Note: This article is also available in Spanish, Portuguese and Farsi.

[quote]Honest history is the weapon of freedom. – Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.[/quote]

Let us now embrace our true – yet utterly forgotten – men’s rights history. Now is the time to throw off myths we have been sold by the peddlers of the orthodox historical narrative. For much of what we believe to be true about the relations between the sexes in the past is, in reality, nothing but fake history; a sheaf of fables fabricated and promoted by social constructionist ideologues.

What is offered in this article is an introduction to the unknown history of 13 subjects I believe are crucial to today’s men’s rights movement. These 13 subjects are areas in the history of the relations between the sexes which have been obfuscated and defaced by an army of academics and policy-shapers who, in their effort to promote utopian agendas for the future, have been, over the past five decades, distorting and censoring the record and have peddled to the public a narrative deliberately tailored to seduce it into accepting a totalitarian set of protocols handed down from above and rolled out by a gigantic and powerful bureaucracy.

Having obliterated all inconvenient facts of the pre-1960s past, these bureaucrats and professors who either control outright, or make their living from, the post-1960s American nanny state, are able to claim, in essence, that if it were not for the “progress” initiated by their camp, life would be an unmitigated nightmare of oppression for the victim class they have identified, or, have invented. The historical falsehoods which now circulate everywhere in our culture – from high literature to junk entertainment – are a fundamental implement in the tactical perpetuation of the social engineers’ claim on power. This is why we should understand that getting hold of an accurate historical perspective on the relations between the sexes in the past should matter to us, and should matter a great deal, and this is why this piece was written. What follows is a big, fat – and very, very red – pill that we are all in dire need of. Call it a weapon of mass instruction.

1) Alimony

Most of us believe that, before the 1960s-1970s period of cultural turmoil, women were at such a disadvantage in the employment market that in divorce cases universal and mandatory court awards of alimony were justified and that the public at large believed that such were necessary. This is a belief of recent, post-1960s, origin. It is not true.

The fact is that long before the 1920’s alimony had been recognized as a racket and it was in the mid-1920s that in the United States there erupted across the nation in the press new dissenting voices across a wide spectrum of interests. A resistance movement had been born. Here is what one of the earliest and most prominent of these dissenters, Chicago Judge Harry A. Lewis, had to say about the matter in 1925:

Under our modern standards woman is no longer man’s inferior. If you would find out whether this is true ask any one of them and see what she says in reply. Yet there appear before me every day unobligated women who seek from $15 to 50 a week from their former husbands’ earnings to add to their own comfortable salaries and for no other reason, pretext or cause than that they were once married to the men.

And in the following year New York Judge Selah B. Strong offered a parallel view:

The whole business of alimony grabbing is degrading. It cheapens the relations between men and women. I truly believe alimony keeps thousands of couples from being reconciled. The woman being supported by her husband under order of the court isn’t anxious to effect a reconciliation. She is dawdling in idleness, free, irresponsible. She’s making him suffer, so she gloats.

But these, of course, are male voices. What could we expect to hear from the opposite sex?

In 1925 Doris Blake, widely read syndicated newspaper columnist, devoted a column to Judge Strong’s views, summing up her own view by calling alimony grafters a “parasitic class.” In 1928 bestselling novelist Faith Baldwin, had this to say:

The rising tide of divorce has brought us a new industry, the ultimate refinement of gold-digging, the perfection of blackmail within the law – marriage for alimony. Women who do not want husbands or children have found a joker in our marriage laws by which they can establish themselves comfortably for life; free, respectable, rich, safe – without personal cost or sacrifice.

There are thousands and thousands of women who are being supported by men to whom they are no longer wives. There is no doubt that this business of alimony is getting to be a serious menace, it may be alright when a man has plenty of money. To pay a former wife a few thousand dollars in alimony may mean nothing to him. But, on the other hand, just consider how many men are forced to pay alimony who cannot afford it. You will find in the majority of cases that there is no good reason why they should pay it, either. The women are well able to take care of themselves. If they did not lack pride and self-respect, they would not accept money from men who no longer mean anything to them.”

Journalist Ruth Brown Reed in 1931 spoke of an “industry”:

The alimony racket has become the great woman’s industry. A sobbing pretty woman before the court – and what chance has the husband? In many cases the amount of alimony is so large in proportion to the man’s earnings that it completely nullifies any chance of happiness or of another marriage. And why – one cannot help but ask – should a divorced man be denied the right to a normal family life?

In 1937, novelist Kate Baldwin complained that “there are many women who will marry merely with the idea of getting alimony. They know that marriage can be painlessly dissolved and they take their marriage vows with no intention at all of keeping them.” And in the same year journalist Maxine Garrison wrote: “Women who marry that they may divorce for money are high-class chiselers who have so far got off scot-free. It’s an old con game with streamline trimmings … It’s all too easy these days for a woman to reason along these lines when she is momentarily bored or angry, ‘Why should I go on putting up with this guy? A divorce, with alimony to take care of the money problem, and I can live my own life as I please.’”

In 1939, Dr. S. L. Katzoff, domestic dilemma expert, medical director, and consulting psychiatrist of the San Francisco Institute of Human Relations, estimated that in his day “alimony in America has grown into a billion-dollar annual business, and only a fraction of the alimony payments are justifiable” and asserted bluntly that “alimony often amounts to holdups with the aid of barbaric laws.”

And a good three decades following the mid-1920s eruption of the Alimony Racket issue as a major public debate on the national scene, newspaper columnist Helen Worden Erskine offered a 1954 assessment:

Will we ever have a new Lincoln to free the alimony slave? In New York’s Manhattan telephone book you’ll still find the entry: Alimony Jail. At various times it’s been my job as reporter to interview inmates of this jail, which is at 434 West 34th Street (appropriately in the Hell’s Kitchen district). Each time I was ashamed of my sex.

The presently accepted official narrative claiming of alimony as a culturally accepted necessity before the supposed economic liberation of the oppressed woman with no opportunity to support herself – until the Marxist-feminist came to the rescue in the 1960s – is a hoax. Let’s dump the myth. Pre-60s divorced women were not helpless unemployables who, without an alimony check every month, or two, or three, would starve in a job market that had no place for them. The official narrative we have been duped into believing is a recent fabrication and could never have been believed by the public until the period following the ‘60s, when the fake history of the relations between the sexes was first delivered to us and then for decades pounded incessantly into our heads by the schools, the bureaucrats and the media.

2) Men’s Rights Organizations

By the mid-1920s the term “alimony racket” became commonplace throughout the United States. The scandal of alimony profiteering – which in some cases manifested itself in some serial wives racking up a string of check providers, whom they were briefly wedded to, by moving from jurisdiction to jurisdiction – gave rise to America’s earliest men’s rights organizations.

But the world’s first men’s rights organization dedicated to a comprehensive range of men’s issues with a goal of legal reform was founded in 1926 in Vienna, Bund Für Menschenrechte (“Federation for Men’s Rights”; erroneously cited in English language newspapers as Liga Für Menschenrechte, which was a different, and unrealers “human rights” organization also founded in 1926). And if you are wondering what book you might find it mentioned in, or what encyclopedia lists it, or which college professor discusses it, the answer is: none, zilch, zippo. In other words, the world’s first men’s rights organization has been erased from history as if it never existed.

