The choice of a mate.

  • Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario), 1882-1971.
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The choice of a mate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    FEMALE CRUELTY sadism pent-up, is just as likely as an ill-adapted man to develop a sadistic perversion, i.e. a love of injuring, hurting, bullying, or tyrannizing over a fellow creature as an end in itself. 1 History is full of instances of her having done so, and if Dr. A. F. Chamberlain, in an impartial treatise, is able to say that woman is more cruel than man, 2 if David Hume was able to say, “ no passion seems to have more influence on female minds than this for power ” 3 (lust of power being the root of sadism), and if Dr. Briffault, whose bias is wholly feminist, is able to say that “ primitive women are . . . even more cruel and ferocious than men,” 4 and of mediæval European women that “ as usual the women excel the men in cruelty,” 5 it is evident that we are dealing with a matter that is something more than fancy. In another work I collected a number of facts not generally known about this question, and instanced the revolting cruelty of the spinster martial corps of Dahomey, 6 of the Indian women of North America, of the women of Imperial Rome, to whom it was an entertainment to flog their slaves, and whose common practice it was to stick pins into the breasts and arms of their female slaves while the latter, stripped to the waist for the purpose, helped to dress them. 7 It was Queen Constance, and not King Robert the Pious, who in 1022 wished to put out the eyes of one of the heretics with whom the King had been debating at the Cathedral of Orleans. 8 It was the women of the French Revolution who disgusted the men with their bloodthirstiness, and not vice versât It was the village girls and women, as Michelet shows, and not the men, who, in the civil wars in la Vendée, went out into the fields and stabbed the eyes of the wounded and dying Republican soldiers with their long needles. 10 Bogumil Goltz says that “ few women 1 See Note, p. 452. 2 The Child (London, 1906, p. 421). Also Wieth-Knudsen (F., p. 57) : “ chil dren and women are the most cruel of mankind ”. 3 Additional Essays, II. 4 MO, I, p. 453. A long list of examples supports the contention. 6 MO., Ill, p. 392. The examples should also be read. 8 See on this point Capt. Sir Richard Burton (A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, Ed. 1893, I, p. 112, and II, p. 49), also and particularly E. Chaudouin’s Trois Mois de Captivité au Dahomey, pp. 286, 352. 7 M.A.I., pp. 90, 93-96. As to the nauseating cruelty of Roman women to their slaves, see, for instance, such an impartial witness as Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities : Article, “ Servus ”. 8 The Middle Ages, by F. Funck-Brentano (London, 1922, p. 71). 9 M.A.I., p. 90. “Histoire de le Révolution Française (Paris, 1853), VII, p. 82. Michelet actually mentions by name certain women who did this. Q* 457