“It has been urged,” the writer says, “that women, being less rational and more emotional than men, should not be held accountable in the same degree.  To this it may be answered that punishment for crime is not intended to be retaliatory, but admonitory and deterrent.  It is, therefore, peculiarly necessary to those not easily reached by other forms of warning and dissuasion.  Control of the wayward is not to be sought in reduction of restraints, but in their multiplication.  One who cannot be curbed by reason may be curbed by fear, a familiar truth which lies at the foundation of all penological systems.  The argument for exemption of women is equally cogent for exemption of habitual criminals, for they too are abnormally inaccessible to reason, abnormally disposed to obedience to the suasion of their unregulated impulses and passions.  To free them from the restraints of the fear of punishment would be a bold innovation which has as yet found no respectable proponent outside their own class.

“Very recently this dangerous enlargement of the meaning of the phrase ‘emancipation of woman’ has been fortified with a strange advocacy by the female ‘champions of their sex.’  Their argument runs this way:  ’We are denied a voice in the making of the laws relating to infliction of the death penalty; it is unjust to hold us to an accountability to which we have not assented.’  Of course this argument is as broad as the entire body of law; it amounts to nothing less than a demand for general immunity from all laws, for to none of them has woman’s assent been asked or given.  But let us consider this amazing claim with reference only to the proposal in the service and promotion of which it is now urged:  exemption of women from the death penalty for murder.  In the last analysis it is seen to be a simple demand for compensation.  It says:  ’You owe us a solatium.  Since you deny us the right to vote, you should give us the right to assassinate.  We do not appraise it at so high a valuation as the other franchise, but we do value it.’

“Apparently they do:  without legal, but with virtual, immunity from punishment, the women of this country take an average of one thousand lives annually, nine in ten being the lives of men.  Juries of men, incited and sustained by public opinion, have actually deprived every adult male American of the right to live.  If the death of any man is desired by any woman for any reason he is without protection.  She has only to kill him and say that he wronged or insulted her.  Certain almost incredible recent instances prove that no woman is too base for immunity, no crime against life sufficiently rich in all the elements of depravity to compel a conviction of the assassin, or, if she is convicted and sentenced, her punishment by the public executioner.”