The Vienna Men’s Rights federation was founded in March 1926 by Sigurd Hoeberth and lasted (under a different name, following a schism in January 1927) until a Nazi commissioner shut it down in 1938, just after Germany annexed Austria. Hoeberth’s Aequitas (as distinguished from the male-only Justitia, headed by Bund co-founder Leopold Kornblueh) staunchest supporters were women, specifically mothers of marriageable sons. The mandate: finding solutions to paternity fraud, malicious alimony extraction, alimony prison, sexual blackmail, and false accusations leading to incarceration. Hoeberth produced eight issues of the two men’s rights periodicals his group published — one of which was named “Self-Defense” — between the years 1930 and 1934.

In the United States many organizations sprang up – The Alimony Payers Protective Association (later called National Sociological League), The Alimony Club of Illinois, National Divorce Reform League, New York Alimony Club – prominent activist members being Dr. Vernon B. Cooley, Robert Ecob, Dr. Alexander Dallek, Adolph Wodiska, and Theodore Apstein. They organized to fight the alimony racket but expanded their scope to address other men’s rights problems.

While Hoeberth’s Viennese organization’s doors were still open it reached out internationally, inviting representatives from the American organizations to attend an international conference. Charlie Chaplin was one outspoken American supporter of the international organization. But all this internationalism came to an end in 1930 during the early months of the Great Depression (yet the Bunde, which split into two different organizations in 1927, lasted until 1938). In America other alimony organizations came and went through the course of the 20th century, and there was always a national alimony reform organization somewhere within the United States which could be found by any who sought it out.

3) Female Men’s Rights Activists

Women played a prominent role in the early men’s rights movement in the United States. Mrs. Bessie Cooley, a second wife of an alimony-scarred husband, was founder of what may well have been America’s first men’s rights organization, the Society of Disgruntled Alimony Payers. Mrs. Rose Fox and Mrs. Samuel Gompers joined existing organizations, the New York Alimony Club and National Divorce Reform League, respectively, and publicly pressed their case despite the fact neither was personally affected by Alimony Racket injustices. In addition, women with no formal tie to men’s rights organizations in their capacity as journalists, judges, and legislators, were prominent in the promotion of the men’s rights issues discussed by the organized groups.

Mrs. Cooley formed her organization in 1927, to promote her well-considered view that “No woman without children, who is able to support herself, is, deserving of alimony. … There are too many gold-diggers among divorced women, and half of them aren’t deserving of consideration.”

In 1932, Mrs. Gompers, and elderly widow, having heard endless stories of injustices done to men in the divorce courts, was motivated by to join up with the National Divorce Reform League, an organization of about 1,000 members, to fight, in her words, “alimony swindlers and the indefinite confinement of men in alimony jails.” She was not shy of controversy, explaining with a smile, to one reporter: “I get letters from women all over the country charging me with being a traitor to my sex. Well, I’m certainly an enemy of gold-diggers, if that’s what they mean.”

Mrs. Fox, spokeswoman of the New York Alimony Club was well aware of how crucial the involvement of women in the movement would be. In 1934 she explained to the newspapers that she “joined this club primarily because that very often a woman can attack her own sex with more effect than can a man.”

4) Heart-Balm Racket, Badger Game & Other Rackets

The early 1930s saw three female state legislators become the most important political champions of the early men’s rights movement: Roberta Nicholson (Indiana), Blanche Hower (Ohio), and Gladys Stewart (Missouri). Each succeeded in passing state laws to ban breach of promise suits, a particular type of civil suit which, since the late 1800s, had grown into an epidemic scam. By the 1930s it was universally known as the “Heart Balm Racket,” an insidious shake-down scam that men’s rights activist Theodore Apstein called “one of the most vicious and lucrative rackets which exists on the well crowded American scene.”

The standard version of the scheme went like this: the woman seduces a man into proposing marriage, coaxing from him a minimum of three letters – being the evidentiary standard required by the court – which prove his expressed desire to marry her. Once this documentary end has been achieved, she then creates some sort of upset to their romantic rapport which will cause the target to realize his chosen mate would become an unbearable wife, causing him to withdraw his offer of matrimony. Next stop for the heart-broken jilted “victim”: the lawyer’s office.

The extraction of large amounts of cash from promise-breaking fiancées was not limited to those women who were premeditated grafters, however. In 1901 an 18-year-old young man named Michael Beck who broke off his engagement with nineteen-year-old Matilda Wood; but only after a bit of time following the pair’s attempt to be married had been frustrated by a clergyman who had refused them, deeming the parties underage. When, four months later, Michael’s matrimonial ardency had cooled, the girl had her would-have-been groom arrested. He languished in jail not being able to come up with the $2,000 bail the court demanded as assurance for his return to face his ex- fiancée’s $10,000 heart balm claim against him.

Woman journalist Nicola Greeley-Smith sardonically essayed the breach of promise/heart balm phenomenon in 1911, comparing the love market to the stock market. She asked: “What is the balm that may be applied to the wounded feelings tender soul who discovers suddenly that she is not as much engaged as she thought she was? Ten thousand dollars is the current market quotation on heart balm, as disclosed by two verdicts for that amount rendered by sympathetic juries in New York this week.” Greeley-Smith’s conclusion: “Only moral from this week’s crop of breach of promise cases is that now is a good time to sue.”

In reality, the Heart Balm Racket was merely an updated variant of the older Badger Game, a shake-down racket practiced by predatory women in league with male accomplices. The Badger Game was epidemic in the 19th century, scamming “hundreds of men a month in New York City alone.” In the classic Badger Game set-up an attractive woman approaches a man of some financial means and entices him to a private place with the intent of maneuvering him into a compromising position. Afterward a male accomplice, usually a purported husband or brother, enters and threatens to expose the dupe unless the targeted victim pays him off to avoid scandal or prosecution over some trumped up charge.

Another variant on the Badger Game, reported in Time magazine in 1930 and still flourishing, is one which, as Wikipedia tells us, “involves accusations of professional misconduct. In an example of this form of the con, a ‘sick’ woman would visit a physician, describing symptoms that required her to disrobe for the examination, require the doctor to examine the genitals, or ensure similar scrutiny from the doctor. During the examination an ‘outraged husband’ or ‘outraged father’ would enter the room and accuse the doctor of deviant misconduct. The ‘sick’ woman, who is of course part of the con, takes the side of her accomplice and threatens the doctor with criminal charges or a lawsuit.”

As soon as the Heart Balm Racket industry was brought to a halt by legislative ban in 1935, long-practiced older scams came to attract the female predator. Simple false sexual harassment cons picked up steam so that petty extortions of men by histrionically “offended” women in New York City became “so widespread that according to one of Manhattan’s ‘confidential detectives,’ the average male visitor to New York, no matter how circumspect, ‘is only lucky if he doesn’t get clipped.’”

Detective Edward Z. Holmes explained how predatory women, unpleasantly restricted by the new Heart Balm laws, found entrepreneurial solutions to their dilemma:

The girls used to have to do nothing more than lead a man into writing them a letter.” Holmes said, “Then they had him. Nowadays they can’t get any place that way, so they have worked up a mess of small time traps that place a man in such an embarrassing position that he’d rather shell out a ten or twenty dollar bill than to call in the police. For instance, one of the girls’ favorite rackets is to stand on a corner and wave at a man driving an out of town car. The girl is well dressed and says that she is in a hurry and could the man give her a lift for a couple of blocks? The minute the car stops for a traffic signal she just remarks that if he doesn’t give her $10 she’ll break the car window and scream! Work? I’ll say it works!

This was 1935. Sound familiar in 2012?

