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 wonder
anxiously 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!
But why should we be more shocked by the commission of a crime by a
woman than by a man--even the cruellest of crimes? Take the male and
female in feral creation, and there is nothing to choose between them in
the matter of cruelty. The lion and the lioness both live by murder, and
until gravidity makes her slow for the chase the breeding female is by
all accounts the more dangerous. The she-bear will just as readily eat
up a colony of grubs or despoil the husbandry of the bees as will her
mate. If, then, the human animal drops the restraints imposed by law,
reverting thereby to the theft, murder, and cunning of savagery,
why should it be shocking that the female should equal the male in
callousness? Why should it be shocking should she even surpass the male?
It is quite possible that, since for physiological reasons she is nearer
to instinctive motivation than the male, she cannot help being more
ruthless once deterrent inhibition has been sloughed. But is she in fact
more dangerous, more deadly as a criminal, than the male?
Lombroso--vide Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry in his essay on Anna
Zwanziger--tells us that some of the methods of torture employed by
criminal women are so horrible that they cannot be described without
outraging the laws of decency. Less squeamish than Lombroso or Mr
Barry, I gather aloud that the tortures have to do with the organs of
generation. But male savages in African and American Indian tribes have
a punishment for adulterous women which will match anything in that
line women have ever achieved, and men in England itself have wreaked
perverted vengeance on women in ways indescribable too. Though it may
be granted that pain inflicted through the genitals is particularly
sickening, pain is pain all over the body, and must reach what might be
called saturation-point wherever inflicted. And as regards the invention
of sickening punishment we need go no farther afield in search for
ingenuity than the list of English kings. Dirty Jamie the Sixth of
Scotland and First of England, under mask of retributive justice, could
exercise a vein of cruelty that might have turned a Red Indian green
with envy. Moreover, doesn't our word expressing cruelty for cruelty's
sake derive from the name of a man--the Marquis de Sade?
I am persuaded that the reason why so many women murderers have made
use of poison in their killings is primarily a simple one, a matter of
physique. The average murderess, determined on the elimination of, for
example, a husband, must be aware that in physical encounter she would
have no chance. Then, again, there is in women an almost inborn aversion
to the use of weapons. Once in a way, where the murderess was of
Amazonian type, physical means have been employed for the slaying.
In this regard Kate Webster, who in 1879 at Richmond murdered and
dismembered Mrs Julia Thomas, springs to mind. She was, from all
accounts, an exceedingly virile young woman, strong as a pony, and with
a devil of a temper. Mr Elliot O'Donnell, dealing with her in his essay
in the "Notable British Trials" series, seems to be rather at a
loss, considering her lack of physical beauty, to account for her
attractiveness to men and to her own sex. But there is no need to
account for it. Such a thing is no phenomenon.
I myself, sitting in a taberna in a small Spanish port, was once
pestered by a couple of British seamen to interpret for them in their
approaches to the daughter of the house. This woman, who had a voice
like a raven, seemed able to give quick and snappy answers to the chaff
by frequenters of the taberna. Few people in the day-time, either men
or women, would pass the house if 'Fina happened to be showing without
stopping to have a word with her. She was not at all gentle in manner,
but children ran to her. And yet, without being enormously fat, 'Fina
must have weighed close on fifteen stone. She had forearms and biceps
like a coal-heaver's. She was black-haired, heavy-browed, squish-nosed,
moled, and swarthy, and she had a beard and moustache far beyond the
stage of incipiency. Yet those two British seamen, fairly decent men,
neither drunk nor brutish, could not have been more attracted had 'Fina
had the beauty of the Mona Lisa herself. I may add that there were other
women handy and that the seamen knew of them.
This in parenthesis, I hope not inappropriately.
Where the selected victim, or victims, is, or are, feeble-bodied you
will frequently find the murderess using physical means to her end.
Sarah Malcolm, whose case will form one of the chief features of this
volume, is an instance in point. Marguerite Diblanc, who strangled
Mme Reil in the latter's house in Park Lane on a day in April 1871,
is another. Amelia Dyer, the baby-farmer, also strangled her charges.
Elizabeth Brownrigg (1767) beat the feeble Mary Clifford to death. I do
not know that great physical difference existed to the advantage of the
murderess between her and her older victim, Mrs Phoebe Hogg, who, with
her baby, was done to death by Mrs Pearcy in October 1890, but the fact
that Mrs Hogg had been battered about the head, and that the head had
been almost severed from the body, would seem to indicate that the
murderess was the stronger of the two women. The case of Belle Gunness
(treated by Mr George Dilnot in his Rogues March[1]) might be cited.
