Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

further six times: it is as though Kipling was doing everything possible to press home his point: that a woman is not only capable of committing murder, but might actually do so, if she felt in some way threatened.
    All this is speculative, of course, and I was anxious to avoid chasing shadows and seeing evidence that was, in fact, no more than mere coincidence. And there I would have left it – except for one strange, almost insignificant, anomaly that appears in the last two lines of the ninth verse. It reads:
    And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.
     
    Lizzie Williams was certainly lacking both a baby (Babe) and her husband (Man). She was also infertile; but surely the word ‘baron’, written within brackets, appears to have been misspelt. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the word is derived from the Anglo-French barain , meaning ‘infertile land’, though alternatively, it might be of Celtic origin. A quick check in the Oxford English Dictionary confirms that the simile for ‘infertility’ has never, at any time, been spelt ‘baron’, but always ‘barren’. So how could Rudyard Kipling, an intelligent man and future Nobel laureate for literature have made such an obvious mistake?
    The answer is that he didn’t. Kipling has given the word a double meaning: ‘baron’ meaning ‘barren’, for those who are satisfied that it describes infertility and are prepared to ignore the error for the sake of artistic licence; and for others, prepared to accept its literal meaning, it describes a title of nobility. In 1894, a baronetcy was conferred on Sir John Williams by Queen Victoria; so the ‘baron’ in the poem might have referred to him. Could it therefore be that Kipling believed Lady Williams to be the murderer, and was it possible that she, and not, as is generally believed, the troublesome suffragists of the day, had provided the inspiration for one of his most famous poems?
    The Female of the Species
Rudyard Kipling
1911
     
    When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
’Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the other’s tale –
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
     
    Man, a bear in most relations – worm and savage otherwise, –
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.
     
    Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger – Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue – to the scandal of The Sex!
     
    But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
     
    She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity – must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions – not in these her honour dwells.
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.
     
    She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.
     
    She is wedded to convictions – in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies! –
He will meet no suave