Criminologist Otto Pollack has noted that “The female modus operandi suggests that women have numerous opportunities for criminal behavior which are not open to men.” (The Criminality of Women, 1978, p. 38) And this feminine modus operandi is infinitely adaptable as new circumstances arrive. As we can see from studying female serial killers, the female sociopath operates not in back-alleys but in the open, exploiting socially acceptable behavior such as engagement and marriage in the case of Heart Balm operators and Black Widows, as well as child care and health care. Unlike the typical male serial killer who seems to need to announce his existence, leaving clearly murdered corpses in his wake, the female of the species covers her tracks with ingenious inventiveness, enjoying her power in closely held privacy.

The term “Badger Game” is long obsolete, yet the scam continues to this very day in updated forms: such as shake-downs involving false sexual harassment or rape accusations. These new variants should not be regarded as innovations directly resulting from novel legal changes, but simply as recent adaptations of longstanding extortion scams which have been widely employed by female sociopaths for the past two centuries. These newer scams do not, as some argue, find their inception in recent developments in “women’s progress”, but rather represent the exploitation of a present-day loop-hole available to the same type of female opportunist, which, like her male counterpart, has been around since time immemorial.

What is, however, completely new is that chivalrous tolerance of old (on the part of all-male juries) towards female criminality has now been replaced by new opportunities for exploitation by ideologically driven governmental policies which act to create a de facto license for racketeering. And with tax-payer funded advocacy in the picture, today’s freelance blackmailers get outside support in such a degree that one might say that we now have a legalized “organized crime” sanction, much the same as we have in the banking industry following the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act.

5) Military Rackets

Wars have provided another profitable racket to the predatory woman. World War I gave rise to what in 1920 California Judge Thomas F. Graham colorfully called the “war-marriage vampires.” Judge Graham laid out the workings of the war-marriage racket to a news correspondent:

The matrimonial profiteer is a thousand times more dangerous than the economic profiteer who can more readily be reached by law. Since the war began, divorces have increased 50 per cent in California, and I am sure it is the same over the nation. Thousands of young men in the heat of war married women who lived with them perhaps two or three days, then put in claims for alimony. I know of one case in which a woman married five soldiers and for long time collected allotments from each. Many married soldiers hoping they would be killed in France so that they could collect insurance. Now that our soldiers have returned, many are finding how they have being victimized! They are too disgusted, too disillusioned to fight. The courts must do it for them.

Ironically Judge Graham had earlier in his judicial career earned a reputation for his rigid pro-alimony policy, but his “white knight” attitude could not be sustained in the face of outrageous cases involving victimized servicemen.

Across the country from Judge Graham’s San Francisco jurisdiction these “vampires” were to be found as well. Army Lieut. Thomas J. Milton was the victim of an especially damaging variant of the allotment scam. When he returned to Chicago in 1919 from active duty to rejoin his mother and his two children, a son, 10, and daughter, 6, who had lived with grandma ever since their mother had abandoned them and their father six years before, he found that the children had been taken away. It turned out while he was away that his wife had attempted to get hold of his allotment checks and on discovering she had no claim of the payments as long as she did not have custody of the children she went to court, got custody, and once Milton had returned refused to let him see them.

During World War II such alimony profiteers as these acquired the new moniker “Allotment Annies.” Acknowledged champion of the Allotment Annies was Vivian Eggers. Eggers was arrested in 1942 for marrying seven soldiers in quick succession. Two of her victims had been wedded to her within a single 24-hour period. Elvira Tayloe collected multiple allotment checks as well. She specialized in sailors. Like Elvira, Mimi Taylor had a thing for the Navy uniform as well. She scored five monthly Navy allotment checks, but unlike other “Annies,” Mimi also had a real husband too, whom she did not bother to let in on the deal – and this was her downfall.

Hundreds of Allotment Annies were convicted of preying upon servicemen during and after World War II. Convictions totaled 242 in 1946 alone. More original than most “Annies” was Gladys Goude. She married 15 times: 11 civilians, all war workers, plus four servicemen. After the FBI was tipped off by husband number 15, Gladys was sent to the pen for a two year stint and was fined $2,000.

In 1950 during the latest war mobilization the FBI announced that the Alimony Annie racket was back with a vengeance. The Korean War, having begun in June brought 47 unluckily discovered Alimony Annies to the attention of federal prosecutors.

6) Chivalry Justice

In the early part of the 20th century there was a great hue and cry for the extension of women’s rights on the part of a group of persons who are never talked about in discussions of women’s suffrage: judges, prosecutors and sheriffs. The reason? The words of Chicago prosecuting attorney, John E. W. Wayman, spoken in 1912, sum it up:

Only by making women citizens and giving them the right to vote can they be made eligible for jury service. I hope to see the day when women will serve on juries. Then only can we expect to obtain justice against criminal and murderous women in our courts.

There was a group of citizens who vehemently disagreed with this point of view and they made their opposition loud and clear. Among those who rejected the idea of women juries were Lulu Blackwell, Elizabeth Buchanan, Mrs. Harriet Burnham, Mrs. Louise Lindloff, Margaret McCabe, Mrs. Antonio Musso, and Mrs. Louise Vermilya. Each of these women was, when they expressed their views to news reporters in 1912, awaiting trial for the crime of murder.

Throughout the early part of the 20th century Chicago was notorious for the predilection of its all-male juries to acquit feminine killers despite the weight, frequently overwhelming, of the evidence. Newspaper blurb writers across the country made jokes about it, yet there were also sheaves of serious articles written expressing dismay and disgust at what was seen as the Chicago woman’s de facto “license to kill.” Headlines such as “Is It Reign Of Terror?; Husbands Fearing Death; Opinion Of Chicagoans” (1913) and “Safer For Women To Kill Than Steal In Chicago Town” (1918), stood above reports of the latest string of failed murder prosecutions of women.

This “reign of terror” inspired Chicago lawyer Agnes McHugh to tell reporters, as she was being considered – on the recommendation of a women lawyer’s association – to be appointed special prosecutor to the latest husband-killing case. Ms. McHugh announced to the press that “a man jury will not convict a woman, murderer in this county if the prosecutor is a man,” attributing the long series of failed prosecutions of women to “latent chivalry in every man,” and explaining that “the jurors see two or three big strong men sitting at the prosecutors’ table, and subconsciously feel that these fierce prosecutors are attacking the frail, pretty woman in the prisoner’s chair. Their instinct is to defend her.” The lady lawyer saw this “latent chivalry” as a temptation to the calculating woman: “I believe the leniency of juries with feminine slayers is responsible for the wave of ‘affinity crimes’ sweeping Chicago,” asserting that “the woman criminal will receive justice only when there’s a woman in court to prosecute her. We demand justice for women — not maudlin sympathy or leniency.”

When women’s suffrage was finally achieved in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th amendment, Chicago Judge Frank E. Johnston Jr., rejoiced, announcing that, “When women judge members of their own sex, it is a sure thing that no more sentimentality will affect the prisoner’s release. Women jurors will vote to convict a guilty woman every time, and we intend to make Chicago safe for husbands.”

Suffrage soon brought women into the judiciary. Early female judges were adamant in expressing their intention to overturn the injustices of the chivalry of all-male juries. Seattle Judge Rhea M. Whitehead quipped in 1921 that “A husband is going to get a square deal in my court. Too many men are convicted on sobby tales of wives!”

The same year, Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General, Mrs. Katherine Van Leuven, was sent from the state capitol to Ardmore in order to assist in the prosecution of husband-killer Clara Smith Hamon.

