Peter Mendes [Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English 1800-1939. A Bibliographical Study  (Aldershot, Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1993)] has identified four separate printings of Gynecocracy, although all have 1893 on the title page:
84-A (1893), 84-B (c.1896-1897), 84-C (c.1905) and 84-D (c. 1912). These four copies are archived as follows:

1) The British Library (London)

The British Library has copies of 84-A without Vol. II (P.C. 31.k.20) and 84-B bound in one volume (P.C. 17.b.42).

2) The Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris)

The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris has copies of 84-B (Enfer 1342) and 84-C without Vol. I (Enfer 819-820) [Mendes: op. cit. pp. 246-50].

3) Private Collection

These notes and extracts are based on my own notes on 84-B, made in The British Museum many years ago, and on a private copy of 84-D. Grove Press, Inc., New York published a hardback edition in one volume in 1971.

Mendes has given full details of the printing, layout, chapter headings etc. but I can add that there are numerous minor alterations or corrections in the text between D and B, and that Grove Press, while seeming to follow D, made still further alterations, one of which is particularly wrong. In chapter 3 Maud tells Julian: “You will back petticoats, however. You will find you have to submit to them". Grove has replaced “back” with “like", obviously not understanding the sense of “back", which here I think means put up with something, as it were, on your back.

Mendes quotes from a prospectus of 1896 about the book, which confirms that it was appreciated as new at the time:
 
“Gynecocracy” is not a common smutty little pamphlet devoted to the vulgar description, in coarse ungrammatical language, of common give-and-take love, but it is entirely based on a new idea, a fresh conception relating to a state of society that we may have heard about, talked about and whispered about; but we have never yet had this peculiar, pleasing, tantalising, salacious system of trained lubricity exposed before in print.

For many it will be a relaxation. The. famous Marquis de Sade found pleasure in humiliating female victims. Can it be possible that there are dainty, high-bred ladies who, gaily turning Nature's laws upside down, find sweet solace in the sufferings of a sweet youth, who becomes their victim, and is forced to be their toy, sometimes an unwilling one, subjected to their most extraordinary lewd desires and inventions? Is petticoat-government a desirable form of education for a raw youth of tender birth, and can he become a man, if brought up among girls, dressed in female attire with corset, high-heeled shoes and sixteen-button gloves, so as to destroy all outward signs of his sex?

What influence will this life of slavery have upon his sexual longings and future career? Can a man be of both sexes at once and change his nature, as he dresses either in masculine or feminine attire? All these questions relating to the sway of womanly government are here fully solved, among a series of adventures which for delicate handling, albeit full of real erotic and novel surprises, surpasses anything that has ever been published up to this day in any language. [p. 247]

A French translation was published in 1902: La Gynecocratie, ou la Domination de la Femme, par Jacques Desroix, precede d’une Etude sur le Masochisme dans l’Histoire et Traditions par Laurent Tailhade. Paris, Charles Carrington, 1902 [number 168, page 120 in L’Enfer de la Biblotheque Nationale by Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernard Fleuret and Louis Perceau, Paris, 1913. The catalogue of the B.N.’s erotic collection up to 1912].

The editors of the catalogue make this comment: “C’est la traduction ou plutot l’adaptation diminuee, edulcoree et sans valeur du roman Anglais Gynecocracy”. That is to say, Englishmen can take pride in the fact that this pioneering work of erotic literature was expurgated for the French reader. I have seen a copy, acquired from a Soho bookshop,  but the British Library does not have one. Nevertheless, it is interesting to know that this new theme entered into French erotic consciousness before 1910, and also into German: a full German translation was published in 1909 [Weiber Herrschaft . . . Erster und vollstandige Ubertragung aus dem Englischen  von Erich von Berini-Bell, Leipzig, 1909 (P.C. 28.a.22 , Kearney, op. cit. p.295)].

