JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I guess I've seen this question before, though not nearly as full-frontal-assault as this one. One of the odd things in this little pamphlet (Capital Punishment, When Man Becomes Degenerate is Woman then to Blame?", self published by Franklin E. Parker at the appropriately-named Ariel Press in Westwood, Massachusetts in 1907)is that the question in its title is only relatively lightly addressed and that at the end of the short work. What Mr. Parker is mostly concerned with is capital punishment, which in the end he sees only as another form of murder, and makes a number of biblical arguments against it. Relative to the responsibility of woman in the degeneracy of man (which doesn't seem necessarily related to the issue of capital punishment) the argument is made that she is not--conditionally. That is, if a woman stays with the degenerate man than she does share responsibility--on the other hand in 1907 I do not know what religious beacon suggesting what a woman might do about that situation. On the third hand another statement maintains that is a "soul-part of man"...(and is) "dominated more or less by his superior will and subject to his ruling", which presents a different issue altogether so far as being married to a degenerate man goes.
I only gave about five minutes to this pamphlet, so there may be a more adaptable answer somewhere--there is actually a long poem at the end that was light and sugary and withering, and I knew that reading it would be like watching a baseball player adjusting his batting glove for a full five minutes, which means you needed it to stop as soon as it started. Anyway, I think the ultimate answer to this woman/blame question was both "yes" and "no".
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