Page:The Legal Subjection of Men.djvu/70



The sacro-sanct hide of female fiends must not be touched with the lash. Consequently, a wretch who tortures for years innocent children—like the Montague wild beast—must not be flogged. The female garrotter must not be flogged.

By express enactment no one but a male can be sentenced to corporal punishment.

As has already been shown the punishment of hanging has been practically abolished for women who murder mere men. If they murder some other woman or babies of some other woman it is quite a different thing. They are, however, exempt from hanging if they murder their own babies.

In every case the duration of the term of imprisonment passed on a female offender is, as everyone knows, enormously less than the punishment imposed on a man for a similar or a lesser offence.

Under no circumstances can a female prisoner be flogged for breaches of prison discipline. Men and boys can be, and are, flogged like dogs for the most trivial disrespect to the governor and other officials.

In one of the convict prisons a strike of female prisoners was announced against some disciplinary regulation to which they objected. The obnoxious regulation was rescinded. If they had been men they would have been flogged into submission. (Riot at Wormwood Scrubbs, 1894.)