Reprinted by permission from The Times (London),
March 28, 1912.
SIR,—For man the physiological psychology
of woman is full of difficulties.
He is not a little mystified when he encounters in
her periodically recurring phases of hypersensitiveness,
unreasonableness, and loss of the sense of proportion.
He is frankly perplexed when confronted with a complete
alteration of character in a woman who is child-bearing.
When he is a witness of the “tendency of woman
to morally warp when nervously ill,” and of
the terrible physical havoc which the pangs of a disappointed
love may work, he is appalled.
And it leaves on his mind an eerie feeling when he
sees serious and long-continued mental disorders developing
in connexion with the approaching extinction of a
woman’s reproductive faculty.
No man can close his eyes to these things; but he
does not feel at liberty to speak of them.
“For the woman that God gave him is not his
to give away."[1]
[1 From “The Female of the Species” by
Rudyard Kipling]
As for woman herself, she makes very light of any
of these mental upsettings.
She perhaps smiles a little at them. . . .[1]
[1] In the interests of those who feel that female
dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted
a woman’s flippant overestimate of the number
of women in London society who suffer from nervous
disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause].
None the less, these upsettings of her mental equilibrium
are the things that a woman has most cause to fear;
and no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that
the mind of woman is always threatened with danger
from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies.
It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his
eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He cannot
shut them to the fact that there is mixed up with
the woman’s movement much mental disorder; and
he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies
which lie behind.
The recruiting field for the militant suffragists
is the million of our excess female population—that
million which had better long ago have gone out to
mate with its complement of men beyond the sea.
Among them there are the following different types
of women:—
(a) First—let us put them first—come
a class of women who hold, with minds otherwise unwarped,
that they may, whenever it is to their advantage,
lawfully resort to physical violence.
The programme, as distinguished from the methods,
of these women is not very different from that of
the ordinary suffragist woman.
(b) There file past next a class of women
who have all their life-long been strangers to joy,
women in whom instincts long suppressed have in the
end broken into flame. These are the sexually
embittered women in whom everything has turned into
gall and bitterness of heart, and hatred of men.