In their entry for Gynecocracy itself on page 378, the editors of L’Enfer say,  “Ce curieux roman bien ecrit, publie en premier lieu a Londres, par R.bson et co., a pour auteur, parait-il un avocat londinien, M. St.n.sl.s de R.des qui, dit-on, serait aussi l’auteur de Yellow Room (roman libre publie par G.u.ch.), de The Petticoat Dominant et d’un ouvrage inedit, Fernand " (this curious and well written novel…has for author, it appears, a London lawyer, M. St.n.sl.s de R.des  who, it is said, would also be the author of Yellow Room…, The Petticoat Dominant, and of an unedited work, Fernand).

No trace has been found of Fernand. I shall mention the other two works in due course. The London lawyer has been identified as Stanislas de Rhodes, who was born in1857, called to the bar (Inner Temple) in June 1881, and practised as a barrister until c.1930. He died in the summer of 1932, aged 75, in Eastbourne. Not every scholar agrees that this attribution is correct. I shall return to this when I discuss The Petticoat Dominant.

In the first part of this essay I explained that the idea of punishing a boy by dressing him as a girl had not appeared before in erotic literature, except very briefly in Madame Birchini’s Dance. So where did the author get the idea from? There are three possibilities: he may have suffered the punishment himself; he may have seen or heard of it having been done to someone else; or he may have read about it.

Whether it had happened to him, we do not know, but he could certainly have read about in the popular press. In my Regime of the Stay Lace I explained that the first reference anywhere to this punishment having actually happened was made in a letter published in The Supplement to The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine for April 1870. A man signing himself  “Etonensis” described how after having been whipped by his sisters’ governess for failing to learn his geography lesson, he was dressed in his sisters’ clothes. He had to stay in these clothes until he had learnt the lesson, joining his sisters for dinner so dressed (pp. 28-9).

This letter was then printed without acknowledgement in Town Talk on May 12th, 1883. This resulted in several replies, which I have reproduced in Regime, pages 41 to 50. Letters relevant in the present context are:

      “Schilling” (20.10.1883, pp. 41-2): In a family of three older girls and a boy of twelve, when their governess had to whip the boy, she made him change into a “punishment dress, which consisted of a short frock and petticoats barely reaching to his knees, stays, chemise and embroidered drawers some inches longer than the frock”.  Sometimes he was further humiliated by being made to remain dressed in his sister’s clothes for sometime after the birching.

      “Julia” (5.7.1884, pp.43-4), who approved of the whipping of boys of up to 16 or 17, and considered it was more shameful for them to be punished by a woman. She also quite understood why one delinquent was dressed in his sister’s clothes. To make the operation as shameful as possible her own practice was to inflict the punishment in the presence of female witnesses, maids or lady visitors. “The young gentleman was then made to don petticoats for the rest of the day, and was given specially in charge to two young ladies, if they were disposed for it, or to my maid. Of course this was quite a nominal infliction, but it involved a good deal of submission to sundry slaps, teasing, and so on, which was highly beneficial”.

     “M. Holbornfields” (7.2.1885, p.44): A lady friend of the writer, having sent her backward nephew of 14 to a special school, discovers that the lady principal undresses and birches the elder boys herself, after which “the boy resumes his jacket and waistcoat, but instead of his own nether garments he has to don for the rest of the day a pair of his governess’s prettily worked drawers of red flannel or white longcloth according to the season". The boy was removed from the school.

     “John E.C.H.” (4.8.1885, pp. 45-7): On his father’s death when he was 14, his aunt sent him to a school in Southern Louisiana run by a Spanish lady. For disobedience he was severely birched by this lady, who then dressed him “in the costume of a child of three or four years old - drawers, petticoats, short dress, all beautifully embroidered and ornamented, and when this toilette was completed I was placed by Madam in the kindergarten class. Of course, it is extremely humiliating for a big boy to be dressed like a little girl, to be made to play with little children, to have to repeat their infantile lessons, to be put to bed at seven o’clock, and, worst of all, to have to submit to a great deal of teasing from the older girls, who delighted in making me carry a doll, and submitting to other indignities, but all aided in producing the one effect desired - prompt obedience to all in authority”.
 
