Women who Kill

3. Spoiling Maidens

3 spoilingmaidens 171 1 Luckilyformen,themonstrouswomenwereexceptional . The great mass of women were mere babes, children really, permanently simple and infantile, but on the whole rather charming. That at least is how the biologists explained the vast differences between men and women when science supplanted religion as Victorian gospel . As the nineteenth century waned, women and men seemed as distant from one another as ever, but now the reasons for that estrangement were sought in scientific research rather than religious preachment. The law of nature replaced the law of God as rationalization for the law of men. The justification changed but the ladies remained the same pretty, foolish, harmless, and despised creatures they had been for a hundred years. Thanks to Darwin and his popularizers, science was able to “prove” what earlier had only been suspected: that men indeed had larger brains than women, that they had higher levels of metabolism and energy, that they were altogether more highly evolved, more nearly perfect. There were some rather embarrassing findings—such as the fact that woman’s brain in proportion to her overall body size was a good 6 percent heavier than man’s—but such inconclusive results, obviously derived from erroneous formulas, were scarcely worth quibbling about and best left alone. Eminently objective biologists and anthropometrists agreed about the results of the research they planned and interpreted: white men led the evolutionary vanguard while children, Negroes, and women slouched in a retrograde clump at the end of the parade. The conclusive finding was this: woman was “simply a lesser man, weaker in body and mind,—an affectionate and docile animal, of inferior grade.” Not that men complained of this shoddy creature they had devised for themselves. Inferior she might be, but her affectionate nature and docility made her a welcome household pet—much like a spaniel or a wellbroken pony. If men could not condescend to love women, they could at least love the “devoted affection” women naturally felt for them. That at least was the opinion of “Professor” Orson Fowler, the enormously influential popularizer of phrenology, who wrote at great length on the relations between the sexes, codifying the popular notions of his time and recycling them as scientific facts. “Ask any number of sample men what 172 female quality they prize most,” he wrote, and “nearly all will answer— ‘Give me the woman who affiliates with, and dotes on, me. . . .’” In fact, he said, a wife who did not “thus assimilate and identify herself” with her husband was “not worth much to any man.” To the popular French writer Jules Michelet, whose works on love and life were republished in America, woman’s chief charm was her tractability. That, combined with her “Byzantian” education, gave every “man of modern times, fresh in intellect, in learning, in conceptions,” the chance to play Pygmalion to his ignorant teenaged bride. The girl’s natural “affection and gratitude” would lead her into “an innocent error” (which her husband need not bother to correct): that all the knowledge he possessed originated with him. “You have the credit of everything,” Michelet exclaimed to his male readers. (He seemed to think that women did not read.) “It is you who have made all living things, all science. . . . for, being her creator, you are also the creator of the world; the world and God are both lost in you.” While woman’s dumb devotion gratified a husband, it raised problems for the man who had no wish to become one. Professor Fowler explained that the same principle that made wives “cling” like demented leeches to their husbands made it “so extremely difficult” for any man to get “‘shake of’ a woman whose affections were once allowed to fasten.” Like a duck, which takes most anything it sees as its mother, a girl who engaged her affections could not be detached. “Either prevent their concentration,” Fowler warned, “or else consummate them in marriage.” For this reason as well as compelling questions of pedigree and property, a man contemplating marriage in respectable society was expected to secure the consent of a young lady’s father before addressing the lady herself. Only a bounder would seek the lady’s affection before the father’s permission. But what if the poor, docile, affectionate female had no father to give either permission or protection? As Margaret Fuller pointed out, thousands upon thousands of women muddled along without the guardianship of...