Again in 1921, Cleveland Judge Florence E. Allen, soon to be the first woman ever to sit on a Supreme Court bench, explained the evils of what in her words was “not born of chivalry, but what men chose to call chivalry, something totally different.” In plain terms she announced that “it is quite true that all men – lawyers, judges, prosecuting attorneys, witnesses and jurors – are inclined to be lenient with a woman on trial or in any way connected with a case. The leniency is not deliberate, but instinctive. Pretty women are all too likely to make men lose their balance.”

When asked in 1922 to answer the question, “Why do juries acquit women?” Judge Allen explained what she had learned from her experience on the bench:

Men have always sat on juries and men instinctively shrink from holding women strictly accountable for their misdeeds. Now that women sit on juries I expect the percentage of convictions in cases of women to be greater. Women are more clever than men in arousing sympathy. I had one woman, a hardened criminal, stage a terrific fainting spell in my courtroom after the jury found her guilty. It took four men to carry her to jail. She continued having these spells, so long that I had to defer pronouncing sentence. Finally I sent her word that the longer she acted so, the longer she would be in jail. Within a few moments she sent up word that, she would be good and received her sentence meekly, with no trace of feeling.

No doubt, in this period when overtly stated misandry was still relegated to ideological extremists and a few criminal sociopaths, the introduction of responsible female citizens into the jury box, as well as the growing number of female judges and prosecutors, helped to stem the tide of penalty-free murders planned by women who might previously have calculated their risks as attractively low. And female citizens of the jury did manage to put many of those who did kill behind bars.

The Chivalry problem came to the forefront in public discussions once again in 1922 when the death penalty for women was hotly debated in the public arena. The inspiration for the controversy was the Atlanta, Georgia case of husband-killer Mrs. Cora Lou Vinson. Cora Lou shot her husband to death in his drug store for daring to go against the wishes of his estranged wife in having filed to divorce.

In order to cover the national controversy over the unexpected death penalty verdict Mrs. Vinson received from the famously chivalrous Georgia men of the jury, the Associated Press sent out a journalist to gather the views of prominent feminists and suffragists, as well as a female lawyer, a policewoman, plus some male judges and sheriffs on the big question: the propriety of executing a woman. A clear majority of interviewees stood firmly behind the idea of a death penalty for women. The few exceptions were from the South: two men, a sheriff and the murderess’s lawyer and one woman, the matron of the jail housing the convicted woman. The feminists – who were what today we would call “equity feminists,” not “gender feminists” – were united in their call for equality. Mrs. Vinson herself remained insouciant, chiming in that “I’ll never hang. The sentence doesn’t worry me.” As it turned out, the murderess was correct. In the end she got a lawyer-negotiated life sentence.

Yet as time marched on, more and more women would indeed become the recipients of death sentences. A great many of them, however, were pardoned by governors. Yet some did indeed eventually find their way to the gallows or to the electric chair.

The situation in France in the 1920s was pretty much the same as pre-1920 Chicago. A woman could murder her husband with impunity. The male juries were chivalrous in the extreme. So much so, that Frenchmen in 1930 reportedly began to take a keen interest in a novel organization formed in Vienna, Sigurd Hoeberth’s Bund. The impetus for this interest? In 1929 France “47 wives were tried for murder of their husbands – None paid penalty for her crime,” according to one US newspaper article.

The female death penalty topic was still a controversial one in 1937, when Marian Mays Martin devoted her “Modern Woman” syndicated column to the subject, with the author coming down firmly on the side of equality. Now, seventeen years after the achievement of women’s suffrage, the long-maligned female-judging male jurist was still regarded by objective observers such as Ms. Martin to be an unreliable arbiter of justice:

What the fate of any of these creatures will be at the hands of a mixed or male jury leaves little room for speculation. What their fate would be at the hands of an all-woman jury leaves none at all. It would not be possible to assemble twelve women who had sufficient pity for them to spare them the death penalty. Women criminals do not like to be judged by women.

Since the early 20th century the women’s rights movement has, to put it mildly, changed. Early 20th century feminists – apart from an assortment of marginal misandrists and female supremacists – were genuine advocates for equality who, whether or not they held naïve progressive (social engineering) views, sincerely sought justice for all.

7) Female Serial Killers

It is a great irony that it is women’s studies scholars of the 1970s who have challenged earlier criminological scholarship for having, for the most part, ignored female criminals. In the orthodox victimhood theory of the present, this oversight is due, according to the “gender” experts, to – you guessed it – a motive on the part of male criminologists to subjugate women by covering-up women’s victimization by rape and domestic violence.

It is presently commonly believed that female serial killers are rare. More thoughtful observers, however, do note that the modus operandi of the vast majority of these supposedly rare criminals is radically different from the male serial killer. The females do not, with occasional exceptions, leave behind a string of obviously murdered corpses. Almost all of their victims’ deaths are either deemed “natural causes” or are carefully hidden away. Nobody looks for a serial killer unless they have a series of obvious murder victims. In short, women criminals of this category get caught – let alone get noticed as even operating – less often than do men. According to forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, it is directly due to the fact that the public believes the ubiquitous stereotype of the serial killer as white and male and a loner, that those serial killers who fall outside the description, such as women, non-whites, and sociable persons, are able to operate with great license.

The most complete list of female serial killers, published by Peter Vronsky, names 140 cases. Yet new research, conducted by the author of this article, has turned up an additional 256. Female serial killers constitutes, it turns out, a subject which has never yet been thoroughly researched.

Peter Vronsky, author of the comprehensive and wonderfully well-written 2007 book, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters, is an historian of criminal justice, and as far as you can get from being a feminist. He rips the mask off the politically correct excuse-makers who seem endlessly imaginative in their ability to perform mental gymnastics in their quest for universal female excuse-hood. Apart from the fascinating analysis of a goodly number of murderous female psychopaths, the book is worth a read if only for the thorough skewering given to infamous crackpot misandrist Phyllis Chesler.

In the early twentieth century the notion that female serial killers (though that specific term was not then used) were rare would have been thought absurd. In the year 1925, for example, there were multiple prosecutions of female serial killers running concurrently, the killers’ names and faces known to a large public.

The new research offers some fresh data. The category “Black Widows,” women who have murdered two or more husbands (in many cases with non-spouse victims in addition), now numbers eighty, a great many never listed before as serial killers. While the list of those who have sent four or more husbands to their graves numbers, at the moment, seventeen.

A large number, scores, of previously unlisted child care providers who were serial child-murders includes such notables as the teenaged German Ida Schnell, who was caught in 1906 after killing babies by sticking hair-pins into their skulls; the Russian philanthropist Madame Kusnezowa, who in 1913 was charged with having murdering 1,012 children by poison; American child care provider Elizabeth Ashmead (early 1900s), who murdered hundreds, Helen Geisen-Volk (1920s), German immigrant to New York and former wartime Red Cross nurse, killer of an estimated fifty-three infants and also a child-torturer; and Georgia Tann (1930s-1950), a sexually perverted child molester and torturer, baby-seller, and kidnapper, who was a nationally recognized expert on child rearing at the same time as she acted as death maven responsible for baby deaths likely numbering in the thousands.