On June 16th 1885 The British Library received a publication entitled Indecent Whipping (P.C. 26.b.5), which reprinted some or all of the letters on that subject, which was the heading under which the letters were printed. The last letter mentioned was thus omitted. In his note on the title, Peter Mendes reports, “France [Hector France] probably did the French translation, published clandestinely in 1886 by Brancart in Amsterdam under the title: Discipline a l’Ecole et dans le Boudoir. Charles Hirsch, in a clandestine catalogue of books in French issued in 1904, gives this note on the French translation above: ‘…les revelations contenues dans le receuil anglais “Town Talk” ont inaugure la serie des traites, monographes, et romans qui ont ete publies en Angleterre au sujet de la verge'.

Hirsch is thus saying that the letters in Town Talk gave rise to, or inspired, the novels and other writings published in English on the subject of the birch, which would include Gynecocracy. [Kearney, p.209; Mendes, p151]. In these episodes, however, the victims spend only part of a day in petticoats. Something more is needed to inspire Gynecocracy, and we do in fact find it in the correspondence printed in The Family Doctor from 1886 to 1894, and reprinted in my Regime of the Stay Lace pages 51 to 104.

This paper started a comprehensive correspondence on the merits or otherwise of corsets and tight-lacing. Men wrote in to describe their experience of the corset. Several claimed that between the ages of 14 and 18 they had been made to wear stays, girls’ boots and gloves at private schools managed by ladies. These were:

? “Eperon": “a school kept by ladies” (28.7.1888, pp55-6),
? “Admirer of Pretty Feet":  “a strict discipline school: [padlock on stays]” (8.6.1889, pp.58-60), and
? “Curb":  “my parents moved me from one school to another in the vain hope of finding one where I should be broken in, and were quite in despair what to do, when they were at length advised to try the effect of placing me with a lady who made a special study of such cases, and had under her care about a dozen young gentlemen, whom she kept in the very strictest control". (7.5.1892, pp.86-9). “Curb’s” letter of 4.2.1893 (pp. 92-3) included this: “It is simply marvellous the improvement which a smart girl of resolute will can force in the most clumsy and unwilling of pupils".

 Women also described their treatment of youths in their care. As “Finished Figure’s” stepson was unruly, at 14 she “subjected him to the regime of the stay-lace, and confined him in a long stiff corset (31.8.1889, pp. 63-4). Both “Trim Waist” (14.12.1889, p.67) and “White Cat” (12.4.1890, pp. 77-9) made the boys in their care wear ladies’ corsets, boots and gloves. In the latter case the boy of 15 was taken into a corset-maker’s and padlocked into a corset which had been prepared beforehand.

“Brought up as a Girl” (23.6.1888, Men in Petticoats pp.13-4) was brought up with his two sisters from the age of 12, wearing girls’ corsets, boots and gloves. Of course all these boys would also have worn chemises under their corsets, something they could not mention.  At his aunt’s command, “E.H.B.” (27.9.1890, p. 80) at the age of 15, exchanged his knickerbocker suit for “a blue serge sailor dress and a pair of richly trimmed closed linen drawers".

 What this amounts to is that in the pages of The Family Doctor from 1888 to 1893 readers were presented with many stories of boys and young men being compelled to dress partially or even wholly as girls for long periods of time. Several of the phrases and incidents reported are repeated or copied in Gynecocracy, so much so that I believe its author was familiar with The Family Doctor. The story of his acquaintance with which the novel begins could have been suggested by “Curb’s” letters. His parents were advised to place him with a lady, and he approved of the discipline of a “smart girl,” while the phrase “the regime of the stay-lace,” which I have used for my own book, comes from “Finished Figure".

I will give lengthy extracts from the early chapters, up to the point when Julian is fully dressed as a girl for the first time.
 

