There is no need then, after all, for any crime writer who wants to fry a modest basket of fish to mourn because Mr Roughead, Mr.Beaufroy Barry, Mr Guy Logan, Miss Tennyson Jesse, Mr Leonard R.Gribble, and others of his estimable fellows seem to have swiped all the sole and salmon.It may be a matter for envy that Mr Roughead, with his uncanny skill and his gift in piquant sauces, can turn out the haddock and hake with all the delectability of sole a la Normande.The sigh of envy will merge into an exhalation of joy over the artistry of it.And one may turn, wholeheartedly and inspired, to see what can be made of one's own catch of gudgeon.
More deadly than the male.''
Kipling's line about the female of the species has been quoted, particularly as a text for dissertation on the female criminal, perhaps rather too often.There is always a temptation to use the easy gambit.
It is quite probable that there are moments in a woman's life when she does become more deadly than the male.The probability is one which no man of age and experience will lack instance for making a fact.Without seeking to become profound in the matter I will say this: it is but lightly as compared with a man that one need scratch a woman to come on the natural creature.
Now, your natural creature, not inhibited by reason, lives by theft, murder, and dissimulation.It lives, even as regards the male, but for one purpose: to continue its species.Enrage a woman, then, or frighten her into the natural creature, and she will discard all those petty rules invented by the human male for his advantage over, and his safety from, the less disciplined members of the species.All that stuff about `honour,'
`Queensberry rules,' `playing the game,' and what not will go by the board.And she will fight you with tooth and talon, with lies, with blows below the belt--metaphorically, of course.
It may well be that you have done nothing more than hurt her pride-- the civilized part of her.But instinctively she will fight you as the mother animal, either potentially or in being.It will not occur to her that she is doing so.Nor will it occur to you.But the fact that she is fighting at all will bring it about, for fighting to any female animal means defence of her young.She may not have any young in being.That does not affect the case.She will fight for the ova she carries, for the ova she has yet to develop.Beyond all reason, deep, instinct deep, within her she is the carrier of the race.This instinct is so profound that she will have no recollection in a crisis of the myriads of her like, but will think of herself as the race's one chance to persist.Dangerous? Of course she's dangerous--as dangerous as Nature! Just as dangerous, just as self- centred, as in its small way is that vegetative organism the volvox, which, when food is scarce and the race is threatened, against possible need of insemination, creates separate husband cells to starve in clusters, while`she' hogs all the food-supply for the production of eggs.
This small flight into biology is made merely for the dim light it may cast on the Kipling half-truth.It is not made to explain why women criminals are more deadly, more cruel, more deeply lost in turpitude, than their male colleagues.But it may help to explain why so many crime- writers, following Lombroso, THINK the female more deadly.
There is something so deeply shocking in the idea of a woman being other than kind and good, something so antagonistic to the smug conception of Eve as the minist'ring angel, thou,'' that leaps to extremes in expression are easy.
A drunken woman, however, and for example, is not essentially more degraded than a drunken man.This in spite of popular belief.A nymphomaniac is not essentially more degraded than a brothel-haunting male.It may be true that moral sense decays more quickly in a woman than in a man, that the sex-ridden or drink-avid woman touches the deeps of degradation more quickly, but the reasons for this are patent.They are economic reasons usually, and physical, and not adherent to any inevitably weaker moral fibre in the woman.
Women as a rule have less command of money than men.If they earn what they spend they generally have to seek their satisfactions cheaply; and, of course, since their powers of resistance to the debilitating effects of alcohol are commonly less than those of men, they more readily lose physical tone.With loss of health goes loss of earning power, loss of caste.The descent, in general, must be quicker.It is much the same in nymphomania.Unless the sex-avid woman has a decent income, such as will provide her with those means whereby women preserve the effect of attractiveness, she must seek assuagement of her sex-torment with men less and less fastidious.
But it is useless and canting to say that peccant women are worse than men.If we are kind we say so merely because we are more apprehensive for them.Safe women, with but rare exceptions, are notably callous about their sisters astray, and the we'' I have used must be taken generally to signify men.We see the danger for erring women, danger economic and physical.Thinking in terms of the phrase that a woman's place is the home,'' we wonder what will become of them.We wonderanxiously what man, braver or less fastidious than ourselves, will accept the burden of rescuing them, give them the sanctuary of a home.We see them as helpless, pitiable beings.We are shocked to see them fall so low.
There is something of this rather maudlin mentality, generally speaking, in our way of regarding women criminals.To think, we say, that a WOMAN should do such things!
