The Price That Women Pay.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIX, Issue 8, 24 August 1907, Page 59

The Price That Women Pay.

The acts of women, up to comparatively recent times, says an eminent University teacher in the department of sociology, have been governed almost wholly by their emotional natures. It would be well if this were still so. The much vaunted “emancipation” of women in very modern times has brought their constitutional and characteristic emo-

(ions into dangerous, often destructive, conflict with a state of intellect that is still, and must long remain, adolescent. It cannot be otherwise than that a

newly awakened, and therefore imperfect reasoning power must cause the ancient and fundamental impulses to react destructively. Thus, from the strict guardian of social conventions that she formerly was, woman has degenerated, under stress of conditions affecting her personal desires, into the most reckless of social law breakers. Doubtless it has always been true that, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” But in this dawn of her reasoning power, Bedlam contains no mind so absolutely wrecked as that of the passionately loving woman whom circum stances compels to bring her immature mind to bear on the difficult problem of her happiness. Formerly woman occasionally drooped and died because of the mental distrubance caused by disappointed love. Latterly, the half-trained powers of her intellect resist the enemy of her emotional desires, engage in an unequal and hopeless conflict, and the result is that incurable form of love madness that is either self-destructive or homicidal. No other form of insanity influences a mother to abandon her childrenAmong women who are moral by nature, love madness is the only form of insanity that will cause them to publicly ignore established social conventions, and to commit atrocious crimes against law, order, and morality.