 By this time I am thirty years of age, and well aware it.
 Home-staying youths, some poet or wiseacre has said, have ever homely wit. Whether I have a homely wit or indeed any wit, I do not know. I have never endeavoured to form an opinion, deeming the question not to be one into which I could hope to enquire impartially; in fact, one for my personal judgement. But though I have been a home-staying youth, I have had experiences; experiences of the world, that is to say, of woman, whom I regard as a complete epitome of the world - and if any one, home-stayer or otherwise, has had experience of her in all her moods and whims, and has passed through all the psychological and physical gymnastics by which her varying caprices and lusts can conduct his soul, his passions, and his senses, and still preserves a homely wit, he must be an arrant duffer!

For Woman is a complete education.

By my own experience, I have reason to respect the petticoat and chemise, the drawers and long stockings, the high-heeled boots and tight corsets - and what they contain - and to believe that good may accrue to a young man being disciplined by a smart girl. This may be thought a very peculiar view.

To give one instance, a young man of my acquaintance was sent at nine years of age to a fashionable preparatory school for Eton, and was expelled eighteen months afterwards. It was considered futile to send him to another school. Three tutors successively resigned on the ground that he was altogether incorrigible. At a loss what to do, his guardians enquired in all directions, and answered innumerable advertisements of persons professing to devote themselves to the reformation of backward and refractory boys, until, at last, it was suggested by a friend of the family, who had had some German anthropological experiences, that the lad should be taken in hand by a lady.

The idea was astounding! A great, rough, strong boy of fifteen who had defied the discipline of private schools and tutors, and of specialists who devoted themselves to such characters, would never yield to a lady. The friend, a person of position and reputation, pledged herself that he would be completely broken in; she had known similar cases in which the plan she advocated had proved successful beyond all possible expectations. After protracted discussion, her suggestions were adopted. A pension was quickly found, The Grafin von ____ stipulated that the lad should be left absolutely under her control for two years, and at the end of that period he turned out a model of docility and obedience, courtesy, and chivalry, and with remarkable intellectual development and self-possession.

His friends acknowledged with wonder and gratitude the marvellous transformation which the pretty demure German Countess had wrought. Naturally, they were curious to ascertain by what magic she had worked this miracle. I do not know whether they succeeded in learning; probably not, as they were English; but having been through the same kind of discipline myself, I possessed the key. When we met, we accordingly compared notes, and he confessed that the magic was wholly feminine. She had impressed him with the subtle and subduing influence of sex, under which he was perpetually kept. She, as I guessed, employed
not tutors but maids, who, notwithstanding his age, treated him in all respects as a child. She used female clothing - first a girl's, then a young lady's, and made the use of masculine habiliments, or even the desire for them, an offence of the deepest dye.

She subjugated his rude male propensities to her softening womanly influence, to which he was compelled to do perpetual homage. She punished rebellion in the most ignominious manner, with the birch; and the same sharp instructor was used to brighten his wits, teach him his lessons, and enforce her precepts. I remember he made a particular complaint of the fact that, to his shame and disgrace, he was usually punished before girls. This he felt acutely.

He described his feelings to me upon the first occasion of his shocking exposure to a bevy of laughing girls. He was held down across an ottoman by a couple of buxom country lasses. The mere narrative made my blood boil and electrified me. He detailed his efforts to repress all expression of his sufferings, in which they revelled and gloried: how he writhed; how, by degrees, his fortitude vanished through stress of pain, whilst consciousness of the youth and sex of his beholders maddened him; how, ultimately, as the cutting strokes administered by the white round arm of a woman continued to fall with cruel regularity, he was obliged to abandon himself absolutely and helplessly. He could no longer withstand the sense of abject humiliation, the necessity for yielding unreservedly to his fair mistress. He spoke of the subjugation and the galling nature of the conviction that they had, despite himself, thoroughly mastered him. But, he added, he could have held out against a man; what sapped his strength was not so much the torture of the punishment as the sorcery of gender. It was the triumph of the Petticoat. He could at last have grovelled on the ground before these fair but relentless conquerors and have begged their permission to breathe.

Enough, however, of his experiences. In the following chapters I purpose narrating my own adventures of like kind. 

