i

REVOLTED WOMAN

ii

iii

iv

Emancipated!v

REVOLTED WOMAN

PAST, PRESENT, AND TO COME

BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
Author of ‘The Brighton Road,’ ‘Drawing for Reproduction,’
‘The Marches of Wales,’ &c., &c.



London:
ELKIN MATHEWS
VIGO STREET
1894
vi

LONDON:
Printed by Strangeways and Sons,
Tower St., Cambridge Circus, W.C.
vii

viii

ix

PREFACE

It might have been supposed, having in mind herfirst and most stupendous faux pas, that Womanwould be content to sit, for all time, humbly undercorrection, satisfied with her lot until the crack ofdoom, when man and woman shall be no more;when heaven and earth shall pass away, and palehumanity come to judgment.

But it is essentially feminine, and womanlike(and therefore of necessity illogical) that she shouldbe forgetful of the primeval curse which MotherEve brought upon the race, and that she should,instead of going in sackcloth and ashes for herancestor’s disobedience, seek instead, not only to bethe equal of man, but, in her foremost advocates—thestrenuous and ungenerous females who periodicallycrucify the male sex in sexual novels writtenunder manly pseudonyms—aspire to rule him, whileas yet she has no efficient control over her ownhysterical being.x

Humanity is condemned by the First Woman’sdisobedience to earn a precarious livelihood by thesweat of its brow. All the toil and trouble of thiswork-a-day world proceed from her sex; and yetthe cant of ‘Woman’s Mission’ fills the air, andthe New Woman is promised us as some sort of apedagogue who shall teach the ‘Child-Man’ how totoddle in the paths of virtue and content. Howabsurd it all is, when the women who write thesethings pander to the depraved palate which gainedHolywell Street a living and an unenviable notorietyyears ago; when they obtain three-fourths of theirreaders from their fellow-women who read theirproductions hopeful of indecency, and conceive themselvescheated if they do not find it. Let us,however, do these women writers, or ‘LiteraryLadies,’ as they have labelled themselves—margarinemasquerading as ‘best fresh’—the justice to acknowledgethat they do not halt ha