Misogyny. Also why Nietzsche was an asshole.

The text below was written less than 100 years ago when women were still fighting for the right to vote in many parts of the United States (and indeed, in the world). 

Note the snide comment about natives wanting to be equal to white men at the end. Perish the thought!

By Sir Almroth Wright In The unexpurgated case against women’s suffrage. (1913). pp 88-98.

_________

“The woman voter would be pernicious to the State not only because she could not back her vote by physical force, but also by reason of her intellectual defects.

Woman’s mind attends in appraising a statement primarily to the mental images which it evokes, and only secondarily, and sometimes, not at all, to what is predicated in the statement. It is over-influenced by individual instances; arrives at conclusions on incomplete evidence; has a very imperfect sense of proportion; accepts the congenial as true and rejects the uncongenial as false; takes the imaginary which is desired for reality; and treats the undesired reality which is out of sight as nonexistent, building up for itself, in this way when biased by predilections, and aversions a very unreal picture of the external world…

If to move about more freely, to read more freely, to speak out her mind more freely, and to have emancipated herself from traditionary beliefs, and I would add traditionary ethics, is to have advanced, woman has indubitably advanced. But the educated native has advanced in all these respects and he also tells us that he is pulling up level with the white man.

Let us at any rate, when the suffragist is congratulating herself on her own progress, meditate also upon that dictum of Nietzsche, “Progress is writ large on all woman’s banners and bannerets: but one can actually see her going back.”

This is probably the most virulently-racist pseudoscience I’ve seen in a while. Phrenology was used in the 19th century to justify racism and was a forerunner of the horrific race-based genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in the 20th.

From: Phrenology: essays and studies. O’Dell and O’Dell (1899). Sadly, it is also available online as a new reprint published in 2010 as a “culturally-relevant” book.

It takes quite a bit to disgust me. Once in a while, a book like this one does just that.

An indifference to life, and a love of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, are common characteristics of most of the Orientals, and are chiefly conspicuous in the ruling classes.

— 

“British India” by Charles Creighton Hazewell, The Atlantic Monthly; November, 1857.

(Many thanks to @34_1 for the submission.)

You will find very few Englishmen who have not got an instinctive aversion for the ordinary native of India– the Madrasi or Bengali. They have a sneaking fawning way about them which almost involuntarily excites contempt and disgust and their talk is ever of rupees, annas, and pie…

A Madrasi, even if wrongly abused, would simply call you his father, and his mother, and his aunt, defender of the poor, and epitome of wisdom, and would take his change out of you in the bazaar accounts.

— Elder Smith. The Cornhill Magazine, Volume 42. (1880).

“The strong man of India” was drawn by “Ding” Darling for the New York Herald Tribune just after Mahatma Gandhi was arrested during the “Quit India” Movement (1942).

It implies that Gandhi wanted to blindly tear down 100 years of “building for India”- a charitable act by the British, indeed. Notice the ghoulish, dark caricature of Gandhi. 

This cartoon was not the only one portraying India’s struggle in unflattering light. A wide swathe of American newspapers supported the British as they sought to quell the Indian movement for Independence. This loyalty has always flabbergasted me. The United States was founded on the principle of “inalienable rights,” against the tyranny of the British Empire; the War of 1812 was fought by the US against the British; and the British were poised ever ready to support the South in case the Union was dismembered during the Civil War.

Physical and Intellectual Character of Hindoos.

In respect to race, the Hindoos have been regarded by naturalists as belonging to what they call the Caucasian or European, but this is proved by the best modern writers to be untrue. The European is white; the Hindoo black, or nearly so. The European has an endless variety in the color of the hair and of the eye, while with the Hindoo the hair is always black, and the eye, a dark brown. In physical force, the Hindoo is below not only the European, but even the Arab, the Persian, and the Chinese. The intellectual character of the Hindoos corresponds to their physical. They have subtlety, but not much originality, or practical good sense. In vigor and manliness of mind, they are below the Arabs and Persians. In moral character, the Hindoos rank extremely low. Candor, integrity, and ingenuousness of mind cannot be said to exist among them. Judicial perjury is said to be practiced in Hindostan on a wider scale than in any other country.

— A cyclopedia of missions. C. Scribner (1855)

Throughout the journey not a single European is to be met with, but the traveller is entirely in the power of the natives, excepting such assistance as he can derive from his pistols and a thick stick. The danger however is not great. The Ooriahs, as well as the Bengalese, are a small and cowardly race; so much so, indeed, that the East India Company will not allow them to be enlisted as soldiers. A Bengalee of five feet six is quite a tall man, and in shape he is as delicate and effeminate as a European lady.

— A Popular Account of the Manners and Customs of India, Charles Acland (1847).

The ascidian that got itself evolved into Bengali Baboos must have seized the first moment of consciousness and thought to regret the step it had taken, for however much we may desire to diffuse Babooism over the Empire, we must all agree that the Baboo itself is a subject for tears.

The other day as I was strolling down the Mall whistling Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, I met the Bengali Baboo. It was returning from office. I asked it if it had a soul. It replied that it had not, but that some day it hoped to pass the matriculation examination of the Calcutta University. I whistled the opening bars of one of Cherubini’s Requiems, but I saw no resurrection in its eye so I passed on.

When I was at Lhassa, the Dalai Lama told me that a virtuous cow-hippopotamus by metempsychosis might under unfavourable circumstances become an undergraduate of the Calcutta University, and that when patent leather shoes and English supervened, the thing was a Baboo.

When Lord Macaulay said that what the milk was to the cocoa-nut, what beauty was to the buffalo, and what scandal was to woman, that Dr Johnson’s Dictionary was to the Bengali Baboo, he unquestionably spoke in terms of figurative exaggeration; nevertheless a core of truth lies hidden in his remark. It is by the Baboo’s words you know the Baboo. The true Baboo is full of words and phrases- full of inappropriate words and phrases lying about like dead men on a battle field in heaps to be carted away promiscuously without reference to kith or kin. You may turn on a Baboo at any moment and be quite sure that words and phrases and maxims and proverbs will come gurgling forth without reference to the subject or to the occasion to what has gone before or to what will come after. Perhaps it was with reference to this independence, buoyancy and, extravagance of language that Lord Lytton declared the Bengali to be the “Irishman of India.”

— From: Twenty-one days in India by George Robert Aberigh-Mackay (1881).