THE RELATIONS OF WOMEN TO CBIME. 5 



is not the woman of France. One glance at the tables of Quetelet 

 proves this. 



We must take a practical view of woman's character. She must 

 be regarded as one in whom the passions burn with as intense heat 

 as in the other sex. The limits of her morality are the same as man's. 

 She attains purity in the same manner; and she meets sexual disaster 

 through the same means. Her worldly view is bounded by the same 

 horizon. She upholds for herself the same standard of success or 

 failure. Temptations run in the same channel and are resisted by the 

 same psychical traits. The forces of heredity play the some role in 

 her mental and bodily life. Beyond these, she belongs to a different 

 mental type from man, the effects of which in our present knowledge, 

 and in the relations we are now studying the sex, reach limits im- 

 possible to fix. I can see no other way of viewing the sex, and reach- 

 ing any thing like approximate truth in her relations to crime. 



In crimes against persons in which personal strength forms an 

 element, there is a physical factor for the difference. The ratio of 

 strength between the sexes is as sixteen to twenty-six, and this is found 

 to correspond to the difference in which women and men participate 

 in crimes against persons and jJi'operty.^ Such a coincidence as this, 

 constantly recurring, renders, in this broad classification of crimes in 

 general, such an explanation probable. But, in a closer analysis of 

 crime in particular, this physical basis loses its value as a probable 

 cause. While we must allow that sexual difference in strength finds 

 a reflex result in consciousness, and thus places a limit to the acts of 

 either sex, yet in crimes against persons we find the sexes approaching 

 to and receding from a common ratio. It is this fact which leads me 

 to the conclusion that all argument regarding the innate excess of 

 moral qualities in the female sex over the male, is based upon a fallacy. 

 It is strongly confirmatory of this, that a simple numerical comparison 

 of the prevalence of crime in the sexes leads to error, unless we credit 

 women with the fewer temptations, the less opportunity, and those 

 forms of sexual cerebration which find their expression in a want of 

 belligerence which characterize women. Thus it would be obviously 

 wrong to assert that, because twelve women to one hundred men are 

 convicted of assassination, women represent more than eight times 

 the morality of men in relation to this one offense. This crime is 

 just the one to call into play all those conditions which constitute 

 the moral atmosphere and conditions of sex. Woman's want of op- 

 portunity, the nature of her occupations, and the absence of the same 

 degree of temptation, must all be taken into consideration in forming 

 an opinion of the moral equivalent of women in connection with the 

 crime. If it were possible to give to each one of these modifying con- 

 ditions a numerical expression, this moral equivalent could be given a 

 mathematical value. But this is impossible, and each possesses in itself 



' Quetelet, loc. cit., p. 91. 