A large number of forgotten husband-killing syndicates turned up in the new research. From the 1880s through the late 1930s, English language newspapers would frequently carry reports on these murders, mostly taking place in eastern Europe, with headlines such as “Husband Poisoning by Wholesale” (1882), “Ten Husband Poisoners” (1890), “A New Business; Husband Poisoning on the Scale of a Commercial Enterprise” (1891), “Killing Off Husbands” (1895), “Epidemic of Poisoning in Hungary; Eighteen Men Killed” (1901), “Women Formed Club to Murder Husbands” (1903), “Woman Kills 300 At Wives’ Behest” (1909), “Exterminating Husbands” (1911), “Wanted to Be Widows So They Hanged Their Husbands” (1933), “Used Fly Paper to Kill Husbands” (1935), “How Wives Gained Power by Mass Murder of Husbands” (1937). Yet another of these husband-killing clubs, located in Belgrade Yugoslavia, even created an officially registered organization, called the Lucretia Club. In 1926 five of the club women were arrested and charged as its ringleaders.

Another little known fact is that some female serial killers specialize in victimizing females. The previously unlisted Leopoldine Kasparek, an Austrian, convicted in 1917, strangled four elderly women and assaulted the necks of a great many more. Russian Darya Saltykova tortured and murdered 138 young women until her perverse career ended in 1801. Greek Miriam Soulakiotis tortured and murdered 177 young women before her arrest in 1950. Mexican Juana Barraza murdered older women, an estimated 49 of them. These three have appeared on many serial killer lists, but for some reason they seem to never come up in discussions of “serial killers and gender.” And there are many, many other sadistic female serial killer of females whose stories are known but not well-enough known or are entirely obscured by time and scholars’ lack of interest – before now.

8) Domestic Violence Against Women

In 1986 Newsweek magazine published a report on domestic violence including this claim:

The policy of benign neglect toward domestic violence was tolerated until feminists began focusing attention on the issue of spouse abuse a decade ago and insisted that wife beaters be treated like other violent criminals. The nation’s police have finally begun to take domestic violence seriously.” (“Attitudes change toward domestic violence – Newsweek, March 3, 1986, p. 58)

The claim is a lie. Here we are, two and-a-half decades later, and the hoax – the claim that domestic violence was tolerated by society and law before the 1960s feminists stepped in to save the day – still continues. The truth is that domestic violence against women has, in the United States – as proven by mountain range of evidence, has always been taken seriously by police and the courts and, more importantly, by the communities in which such crimes occurred. If there is any exception to law enforcement intolerance of domestic violence against women in the American past it would likely have been a new development as a result of federal bureaucratization due to the War on Drugs and the beginnings of the militarization and the cumbersome bureaucratization of local police, combined, perhaps, with the overall permissiveness of the counterculture of the 1960s.

Yet nobody before the 1960s would have believed the false claim that is current today. For well over a century preceding the 1960s newspapers regularly reported arrests of wife beaters and, up until the mid-1900s, reported the various punishment for the crime: chain gangs, jail sentences, public shaming, flogging and other forms of corporal punishment, often illustrating the malefactors’ just desserts with dramatic drawings or photos.

Currently the lie that domestic violence against women was unpunished by the legal system in the past is often presented in an elaborated form with the added fraudulent claim that society at large found domestic violence tolerable and therefore law enforcement and the courts, by neglecting domestic violence (which they in fact did not), were merely reflecting the purported widespread acceptance by the population as a whole.

The fact is, that in the pre-’60s era, not only was wife-beating not seen as acceptable by the public at large, but public response this crime was frequently extremely harsh and frequently citizens did not bother with waiting for their employees, the public servants in law enforcement, to deal with matters. They could handle things just fine on their own. Old newspaper reports show wife-beaters being subjected to tarring-and-feathering, beatings, community banishment, and in some of the more egregious repeat-offender cases, even lynching.

Some examples:

On January 27, 1853, The Jeffersonian Republican, the newspaper of Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania, reported the death of New York City wife-beater, Joseph Hines, who had been thrashed by three men who, when passing by the house of the perpetrator and hearing the children’s screams, seized him and gave him a severe thrashing, so severe that he died two days later. The writer summed up the prevailing attitude of the day concerning domestic violence against women thusly: “It is a pity that every vile rascal who beats his wife could not be served in the same manner.”

In 1885 Pittsburg a group of gentlemen formed a society to collect funds for the prosecution of wife-beaters.

On March 23, 1914, in the small town of Malvern, Iowa, “a delegation of citizens consisting of a minister, church members and business men” paid a visit to a chronic wife-beater to demand he leave town if he cared for his health. He took the advice and vamoosed.

The issue of domestic violence against women was a major topic of public discussion which raged from the mid-1880s into the mid-20th century, as is attested by the large number of newspaper articles chronicling the heated public debate on the problem and its appropriate solution. From the start, the employment of the whipping post was central to the debate. Illustrations dating back to 1885 which show the flogging of wife-beaters provide dramatic evidence of the seriousness of the discussion. The flogging practice’s most notable proponent was Theodore Roosevelt, who promoted its use beginning in 1899, while governor of New York and continued to do so after he became president.

A 2006 book, Donald G. Dutton’s Rethinking Domestic Violence, discusses the heated controversy over the whipping post as punishment for wife-beaters, yet his assertion that flogging bills “were supported by suffragist leaders” is misleading. The leaders did indeed take up President Roosevelt’s whipping post proposal, yet when voted upon during the 1905 National American Suffragist Association convention they were rejected. Likewise, in 1911 and 1913 women’s rights groups (District of Columbia and California respectively) publicly condemned the punishment.

Sentences of corporal punishment for domestic violence offenses eventually became obsolete. Maryland was the last hold-out. In 1938 the Baltimore flogging of Clyde Miller was displayed in photographs for the world to see, but by that time such an event was a rare one. One of the final instances of flogging of a wife beater was that of Lloyd Busching in 1945, again in Maryland, which provided the inspiration for an anti-domestic violence comic book.

9) Ransom Child Kidnapping & Parental Kidnapping

In 1997 a book about child kidnapping in America was published by UC Berkeley professor Paula S. Fass, regarded as the national authority on the history of childhood. The book is cleverly constructed so as to hide the fact that it is in reality a tendentious piece of propaganda designed to create a historical narrative that will serve as the foundation for collectivist childrearing protocols instituted by the United Nations (under UNESCO). The underling thesis of the book is that parents are too protective of their children and they must be coaxed to change their outdated unprogressive attitudes so that they will allow “society” to have more and more authority over their offspring. Professor Fass, in order to “prove” the error of normal protective parental mores, goes about creating a false narrative through the deployment of carefully selected, but unrepresentative, examples, and the strategic of omitting politically incorrect facts.

A sampling of falsehoods and omissions includes:

[unordered_list style=”bullet”]

Leading the reader to believe that children were not kidnapped by Gypsies, when in fact they frequently were, a falsehood in accordance with politically correct doctrine;

Claiming parents had no good reason to worry about child kidnapping before 1874, when a famous case was widely publicized causing the public, according to Fass, to become exaggeratedly protective;

Failing to include ransom child kidnapping gangs operating as early as 1839;

Failing to include the politically incorrect fact that the first, and widely publicized ransom child kidnapping occurred in 1819, and was committed by a female kidnapper, as well as generally obfuscating the issue of female kidnappers in general, and omitting notable cases of female kidnappers dating back to the first decade of the 1800s;

Claiming, despite overwhelming and easily accessible evidence to the contrary, that parental kidnapping was not seen as a serious social problem in the early 1900s, a deception she deploys as a tactic for bolstering her false media-created-hysteria thesis;[/unordered_list]

Radical underplaying of the participation of females in such criminal activities, by mentioning few female cases, by making deceptive generalizations, and by selecting those few female kidnappers mentioned in order to ensure that the sample would make the female kidnapper appear both marginal and limited to a narrow range of types: unsympathetic society queens and basket-case neurotics.

