's free-mating impulse, 127
U.S.A., favours exaltation of women, 52
the degenerate male the greatest bane in, 93

Vote, habitually down-trodden position of those who possess the, 75

Viragoes, influence of, 91
high percentage of, in Anglo-Saxon countries, 95
jealous of normal women, 95
try to convert them to negativeness, 96
hate men, 100, 101
supported by Socrates, 101, 102

- p. 221 -

Webb, Mary, her psychologically false novel, 57

Webb, Sidney, obsessed by economic aspect of social unrest, 174
Wife, originally a despised creature 123, 124
derivation of the word, 124n
to-day honoured, 125
Weininger, on elements of the opposite sex in men and women, 91
his lack of originality, 91n
the point overlooked by, 93
on woman's maleness demanding emancipation, 93
on absence of successful woman's movement in Southern Europe, 94
Wilcox, Barbara, on woman's preference for town life, 140
Winckelmann, influenced Goethe, 36
Wittels, Dr. Fritz, on free choice in mating denied to respectable women, 122
on woman's hatred of man-made society, 125
and her hatred of men in general, 126
argues that women must be sacrificed for the good of the race, 127
a. psycho-analyst, 128, 130
women declared anarchists by, 121, 133
Women, normal, opposed to Socratic doctrines, 17
 havoc wrought among, by false assimilation to male, 19, 20
unreconciled to their sex in Anglo-Saxon communities, 25
and therefore ape the male and also denigrate him, 26
sacrifices made by, to he exalted by their environment, 27
Anglo-Saxon, hate the strong man, 70n
able to enter public life to-day because of epicene nature of work, 70, 71
unconscious promoters of Feminism, 88
masculinoid, not necessarily unadapted, 92
but a menace when men are degenerate, 93
South European, more feminine than English and North American, 94
one just grievance of, in European civilization, 107, 108
respectable married, resent going out to work, 119n
denied free choice in mating, 122, 123
dancing loved by English, 126n
enjoy war, 131, 132
prefer town life, 139, 140
comparison of earnings of, with those of men, 157
their numbers in work outside the home, 160
naturally desire skilled occupations, 170, 171
prefer male schizothymes, 194
often neglect their appearance after marriage, 194
their knock-knees condemned by Dr. Heilborn, 37
and Havelock Ellis, 38
sentimentalism of middle-aged men towards, 49, 50
reconciled to their sex only by adequate sex-partners, 66
haste of English, to rush to male callings and clothes, 66, 67
unreconciled to their sex owing to male degeneration, 68
unlikely to think their assistance necessary under a strong Government, 69, 70
working-class, prefer to remain at home, 29

- p. 222 -

"boyish" figure in, admired in Protestant countries, 35

Woolf, Virginia, her singularly silly novel, 19
Work, to-day nearly always epicene, 70
therefore a proof of male degeneracy, 71
boring nature of domestic, 71
Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, on divorces in Genoa, 187

Xanthippe, Socrates probably lied concerning, 12, 13

Xenophanes, advocated dualism, 3
Xenophon, unfortunately survived to perpetuate Socratic dualism, 5
witness in case of Socrates versus Healthy Man, 9