Gynecocracy

CHAPTER 5

It was a long time after that I heard what had become of Maud.

In the first place for six weeks she was degraded to the rank of a scullery maid. All her own clothes were taken away and locked up. She was dressed in the short frocks and the coarse and common underclothing of a rude little village maiden. She was not permitted-great girl of twenty though she was-to wear drawers. In these short garments she was compelled to wash and scrub floors, dust the staircase, mount steps, and clean windows and pictures.

For the first ten days she was whipped, birched, three times each day. For rebellion or slovenliness she received smacks with the tawse, the fringed edge of which she hated and dreaded more than the birch.

She was sometimes dressed in a very short chemise; hung by the wrists to a bedpost, her feet only just touching the ground; or made to stand in the stocks in a stiff backboard, the collar of which was raised extravagantly high for long periods.

She was, at other times, fastened naked across the bed, well whipped, and left so for several hours. Every Tuesday and Friday she had to wear, during the morning, a nettle petticoat, and in the afternoon bunches of nettles were hung underneath her clothes.

Sometimes she was kept quite naked for several days so that she had the utmost humiliation to go through, and, in addition, she was repeatedly whipped in front.

It was many years later when I learned all this from Maud's own lips in Beatrice's presence; and her punishment proved to be a very efficient mortification of whatever pruriency she possessed.

This parenthetical notice of her fate seems to be needed here; her own description of her discipline must be referred to for an adequate idea of her punishment and of its subjective results.