Joan Smith

In that year a ruling by a seventeenth-century judge, Sir Matthew Hale,

A husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife,

they agreed that Hale’s ruling was an ‘anachronistic and offensive’ fiction

which ‘insists that male sexuality is actively antagonistic to women’

We may wish that they endure many hours of brow-beating perplexity in conducting this principle through the courts.1

not so much in the evidence which was given as in the commentaries upon the case’.

indecent boasting about the pleasures they were missing.

but they do not take account of the deeply altered state of affairs at work for men and women: they do not allow for the truth that all places of work which include men and women in roughly equal numbers are hectic cockpits of sexual interest, flirtation, intrigue and scheming, in which women are just as likely

These admonitions seem to be inherently decent and incontestable; but they do not take account of the deeply altered state of affairs at work for men and women: they do not allow for the truth that all places of work which include men and women in roughly equal numbers are hectic cockpits of sexual interest, flirtation, intrigue and scheming, in which women are just as likely as men to make advances and, if they are spurned, to be spiteful in revenge.

Thomas hearings in the ultraconservative Sunday Telegraph, bemoaned the fact that she had not been sexually harassed at work and commended women who use their ‘sex appeal’ to ‘get on in life’