 Julian’s own story begins in a similar way. At the age of 14 he puts his hand under the skirts of a maid who is going upstairs, causing her to drop a tray. He is sent away to school, but leaves after two years, school not suiting his health. He is then sent to a country house belonging to his late uncle where his three cousins, Maud, 20, Beatrice, 18, and Agnes, 16, are being educated by a young French governess, Mademoiselle de Chambonnard. He admires them all, but falls in love with Beatrice. He meets Elise, Mademoiselle’s maid and another maid, Mary. He is teased in various ways by these women, and goes to bed with a sense of foreboding.

      Next morning Julian wakes up miserable. He is alone among women. He fears that he will be 'shorn of his manhood and made    .     effeminate'. He resolves to assert himself and does so when, at breakfast, Mademoiselle opens and reads two letters
      addressed to him. He demands to see them, but is refused: they do not require a reply, and he is not allowed to write or
      receive letters without her permission. Later in the schoolroom his cousins reproach him for being so rude and warn him that
      he will 'catch it'.

“I suppose,” added Maud, “he has never heard of a riding whip. Mademoiselle has a horridly cruel little whip. Ay! How it          .          bites!" And she laughed.

“Or of the regime of the stay-lace, or of fifty other ways young ladies have for breaking in refractory boys", went on Agnes. “Never mind", in a tone of mock consolation, which maddened me, “he will soon be initiated".
“She, whip me! At my age, and before you, girls! You must be mad to think she would dare to do such a thing. You are only laughing at me. I should fight. I am much stronger than she is".

 “You will back petticoats, however,” said Maud. "You will find you have to submit to them. And she is sure to punish you in front of us. You will not have many clothes left to conceal your hidden charms: and if you turn out to have as nice a figure in reality as you seem to have now, I shall get Mademoiselle to let you pose for me as a model for an Apollo".
 
     Beatrice advises him to submit quietly. Mademoiselle then enters:

“Now, Master Julian”, she said, “you have to realize that I am your governess and that you are my absolute slave. Don’t interrupt! From you I shall expect and shall exact the most implicit obedience, and the most abject submission. You will tremble hereafter at the mere rustle of a petticoat; by it you are to be governed. If you are sufficiently foolish to continue your insubordination and the ridiculous temper you displayed this morning, it will be the worse for you”.
 
“Mademoiselle”, I broke in, “I do not understand you; my father sent me here because I am too delicate for school”.

“And too unruly for home. Too indecent!” (at which I blushed). “Too inquisitive! Too anxious to know what young ladies have under their petticoats”. (I was dumbfounded, and furtively glanced at the girls who were eagerly listening). “Yes! I know all about it. The petticoat will have its revenge now, and you will be under it in more senses than one for some time. Kneel down there at my feet”. (I hesitated, especially seeing the girls highly amused). “Kneel down at once”, she repeated, settling herself in her chair, and assuming a more erect attitude, “and put your hands behind you”.

     His arms and ankles are strapped together and Mademoiselle slaps his face.

“And now, Julian, you shall be deprived of your trousers. Take a long leave of them. When you will see them again, I do not know; they teach you all sorts of resistance and naughtiness and make you assume airs of ridiculous superiority which you do not possess. We must make a girl of you. Elise, make him stand up and take them off”.
“Oh, Mademoiselle! Oh, please do not before you and the girls. Oh, don't -----”.

     His trousers and drawers are removed.

My cheeks burned and I felt horridly defenceless.

“Now, Julian, how do you feel? To enforce your subjection to the petticoat, the emblem of the female sex, and to show your domination by it, you shall stand in the corner with one over your head until half-past twelve, when lessons are over. Elise, fetch one of my red flannel petticoats out of the soiled linen basket in my room”. Elise soon returned with the garment required. “Tie it together at the top---so! Now throw it over his head. There, now, he is under the petticoat! Put him in the corner; and at half-past twelve, Julian, she will come and take you to my bedroom, where I shall birch your bottom for you as smartly as ever a boy's bottom was birched”.

     Julian remains thus trussed up in a state of great apprehension while the class continues, with Beatrice getting a whipping
     for blunders with her Dante.