Fat, gross-featured, far from attractive though she was, her victims
were all men who had married or had wanted to marry her. Mr Dilnot
says these victims "almost certainly numbered more than a hundred." She
murdered for money, using chloral to stupefy, and an axe for the actual
killing. She herself was slain and burned, with her three children, by
a male accomplice whom she was planning to dispose of, he having arrived
at the point of knowing too much. 1907 was the date of her death at La
Porte, U.S.A.
It occurs when the female killer happens to be dramatical-minded that
she will use a pistol. Mme Weissmann-Bessarabo, who, with her daughter,
shot her husband in Paris (August 1920), is of this kind. She and the
daughter, Paule-Jacques, seem to have seen themselves as wild, wild
women from the Mexico where they had sometime lived, and were always
flourishing revolvers.
I would say that the use of poison so much by women murderers has
reason, first, in the lack of physique for violent methods, but I would
put alongside that reason this other, that women poisoners usually have
had a handy proximity to their victims. They have had contact with their
victims in an attendant capacity. I have a suspicion, moreover, that a
good number of women poisoners actually chose the medium as THE KINDEST
WAY. Women, and I might add not a few men, who would be terribly shocked
by sight or news of a quick but violent death, can contemplate with
relative placidity a lingering and painful fatal illness. Propose to a
woman the destruction of a mangy stray cat or of an incurably diseased
dog by means of a clean, well-placed shot, and the chances are that she
will shudder. But--no lethal chamber being available--suggest poison,
albeit unspecified, and the method will more readily commend itself.
This among women with no murderous instincts whatever.
I have a fancy also that in some cases of murder by poison, not only by
women, the murderer has been able to dramatize herself or himself ahead
as a tender, noble, and self-sacrificing attendant upon the victim.
No need here, I think, to number the cases where the ministrations of
murderers to their victims have aroused the almost tearful admiration of
beholders.
I shall say nothing of the secrecy of the poison method, of the chance
which still exists, in spite of modern diagnosis, that the illness
induced by it will pass for one arising from natural causes. This is
ground traversed so often that its features are as familiar as those of
one's own house door. Nor shall I say anything of the ease with which,
even in these days, the favourite poison of the woman murderer, arsenic,
can be obtained in one form or another.
One hears and reads, however, a great deal about the sense of power
which gradually steals upon the poisoner. It is a speculation upon
which I am not ready to argue. There is, indeed, chapter and verse for
believing that poisoners have arrived at a sense of omnipotence. But if
Anna Zwanziger (here I quote from Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry's essay on
her in his Twenty Human Monsters), "a day or two before the execution,
smiled and said it was a fortunate thing for many people that she was to
die, for had she lived she would have continued to poison men and women
indiscriminately"; if, still according to the same writer, "when the
arsenic was found on her person after the arrest, she seized the packet
and gloated over the powder, looking at it, the chronicler assures us,
as a woman looks at her lover"; and if, "when the attendants asked her
how she could have brought herself calmly to kill people with whom she
was living--whose meals and amusements she shared--she replied that
their faces were so stupidly healthy and happy that she desired to see
them change into faces of pain and despair," I will say this in no way
goes to prove the woman criminal to be more deadly than the male. This
ghoulish satisfaction, with the conjectured feeling of omnipotence, is
not peculiar to the woman poisoner. Neill Cream had it. Armstrong had
it. Wainewright, with his reason for poisoning Helen Abercrombie--"Upon
my soul I don't know, unless it was that her legs were too thick"--is
quite on a par with Anna Zwanziger. The supposed sense of power does not
even belong exclusively to the poisoner. Jack the Ripper manifestly had
something of the same idea about his use of the knife.
As a monster in mass murder against Mary Ann Cotton I will set you
the Baron Gilles de Rais, with his forty flogged, outraged, obscenely
mutilated and slain children in one of his castles alone--his total
of over two hundred children thus foully done to death. I will set you
Gilles against anything that can be brought forward as a monster in
cruelty among women.
Against the hypocrisy of Helene Jegado I will set you the sanctimonious
Dr Pritchard, with the nauseating entry in his diary (quoted by Mr
Roughead) recording the death of the wife he so cruelly murdered:
March 1865, 18, Saturday. Died here at 1 A.M. Mary Jane, my own beloved
wife, aged thirty-eight years. No torment surrounded her bedside [the
foul liar!]--but like a calm peaceful lamb of God passed Minnie away.
May God and Jesus, Holy Ghost, one in three, welcome Minnie! Prayer on
prayer till mine be o'er; everlasting love. Save us, Lord, for Thy dear
Son!
Against the mean murders of Flanagan and Higgins I will set you Mr
Seddon and Mr Smith of the "brides in the bath."