The Fraud of Feminism. Bax Ernest Belfort

is a hereditary disposition. If the real cause is unique, the provocative agents are numberless. The moral emotions, grief, fright, anger and other psychic disturbances are the most frequent causes of hysterical affections and in every walk of life subjects are equally liable to attacks.”

      Hysteria may appear at any age. It is common with children, especially during the five or six years preceding puberty. Of thirty-three cases under twelve years which came under Dr Still’s notice, twenty-three were in children over eight years. Hysteria in women is most frequent between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and most frequently of all between fifteen and twenty. As a rule there is a tendency to cessation after the “change.” It frequently happens, however, that the disease is continued into an advanced period of life.

      “There is a constant change,” says Professor Albert Moll (“Das nervöse Weib,” p. 165), “from a cheerful to a depressed mood. From being free and merry the woman in a short time becomes sulky and sad. While a moment before she was capable of entertaining a whole company without pause, talking to each member about that which interested him, shortly afterwards she does not speak a word more. I may mention the well-worn example of the refusal of a new hat as being capable of converting the most lively mood into its opposite. The weakness of will shows itself here in that the nervous woman [by “nervous” Dr Moll means what is commonly termed “hysterical”] cannot, like the normal one, command the expression of her emotions. She can laugh uninterruptedly over the most indifferent matter until she falls into veritable laughing fits. The crying fits which we sometimes observe belong to the same category. When the nervous woman is excited about anything she exhibits outbreaks of fury wanting all the characteristics of womanhood, and she is not able to prevent these emotional outbursts. In the same way just as the emotions weaken the will and the woman cannot suppress this or that action, it is noticeable in many nervous women that quite independently of these emotions there is a tendency to continuous alterations in their way of acting. It has been noticed as characteristic of many nervous persons that their only consistency lies in their inconsistency. But this must in no way be applied to all nervous persons. On this disposition, discoverable in the nature of so many nervous women, rests the craving for change as manifested in the continual search for new pleasures, theatres, concerts, parties, tours, and other things (p. 147). Things that to the normal woman are indifferent or to which she has, in a sense, accustomed herself, are to the nervous woman a source of constant worry. Although she may perfectly well know that the circumstances of herself and her husband are the most brilliant and that it is unnecessary for her to trouble herself in the least about her material position as regards the future, nevertheless the idea of financial ruin constantly troubles her. Thus if she is a millionaire’s wife she never escapes from constant worry. Similarly the nervous woman creates troubles out of things that are unavoidable. If in the course of years she gets more wrinkles, and her attraction for man diminishes, this may easily become a source of lasting sorrow for the nervous woman.”

      We now have to consider a point which is being continually urged by Feminists in the present day when confronted with the pathological mental symptoms so commonly observed in women which are usually regarded as having their origin in hysteria. We often hear it said by Feminists in answer to arguments based on the above fact: “Oh, but men can also suffer from hysteria!” “In England,” says Dr Buzzard, “hysteria is comparatively rarely met with in males, the female sex being much more prone to the affection.” The proportion of males to females in hysteria is, according to Dr Pitrè (“Clinical Essay on Hysteria,” 1891), 1 to 3; according to Bodensheim, 1 to 10; and according to Briquet, 1 to 20. The author of the article on Hysteria in The Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911) also gives 1 to 20 as the numerical proportion between male and female cases. Dr Pitrè, in the work above cited, gives 82 per cent. of cases of convulsions in women as against 22 in men. But in all this, under the concept hysteria are included, and indeed chiefly referred to, various physical symptoms of a convulsive and epileptic character which are quite distinct from the mental conditions rightly or wrongly connected, or even identified, with hysteria in the popular mind, and by many medical authorities. But even as regards hysteria in the former sense of the word, a sharp line of distinction based on a diagnosis of cases was long ago drawn by medical men between hysteria masculina and hysteria fœminina, and in the present day eminent authorities —e. g. Dr Bernard Holländer – would deny that the symptoms occasionally diagnosed as hysteria in men are identical with or due to the same causes as the somewhat similar conditions known in women under the name.

      After all, this whole question in its broader bearings is more a question of common-sense observation than one for medical experts.

      What we are here chiefly concerned with as “hysteria” (in accordance with popular usage of the term) are certain pathological mental symptoms in women open to everybody’s observation, and denied by no one unprejudiced by Feminist views. Every impartial person has only to cast his eye round his female acquaintance, and to recall the various women, of all classes, conditions and nationalities, that he may have come in contact with in the course of his life, to recognise those symptoms of mental instability commonly called hysterical, as obtaining in at least a proportion of one to every four or five women he has known, in a marked and unmistakable degree. The proportion given is, in fact, stated in an official report to the Prussian Government issued some ten years back as that noticeable among female clerks, post office servants and other women employed in the Prussian Civil Service. Certainly as regards women in general, the observation of the present writer, and others whom he has questioned on the subject, would seem to indicate that the proportions given in the Prussian Civil Service report as regards the number of women afflicted in this way are rather under than over stated.3 There are many medical men who aver that no woman is entirely free from such symptoms at least immediately before and during the menstrual period. The head surgeon at a well-known London hospital informed a friend of mine that he could always tell when this period was on or approaching with his nurses, by the mental change which came over them.

      Now these pathological symptoms noticeable in a slight and more or less unimportant degree in the vast majority, if not indeed in all women, and in a marked pathological degree in a large proportion of women, it is scarcely too much to say do not occur at all in men. I have indeed known, I think, two men, and only two, in the course of my life, exhibiting mental symptoms analogous to those commonly called “hysterical” in women. On the other hand my own experience, and it is not alone, is that very few women with whom I have come into more or less frequent contact, socially or otherwise, have not at times shown the symptoms referred to in a marked degree. If, therefore, we are to admit the bare possibility of men being afflicted in a similar way it must be conceded that such cases represent such raræ aves as to be negligible for practical purposes.

      A curious thing in pronounced examples of this mental instability in women is that the symptoms are often so very similar in women of quite different birth, surroundings and nationality. I can recall at the present moment three cases, each different as regards birth, class, and in one case nationality, and yet who are liable to develop the same symptoms under the influence of quite similar idées fixes.

      But it seems hardly necessary to labour the point in question at greater length. The whole experience of mankind since the dawn of written records confirmed by, as above said, that of every living person not specially committed to the theories of Modern Feminism, bears witness alike to the prevalence of what we may term the hysterical mind in woman and to her general mental frailty. It is not for nothing that women and children have always been classed together. This view, based as it is on the unanimous experience of mankind and confirmed by the observation of all independent persons, has, I repeat, not been challenged before the appearance of the present Feminist Movement and hardly by anyone outside the ranks of that movement.