A sort of mesmeric influence seemed to have crept into me from that intensely feminine garment which had been in such close contact with Mademoiselle's own person, and then so long over my head and face, as I stood disgraced in the corner. It seemed to have sapped my strength and all my powers of resistance, to have undermined my self-respect, to have rendered me contemptible in my own eyes; in short, to have completely emasculated me. I had felt my virility ebbing away during the hours I had stood with the red thing enveloping my shoulders, touching my eyes and nose and mouth, conscious all the while that it was a woman's petticoat which had been worn, and that a thing so essentially feminine had, willy-nilly, been forced upon me. I had gradually, step by step, to give in to the flood of feminine associations which rushed upon me, and yield by degrees to the power of woman. I was keenly aware that nothing could save me, that all opposition was useless and hopeless, and I was slowly drifting towards the knowledge that I must sooner or later abandon myself absolutely to it. I stood before Mademoiselle, cowed and humiliated, not so much at the prospect of the beating as at the sense of my own helplessness in her hands, because she was feminine and could therefore do with me what she liked. Whatever it was, I knew I had no power left to resist, and trembled at the inevitable acknowledgement of this fact to myself. She seemed the embodiment of triumphant womanhood as I was hustled into her presence, shaken and pulled about by another woman to be whipped by her.

     Julian is now mercilessly birched by Mademoiselle. 

At last she rose, and pouring some wine into a large Bohemian glass, she bade me drink; then, pointing to some clothes Elise had left behind her, told me to put them on.

I suppose the red grape juice made me defiant, for, on perceiving them to be a girl's dress, I protested. Mademoiselle simply said she was sure I should obey her. Strange to say, that was enough, and I complied; only remarking that for her sake I wished to be a boy. She smiled, and promised that I should tell her all about it after luncheon, in her boudoir. With her help, I then put on a chemise, long stockings, drawers, petticoats, a corset which would not fit, and I was buttoned up in a bodice. How strangely embarrassed I felt. But these feelings were swallowed up by a sense of disgrace when I found that outside all, I had to wear a pair of Mademoiselle's own laced drawers, the waistband being tied round my neck, and my arms thrust through the legs as though they were sleeves. These were fastened with garters at the wrists.

In that guise I was to appear before the girls at luncheon, in token of my subjugation and defeat, and of the rout and discomfit of my virility. Petticoats were difficult enough to put up with; this addition of a pair of drawers completed my abasement. However, the novelty and discomfort of the attire served somewhat to divert my attention from the intense humiliation I suffered, as did also the effort necessary to walk at all decently; for what with the high heels of the girls' boots, which buttoned high up my legs and which felt like mountains under them - and what with the agitation of my nerves and my soreness from the severe whipping I had received at Mademoiselle's hands, walking was no easy matter.

I blushed like a girl as I felt the feminine garments against my legs and saw the drawers about my arms. The delicate, minute, ladylike handkerchief, all laced, and of no practical use whatever, which I had to hold in my hand, made me feel really girlish; and when ushered into the luncheon-room and introduced to my cousins as, “Miss Julia, instead of that very naughty boy Master Julian, who has been sent home", I began positively to wonder whether I was not actually a girl. They made great fun of me in a quiet and exasperating way, saying the sleeves reminded them of a bishop under his wife's thumb, and Agnes slyly suggested a cushion when she noticed that it hurt me as I sat down.
 

     The bishop is of course Bishop Proudie in 'Barchester Towers'. Julian now upsets Beatrice’s wine glass over her frock, for
     which she is ordered to slap his face.
 
     Thus it was that I soon found I had more governesses than one. Mademoiselle ruled by a mixture of sex and  force - force
     which her sex made irresistible; but I could evade and escape her to some extent. Beatrice ruled by love, and her pains
     were sweet, though sharp...

This brilliant dissertation will be continued in a later issue. The quotes from the book demonstrate that the power of petticoat discipline has been known since the nineteenth century. Few better descriptions of the torments of a humiliated male under petticoat rule have ever been written.