On publication in 1997 the book got numerous academic reviews and not a single review questioned a single claim of “fact,” not even the most improbable of them, included in it. It can reasonably be said that Fass’s fake history is now accepted as factual and no one else in academia is inclined to challenge its canonical status by publishing the facts which contradict it. The book’s claims, thus, are currently treated as facts by the readers it was intended for: bureaucratic policy-makers and the academic thought-shapers of those who are to implement policy.

Nine years following this tract’s publication, in 2006, Fass took part in a conference at the New School for Social Research in New York, an institution founded expressly for the purpose of promoting social engineering, entitled “Parenting – Why Are We Afraid to Let Go?” The conference aimed to discover means by which to assist policy-makers in finding ways to creatively coax the public into accepting increasing governmental interference with their parental rights.

10) Parental Alienation

One of most evil hoaxes ever perpetrated by professional misandrists is that surrounding the phenomenon which we today call “parental alienation.” The claim is that it is a recently identified (and nonexistent) phenomenon, that the term and its definition are primarily meant to describe female parental behavior, and that the main motive for those who promote awareness of parental alienation is their desire to assist fathers in gaining freedom either to indulge in sexual perversions with their own children or to gain access to their exes in order to commit abuses against them.

In actuality, parental alienation, often called in the past “poisoning the child’s mind” or “alienating the child’s affections,” has been common in divorce court cases since the early 19th century. Historical records reveal that fathers have indeed been alienators, were accused of such behavior by their wives and further, that women have been accused of being alienators by female relatives. Two well-documented early 19th century London cases, Westmeath v Westmeath (1820) and Ball v Ball (1827) involved accusations of parental alienation. In the former, the father was accused, in the latter cross-accusations of alienation were made. The most eloquent description of parental alienation ever published is the 1980 book, Somewhere Child, by Bonnie Lee Black is a brilliantly written, excruciating account of a viciously alienating father – and parental kidnapper – and the havoc he wreaked.

In 1939, the most widely-read advice columnist in the English-speaking world, Dorothy Dix, discussed the widespread tendency of many mothers to leave their husbands and then callously destroy their children’s relationships with their father. Dix described some of the gate-keeping tactics and condemned them as criminal:

In all the range of crime there is none blacker or cruder than separating a father from his children and yet women do it every day without a pang of compunction because they consider that they have a monopoly of their children. They are not even fair about it because they know the father can’t fight for his children for he has no home in which to keep them, nobody to take care of them.

This type of obsessive “monopoly” is vividly represented in two early-1950s cases which reveal the dynamics of parental alienation perpetuated by a female alienator against an alienated mother and her daughter: the Star Schneider (10-years-old) and Marlene Matchan (9-years-old) cases. In both instances the court identified the alienation and made a custody decision based on a strategy to end the mind-poisoning. Newspaper photos from both cases give us an unsettling glimpse of the misery of the child victims.

In the Schneider court case the alienated parent, Ethel Martin (formerly Schneider) disclosed that she herself had been an alienated child, estranged from her alienated father through the devices of her own mother, the grandmother of now alienated little Starr. “After my father and mother were divorced,” Mrs. Martin testified, “my mother turned me against my father. I hated my father while I was a little girl.”

In sum, the historical record shows that child custody-related “mind-poisoning,” or “parental alienation,” is not sex-specific nor is it a novel concept invented in the 1980s by the man who coined the modern term.

11) The Disengaged Father

Historian Robert L. Griswold’s book, Fatherhood in America: A History, came out in 1993. It’s a miserable, politically correct tract; a narrative crippled by the social constructionist fallacies it embraces. The author had previously distinguished himself for having bought into the idiotic theory that, because some early American court archives of divorce records from the 17th century contained no documents referring to child custody it is reasonable to conclude that parents at that time did not care about their kids. Slavishly following the social constructionist dogma, Griswold’s Fatherhood ludicrously states, as if it were a plain and proven fact, that “gender is historically and socially constructed.” He develops a picture in which fathers – like all other humans, according to constructionist theory – have no personal agency or character as individuals but rather are no better than biological ciphers responding much as a group of puppets would, moving in lockstep to whatever the historical conditions demand – yet with the increasing help of experts, marching along the inevitable straight-line historical continuum of social “progress.”

In discussing the question of whether century fathers in the late 19th century took significant interest in their children, Griswold quotes from some letters found in an archive, pointing out two letters from fathers, a Mr. Kendall and a Mr. Laflin, showing that they were intimately engaged parents. But Griswold finds it necessary to feed the evidence through his constructionist meat-grinder so that it will conform to his prefabricated narrative.

Men like Kendall and Laflin were not alone. They represented a style of fatherhood congruent with long-developing attitudes about children and in line with the hopes of domestic moralists that men commit emotional energy to their wives and children. But such emotional bonds were difficult to establish and likely uncommon.(p. 15)

With respect to father-daughter relationships he makes the constructionist claim, without bothering to offer any supporting evidence, that “Fathers’ frequent absences from home coupled with their daughters’ immersion in a female world militated against deep father-daughter relationships.” (p. 17)

Sadly, because most of the public has been for decades sautéed in this kind of philosophy – holding that there is not essential human character, so personal agency, that society “evolves” rather than merely changes – many have fallen under the spell of the specious premise that parent-child bonds are a “social construction” rather than an essential part of the natural normal human psyche.

12) Misandric Fixation

What is misandric fixation? It is the obsession with the eradication of maleness.

Contrary to what we might nowadays suppose to be the case, misandric fixation is not necessarily the result of subjection to ideological indoctrination. Historical cases reveal that the condition can take hold without the subject having been influenced by either Marxist or eugenics ideologies. Indoctrination can, obviously, exacerbate certain vulnerabilities in the subject which were pre-existent, yet indoctrination is not a necessary prerequisite to the condition. Several notable cases, hitherto completely overlooked by historians, which date from the late-19th to mid-20th century, offer insight into the mindset of women subjected to misandric fixation.

Marie Irrgang, who died in 1901, was leader of an Austrian misandric organization called Jungfrau Verein (Virgin’s Association). Fraulein Irrgang called herself the “champion man hater of the world.” She not only detested men, but also all masculine beings regardless of species. At Irrgang’s death in 1901, her followers assiduously attempted to obey their champion’s willed dictates by the letter, as they organized her funeral. Males, it goes without saying, were forbidden to be present. But the collective of man-haters discovered to their dismay that they could not locate a woman with strength enough to carry their club’s banner in the procession, so they reluctantly hired the services of a member of the detested sex in order that their organizational symbol of hate could proudly wave.

This hatred of all male living things was shared by the American misandrist, Sarah Hunt, born circa 1834. After running off her husband and sons (but not her daughter) in 1889, Mrs. Hunt figured out how to operate her farm without the presence of a single male animal.

Inveterate man-hater Harriet Evans, born circa 1841 in England, spent most of her life under the long reign of Queen Victoria. She stayed indoors with the blinds drawn to avoid the male-infested outdoors. But once Victoria’s son, King Edward VII, inherited the throne, Miss Evans had to make special arrangements with the postal service – in order to avoid coming into contact with stamps bearing the image of a man; when she had occasion to handle paper money bearing the male monarch’s image it was quickly tossed into the fire. 1878 saw the beginning of the vengeful career of the obsessive Scotswoman Sarah Hyslop who, having been jilted by her fiancé, devoted her life to a militant campaign of jilting a long series of deceived fiancées at the altar in order to exact revenge on the entire sex. She chalked up 53 victims by the time of her death in 1939.

