Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes
Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. Century Co., 1923.
She was sentenced to death for the bombing of public facilities but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was released after independence. She raised the moral issue of torture which was very commonly used by the French then, but she was silent about the morality of exploding bombs and killing civilians. Women however did not fare very well in the independent, post revolution Algeria—see {36994} and {36995}.
This quotation while difficult for us to fathom today, illustrates a very conservative 18th century view of punishment and law enforcement. The South African high court was very distressed that torture was to be ended. To them, and many others throughout the so called “civilized” European cultures of the time, capital punishment was not a very good deterrent—even for slaves. The execution was usually accompanied by horrible torture and cruelty before death. Slavery was such a horrible life, and the White colonists knew it, that death could be welcome (many slaves had committed suicide). So the suffering at the execution was to serve as a further deterrent. In reality it did not, any more than capital punishment did in the 20th century, but by the logic of the culture and the times, torture was needed as well as capital punishment.
Manava Dharma Shastra. This text is a part of the Hindu Holy Texts. Hindus believe that Manu was a prophet whose text is revealed or inspired.
The Premier was opposing Turkish admission to the EEC common market.
This is a particularly ironic quote. Although Arafat verbally and officially opposed torture, but used it frequently within the PLO and its “law enforcement” efforts amongst the Palestinians.
“Catiff” is a Middle English term to describe a lowly, despicable person.
Pernambuco is a state of Brazil. His voyage took him to several slave countries.
Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, also known as Charlotte Perkins Stetson, her first married name, was a prominent American humanist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
