THE RELATIONS OF WOMEN TO CRIME. n 



of every woman has been to establish a permanent relation to some 

 man based upon involuntary sexual emotions. So long has this been 

 in existence, so much power has it acquired by the increment of the 

 forces of heredity, that it has become an organic law of society. This 

 is a factor which enters into every woman's existence ; by it her sex- 

 ual life is made to exceed in intensity the intellectual. Ceaseless 

 indwelling upon what every woman is taught to regard as both a 

 necessity and an honor has tended to give undue force to every thing 

 that relates both mentally and physically to her sexual existence. 

 This is the manner in which society has made the way easy for 

 woman's sexual error. Reflecting upon this, I confess to admiration 

 for a sex which in the face of these difficulties has ever maintained 

 such a well-deserved reputation for jjurity, and shown us that man- 

 kind turns instinctively to good rather than evil. Punishment is part 

 of the crime, with society. To women for a sexual offense it measures 

 out a punishment relentless and life-long. They are banished and 

 hang on the outermost skirts of the inexorable law-giver as " Scarlet- 

 Letter" ones, for whom, in all their lives, there is no further hope. 



Prepared in this fashion for infanticide, can it be wondered at 

 that the ratio for this crime is 1,320 women to 100 men ? * It is clearly 

 an alternative of either social banishment and a total defeat of her 

 selected destiny, or an attempt to conceal her error by crime. "With 

 an obliteration of one set of moral feelings there must be necessarily 

 a weakening of the general moral character. She is therefore pre- 

 pared to violate all the emotions and consciousness which have their 

 origin in the very condition, through the undue development of which 

 she met disaster. Infanticide appeal's to the woman's consciousness 

 less formidable and repellent than her certain punishment by society. 

 Her training has prepared her to place this lessened value upon the 

 crime. Quetelet gives prominence to shame as an impelling motive 

 to the crime. I can give it no such value. That sense of shame or 

 modesty which exists as a phase of sexual cerebration in every men- 

 tally healthy woman, and that induces her to guard so jealously the 

 casket after the jewel has been stolen or rather bestowed, is the part 

 of her mental life to which the most violence has been done by her 

 social error. What the French philosopher ought to refer to, is not 

 the sexual quality of shame, but a sense of degradation which is com- 

 mon in an equal degree to both sexes. It is the sense that the good 

 opinion of those we know, and whose esteem we value, has been for- 

 feited. When we connect this sense of forfeiture with the fact that 

 the interests in life which women are educated to hold most sacred, 

 await but detection to be lost forever, I think we have found suffi- 

 cient reason why this crime, which so antagonizes all womanly quali- 

 ties, should exist to such a degree as to alter nearly one-half the ratio 

 of the sexes in relation to crimes which involve human life. In ana 



' Quetelet, loc. cit. 