American bachelorette Miss Louisa Strittmater, who died in 1944, called men “the inveterate enemies of women.” It was revealed in her will that she believed that “men some day would revert to apes.” She “looked forward hopefully to the day when science would enable women to bear children without the aid of men.” Once woman acquired this power she wanted “all male children killed at birth.” She willed her money to the National Women’s Party for the Advancement of Feminism.

Viktoria Rieger, known in Hungary’s Tisza valley by the nickname Smoking Peter – which she earned because she, whom everyone thought to be a he, “was never seen without a pipe in his mouth” – was one of scores of women who serially murdered husbands of others as a “service” to wives, was not, like most of the Hungarian female serial killers, merely a greedy opportunist. She did not always profit from the murders she committed. Her method was unusual. Instead of providing poison to the wife who hankered after a graveyard divorce as did most of her sisters in crime, she did the dirty work herself. The wife would coax the victim to the barn where Viktoria would conk him over the head and then hang the unconscious husband employing a noose prepared in advance. In 1933 following a long string of such “suicides,” the murderess was finally exposed and arrested. But when apprehended by police “Smoking Peter” was thought to be a man. Prison staff discovered the truth and later doctors determined she suffered from a hormonal imbalance caused by a glandular disorder. Viktoria Rieger was an avowed man-hater. Investigators believed that Viktoria, who had escaped from an unhappy marriage 22 years earlier, had a “fixed idea that all wives were abused and therefore it would be a sort of noble crusade to go around liberating as many wives as she could from the misfortune of having a husband.”

So we see that the infamous Valerie Solanas, who was able to publish her eugenic dreams of a misandric final solution for the world, was not as unusual as she might appear. Misandric fixation, it seems, deserves looking into.

13) Origins of the word “misandry”

Currently circulating as a “meme” on the internet is a false claim concerning the origin of the word “misandry,” holding that the word is of recent origin and that it was concocted by post-1960s men’s rights activists. One misandrist blogger actually barks that “misandry does not exist. It’s a modern made up word. So stop f****ing using it.” That none of the internet dictionaries currently offer accurate dates of origin only encourages the proliferation of the falsehood. Both Oxford and Miriam-Webster ascribe “misandry” a mid-1940s date of earliest use.

The fact is that the words “misandry,” “misandrist,” “misandric,” and “misandrous” appeared in the English language in the nineteenth century, and were employed not just by males. The German word with the same meaning “Misandrie,” appears as early as 1803 (note that German has a different word, Menschenhassen, for what we term “misanthropy,”). The new research offering these early citations has now been made available online, yet we can expect the inaccurate claims to continue to flood forth from those devoted to stamping out the “thought crime” – discussing misandry.

Final thoughts

A sentence from a recent chat-room thread appeared in which the writer makes a sincere effort to defend the idea that misandry exists: “Men have not been subjected to violence and oppression by women. That’s not the debate.” This unfortunately utterly uninformed claim represents precisely the sort of dilemma – due to ignorance of the past – that inspired the composition of the present article. The reality is that we cannot hope to succeed in countering false premises regarding the present as long as we uncritically accept false premises about the past.

It is a fact that all totalitarian systems – without exception – employ false history as a major strategic weapon which, when deployed, succeeds in sowing confusion and weakness, undermining the clarity of understanding that is prerequisite in order for the target population to organize itself to fight back effectively.

Our bureaucracy-plagued world, of course, contains enough well-paid Marxists and governmental control-freaks to allow for every historical fact disclosed in this article to be, in short order, thoroughly subjected to a “critical theory” treatment which, by ignoring facts and substituting “discourse,” would explain away each and every piece of evidence as yet another exemplification of the “oppression” that comes from living, as the fashionable saying goes, “in patriarchal societies.” Consequently it is up to the sane among us to make sure that the facts contained in this article get out to the public and, most importantly, get out to the boys and girls who are at this very moment being marched by smug social engineers into the ravenous jaws of that monstrous and all-consuming politically correct control-matrix which we tend to euphemistically call “contemporary culture.”

[quote]A country without a memory is a country of madmen. – George Santayana[/quote]

NOTES (count: 126):

1) Judge Harry A. Lewis, “Under our modern standards …”;Roy J. Gibbons, “Chicago Judge Denounces Childless Wives Who Demand Alimony With Divorces,” syndicated (NEA), Manitowoc Herald-News (Wi.), Dec. 24, 1925, p. 3. ] http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/08/ludge-lewis-vs-alimony-racket-1925.html

2) Judge Selah B. Strong, “The whole business of alimony …”; “American Wives Biggest Grafters Says Judge Strong of New York,” syndicated, Laredo Times (Tx.), Apr. 9, 1926, p. 2. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/08/judge-astrong-vs-alimony-racket-new.html

3) Doris Blake, “parasitic class.” Doris Blake, “Ban on Alimony for Childless Wife is Approved,” Chicago Daily Tribune (Il.), Oct. 6, 1925, p. 21. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=parasitic+class

4) Faith Baldwin, “The rising tide of divorce …”; Genn, Lillian G., “Marriage for Alimony Only a Public Menace Says Faith Baldwin,” syndicated (Public Register), Modesto Bee (Ca.), Sep. 25, 1928. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/08/marriage-for-alimony-only-1928.html

5) Dr. S. L. Katzoff, “alimony in America …”; “Alimony Business Says – In United States Billion Dollars A Year Paid Out In Alimony. But Only Fraction Of It Justifiable, Says Expert.” Syndicated (AP), Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune (Wi.), Apr. 17, 1939, p. 10. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=katzoff

6) Helen Worden Erskine offered a 1954 assessment: “Will we ever have a new Lincoln …”; Erskine, Helen Worden (“The World Goes By” column), “Asserts Women Should End ‘Racket’ of Alimony,” syndicated, Waterloo Daily Courier (Io.), Feb. 12, 1954, p. 4. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/08/alimony-slavery-in-1954.html

[Elisabeth Malleier, “Der ‘Bund für Männerrechte’. Die Bewegung der ‘Männerrechtler’ im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit”. Wiener Geschichtsblätter 58 (3). Wein 1998: 208–233]. 7) Bund für Männerrechte (“Federation for Men’s Rights”; erroneously called in English language sources, Liga Für Menschenrechte (League for Men’s Rights). An overview of the Bund, reproducing English language sources and supplying corrections and additional information from German language sources appears online in The Unknown History of Misandry. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/07/worlds-first-mens-rights-organization.html There is an excellent German language dissertation on Bund für Männerrechte from 2009: [Kerstin Christin Wrussnig, “Wollen Sie ein Mann sein oder ein Weiberknecht?“ Zur Männerrechtsbewegung in Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit, Diplomarbeit (Mag. phil), Wien, 2009]; a brief article from 1998, also in German on the organization is:

8) A currently operating organization, Österreichische Liga für Menschenrechte exists. Their website states it was founded in 1926 (in association with an international organization), disbanded in 1934, and revived in 1946 – the same year as Hoeberth’s Liga für Menschenrechte was founded – with a mission to promote human rights, with a specific interest in combating anti-semitism. English language newspapers confused the two organizations and when a German name for the group was given it was either the incorrect Liga (never “Bund” or “Bund für Männerrechte” ) or, after the January 1927, the correct (but abbreviated) names Aequitas (“Equitas“) and Justitia.

