CHAPTER V THE LAW (p. 145-146)

Why have we vicious laws? Because they have been made and carried out by men alone.
MRS. SHELDON AMOS, N.D.

Laws made and administered by men constituted the focus of women’s intense anger during the entire period under study. Nina Boyle of the Women’s Freedom League raged in 1913 against "the open immorality of the Courts of Justice," where the overt "sex bias" of magistrates manifested itself in "tenderness to male ruffians who inflict the ‘reverberations of their physiological emergencies’ upon women and children." "We have watched the treachery and dishonesty of politics and the abuse and tyranny of the administration of the law until we are sick and sore with the shame and vileness of it," she wrote furiously. Commenting upon the reception of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1912, Boyle noted the wild indignation of the male person when for the first time "soliciting" is under this Act made a male as well as a female offence.

The callous admission of Mr. Huntley Jenkins that "thousands of men" annoy and molest women and that it is preposterous to consider it an offence; the contention that "two young officers" (police) must on no account be considered witnesses sufficient to bring home a charge like this to a man—although 9,000 women are convicted every year on less; and the triumph of sex bias over even the police evidence ending in the acquittal of the accused against the clearest evidence. Nina Boyle and many other suffragists insisted that "these things are possible because women have no power." The power of women, opponents of women’s suffrage asserted over and over again, resided in the private sphere, in their influence in setting the moral tone of the nation. It was women, they claimed, who made the morals of the country.

"That is not true," Butler fumed in the nineteenth century, "it cannot be true, so long as men alone make the laws. For the law is a mighty teacher of morality or immorality, justice or injustice." Feminists argued that patriarchal attitudes that maintained and encouraged their degraded status in a separate sphere were legitimated by a body of law enacted by Parliament and interpreted in the courts. They understood law to be the expression and exercise of power in society. "Is it to be wondered at," asked the auther of an NUWSS leaflet in 1913, "that little respect is paid to women when the law classes them with regard to their political status…with criminals, paupers, and lunatics?" "[T]he unprotected position of our girls and women," asserted Common Cause in 1910, is a direct consequence of their unrepresented state." Feminists insisted that a monopoly on power in the public sphere created a tyranny of power in every other sphere as well; that women’s lack of power in the public sphere meant lack of power in any sphere; and that public and private were concepts of separation that had no basis in reality and had to be eliminated altogether.