WOMEN ARE CRUEL

Evening Star, Issue 20539, 18 July 1930, Page 14

WOMEN ARE CRUEL

AN AUTHOR'S INDICTMENT I That women are by nature cruel is the thesis of A. Corbett Smith, a Bri- ( tisb author and lecturer, who has asi sorted that it is widely in evidence not ! only in group form (he cites their cries j for a knock-out at prize fights) but in i the individual, both spinster and marj ried woman, says the New York I ‘ Times.’ Adducing other examples, Mr Smith recalls, in an article in the London ‘ Daily Chronicle,’ that the play, ‘ Beau Geste,’ recently performed at His Majesty’s Theatre an London, contained a harrowing crucifixion scene. “ Responsible critics protested strongly, and there was talk of cutting the scene,” he said. “ The box office manager expressed his astonishment at the largo number of women who, before they would book their scats, demanded his assurance that the scene was rcI tained.

I” .Again, it is hardly necessary to affirm that it is women, seven-eighths of the reading public, who support the publication and largo sales of certain lurid war books of the day. There are few men who can stomach the obscenii ties, the blood and filth with which ( these and other volumes aro saturated, i “ Or, to take another angle, the I harshness and moral cruelty on the part of many women overseers and managers toward girl employees in great business and trading firms has i latterly become proverbial. Evep more | significant is the domineering behaviour j of certain women managers to junior j male employees. For hero is.a new opi portunity in our social history, i “ Now, these casual examples, with I a hundred more like them, are not just ■ symptoms of the present age. Or, rather, they are only accentuated, because history repeats itself. We face a psychological condition of womanhood { which is but educed and intensified by I existing social conditions, f “ For it is nob disputed, least of all by women, that, compared with man, woman is both largely inured and insensitive to pain and suffering, and also is more prone to the infliction of cruelty, mental and physical. This, even upon those whom they love. “ Upon the first count, wc remember that the life of every woman is largely compounded of suffering, while any house surgeon of a great hospital will testify to the stoicism of women under a major or minor operation. And what man could ever face the intensive duties of a hospital nurse? “ Upon the second count, the history of specific ages and people is packed with examples of the more intense, the more refined cruelty of women. One recalls the women Terrorists of the French Revolution, who ‘ revolted even their male colleagues by their barbarity ’; the patrician women of .Romo during the first and second centuries a.d. ; the women of many native races, East and West, to whom is especially given the task of torturing prisoners:— “ When you're wounded and lie on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, as Rudyard Kipling sings.

‘‘Whenever the balance of the sexes has swung toward the dominance of woman and the degeneration of man, woman instinctively and inevitably rends to asnrne and to exaggerate the normally accepted attributes of man. “ She has become impatient of his apparent failure, and so she comes increasingly to despise him. _ Hence her desire to wound. But, with her impulsive outlook, she makes the cardinal mistake of regarding cruelty, mental or physical, as an attribute of strength instead of weakness.

“ Justified or not, this outlook by women is perhaps the most deplorable of all phases of our social life to-day. It ruins tho home, it tends-to dislocate business and voluntary social effort, and it keeps- men in constant antagonism, leading them to retaliate in kind, when they should bo seeking and winning sympathy, encouragement/, and comradeship from woman, tho sheet anchor of their hopes and aspirations.

“ But no society is static. It must advance or regress. The omens to-day are good. There are many suggestions of a steady swing back to a happy femininity. Woman’s imagined dominance of the moment is a myth. It is built upon self-delusion. To-morrow she will awaken, the balance will adjust itself, and, in tho words of Pope “ If she rules him, never shows she rules. • Charms by accepting; by submitting, sways.”