9) “… lasted until October 1930.”; “World League for Rights of Men Dies; Women’s Shoe Store in Headquarters,” syndicated, The Tipton Daily Tribune (In.), Oct. 7, 1930, p. 1. (same link)

10) The Alimony Payers Protective Association (later called National Sociological League); “Alimony Payers to Fight for Their Rights,” Anonymous, syndicated (Johnsons Features), Odgen Standard Examiner (Ut.), May 22, 1927, magazine section, p. 1. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/07/alimony-racket-organized-resistance.html

11) Society of Disgruntled Alimony Payers; Gibbons, Roy J., “Militant Wife Launches War Against Alimony in Chicago,” syndicated (NEA), Freeport Journal-Standard (Il.), Jul. 8, 1927, p. 13. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=Disgruntled+Alimony+Payers

12) National Divorce Reform League, founded 1932; A different organization was founded in 1880 in Boston as The New England Divorce Reform League and later expanded into “The National Divorce Reform League.” Julia Blanshard, “Slower Marriages, Speedier Divorces! – That’s The Aim of Group Seeking Uniform U. S. Divorce Laws,” syndicated (NEA), The Star Journal (Sandusky, Oh.), Feb. 13, 1933, p. 2.

13) New York Alimony Club; Church, Douglas, “Open New War on the Alimony Racket: Woman Joins Club and Will Lead Fight for Change in Laws Which Now Send Men to Jail Because They Cannot Pay Allowances to Separated Wives,” Lincoln Star (Ne.), May 6, 1934, magazine section.

14) Dr. Vernon B. Cooley, Chicago Alimony Club, new name for “Society of Disgruntled Alimony Payers”; Alimony Payers Band to Blight ‘Gold Digging,’” syndicated (AP), Pampa Daily News (Tx.), Aug. 20, 1927, p. 12. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/08/dr-vernon-p-cooley-early-anti-misandry.html

15) Robert Ecob, The Alimony Payers Protective Association; “Alimony Payers to Fight for Their Rights,” Anonymous, syndicated (Johnsons Features), Odgen Standard Examiner (Ut.), May 22, 1927, magazine section, p. 1. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/07/alimony-racket-organized-resistance.html

16) Dr. Alexander Dallek, National Sociological league; Dexter H., Teed “Ex-Husbands Start Hot Fight on Alimony Racket; Win First Victory – Depression Cuts Salaries and Ex-Wives Suffer,” syndicated (AP & NEA), The Capital Times (Madison, Wi.), Sep. 15, 1931, p. 2.

17) Adolph Wodiska, Alimony Club of New York;“Coast-to-Coast Laughs and Griefs of the Alimony Clubbers,” (King Features Syndicate), Hamilton Evening Journal Magazine Section (Oh.), Jan. 9, 1932, Magazine section, p.1.

18) Theodore Apstein, National Divorce Reform League; Julia Blanshard, “Slower Marriages, Speedier Divorces! – That’s The Aim of Group Seeking Uniform U. S. Divorce Laws,” syndicated (NEA), The Star Journal (Sandusky, Oh.), Feb. 13, 1933, p. 2.

19) Justitia (Justitia Verein für Männer und Familienrecht, led by Leopold Kornblueh), ceased in 1937; Aequitas (Aequitas Weltbund für Männerrechte) continued after Hoeberth’s death in 1938, but when the Germany annexed Austria (Mar. 12, 1938), a Nazi Commissioner shut Aequitas down. American newspaper sources ignored the organizations after 1930.

20) Mrs. Cooley “No woman without children ..”; “Militant Wife Launches War Against Alimony in Chicago,” syndicated (NEA), Freeport Journal-Standard (Il.), Jul. 8, 1927, p. 13.

21) Mrs. Gompers, “alimony swindlers …”; “She is a Foe of the Gold-Diggers – Samuel Gompers’ Widow Turns from a Life Of Domesticity To Champion Divorce Reform,” syndicated (NEA), Jul. 21, 1924, Clubs & Parties section, p. 1. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=gompers

22) Mrs. Rose Fox, “joined this club …”; Church, Douglas, “Open New War on the Alimony Racket: Woman Joins Club and Will Lead Fight for Change in Laws Which Now Send Men to Jail Because They Cannot Pay Allowances to Separated Wives,” Lincoln Star (Ne.), May 6, 1934, magazine section.

23) Roberta Nicholson (Indiana); “Foe of Heart Balm to Make U. S. Fight – Seeks Law In Each State To Protect – Indiana ‘Lady Legislator’ to Extend Her War on ‘Gold Diggers.’ syndicated (Central Press), Mansfield News-Journal (Oh.), Mar. 22, 1935, p. 4. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=Roberta+Nicholson

24) Blanche Hower (Ohio); “Pushes Balm Bill,” syndicated (AP / CP), The Evening Independent (Massilon, Oh.), Feb. 8, 1935, p. 1. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/07/anti-misandry-politician-mrs-blanche.html

25) Gladys Stewart (Missouri); James E. Helbert, “Bill Designed To Protect Men In Missouri Causes Furor Lone Female Legislator Payment Banned Unless Couple Had Been Married Five Years,” syndicated (UP), The Lima News (Oh.), Mar. 18, 1937, p. 10 http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=Gladys+Stewart+

26) Theodore Apstein called “one of the most vicious …”; Theodore E. Apstein, “Legal Blows Struck at Long-Flourishing Heart Balm Racket,” syndicated (NEA), The Daily Times-News (Burlington, N. C.), Apr. 17, 1935, p. 7. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/07/heart-balm-racket-1935.html

27) Michael Beck;“Sends Boy Lover To Jail. – Miss Wood, 20, Wants $10,000 Heart Balm from Beck, 19.” The World (New York, N.Y.), Oct. 17, 1902, p. 14. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=Michael+Beck

28) “What is the balm …”; Nicola Greeley-Smith, “Rising Market in Balm for Jilted Girls; $10,000 Current Quotation for the Week,” The World ( New York, N.Y.), Mar. 4, 1911, p. 3. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/search?q=Nicola+Greeley-Smith

29) “hundreds of men a month …”; blog National Night Stick, “The Badger Game.” http://snakeoilgraphics.com/NightStick/post/The-Badger-Game.aspx

30) “Badgered Doctors,” Time magazine, Aug. 25, 1930; reference in Wikipedia “Badger Game” page

31) “involves accusations …”; Wikipedia “Badger Game” page.

32) Detective Edward Z. Holmes, “The girls used …”; Sherman Miller, “Broadway Girls Evolve New Kind of ‘Clip’ Schemes – ‘Gold Diggers’ Still Prosper Despite Ban of Heart Balm Threats,” syndicated (AP), The Salt Lake Tribune (Ut.), Dec 15, 1935, p. D 11. http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-york-ap-halcyon-days-of-heart-balm.html

33) Otto Pollack, The Criminality of Women, 1978, Greenwold Press, Indiana University, Bloomington (first edition: University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1950), p. 38.

34) Judge Thomas F. Graham “The matrimonial profiteer”; Paul N. Wilson, “’Halt War-Marriage Vampire!’ – Noted Judge Fights Alimony Drive On Veterans,” syndicated (NEA), Oct. 19, 1920, p. 3 http://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/09/victimizing-veterans-alimony-racket-in.html

35) Judge Thomas F. Graham, “pro-alimony policy”; [“Two Wives Unnecessary Luxury, Court Rules. Judge Refuses to Reduce Alimony After Man Remarries.” Philadelphia Inquirer (Pa.), May 21 1916, p. ?] (same link)