E. Belfort Bax

“ How then, after consideration, shall we judge of the Feminist thesis, affirmed and reaffirmed, insisted upon by so many as an incontrovertible axiom, that woman is the equal, intellectually and morally, if not physically, of man? Surely that it has all the characteristics of a true dogma. Its votaries might well say with Tertullian, credo quia absurdum. It contradicts the whole experience of mankind in the past. It is refuted by all impartial observation in the present. The facts which undermine it are seriously denied by none save those committed to the dogma in question. ”

“ If the man who “in whole or in part” lives on the proceeds of a woman's prostitution is of necessity a degraded wretch outside the pale of all humanity, as he is represented to be by the flogging fraternity, how about the employer or employeress of female labour who bases his or her scale of wages on the assumption that the girls and women he or she employs, supplement these wages by presents received after working hours, for their sexual favours—in other words, by prostitution? ”

“ Such has been the growth of the articulate and political side of the theory of Modern Feminism.
The sentimental side of Feminism, with its practical result of the overweighting of justice in the interests of women in the courts, civil as well as criminal, and their practical immunity from the operation of the criminal law when in the dock, has advanced correspondingly; while at the same time the sword of that same criminal law is sharpened to a razor edge against the man even accused, let alone convicted, of any offence against the sacrosanct majesty of “Womanhood.” ”

“ But the theory of chivalry is scarcely invoked in the present day save in the interests of one particular form of weakness—viz. the woman as the muscularly weaker sex, and here it has acquired an utterly different character. [1]
Chivalry, as understood by Modern Sentimental Feminism, means unlimited licence for women in their relations with men, and unlimited coercion for men in their relations with women. To men all duties and no rights, to women all rights and no duties, is the basic principle underlying Modern Feminism, Suffragism, and the bastard chivalry it is so fond of invoking. ”

“ In default of any real injustice pressing on the woman the Feminist is constrained to make as much capital as possible out of the merest semblance of a grievance he can lay his hand on. The reasons for this distinction which the law draws between the husband and the wife, it is obvious enough, are perfectly well grounded. It is based mainly on the simple fact that while a woman by her adultery may foist upon her husband a bastard which he will be compelled by law to support as his own child, in the husband's case of having an illegitimate child the wife and her property are not affected. ”

“ The absurdity of it is manifest when one considers that the issue of man versus woman as units of physical strength respectively, is purely irrelevant. It is not a question of the man tackling the woman or any number of women. It is the question of the whole force of the State tackling the man in favour of the woman. The prevalent idea in many men's minds seems to be that of the State drawing a ring-fence around the disputant man and woman and letting them fight the matter out between themselves, which, to speak the language of the great geometer of antiquity—"is absurd." ”

“ In conclusion I can only express the hope that honest, straightforward men who have been bitten by Feminist wiles will take pause and reconsider their position. Whatever sentiment or sympathy they may have with the aims of the movement intrinsically, it ought to be not too much to expect them to view with contempt and abhorrence the mass of disingenuous falsehood and transparent subterfuge, which the votaries of Feminism systematically seek to palm off upon a public opinion—only too easily gullible in this matter—as true fact and valid argument. ”

“ While the genuine criminal is obtusely silent against all reproaches, a woman will express her astonishment and indignation that anyone can doubt her perfect right to act as she has done. Women are convinced of their being in the right without ever having sat in judgment on themselves. The male criminal, it may be true, does not do so either, but then he never maintains that he is in the right. He rather goes hastily out of the way of discussing right and wrong, because it reminds him of his guilt. ”

“ If you can set public opinion off on the question of wicked Man and down-trodden Woman, you have done a good deal to help capitalistic enterprise to tide over the present crisis. The insistence of public opinion on better conditions for the labourer will thus be weakened by being diverted into urging forward vindictive laws against men, and for placing as far as may be the whole power of the State at the disposal of the virago, the shrew and the female sharper, in their designs upon their male victim. ”

“ The acquittal of women on the most serious charges, especially where the victims are men, in the teeth of the strongest evidence, is, on the other hand, an everyday occurrence. Now it is statements like the above on which, as already said, the Feminist Movement thrives; its most powerful argumentative weapon with the man in the street is the legend that woman is oppressed by man. It is rarely that anyone takes the trouble to refute the legend in general, or any specific case adduced as an illustration of it. ”

“ To these are joined a host of literary men and journalists of varying degrees of reputation who contribute their quota to the stream of anti-manism in the shape of novels, storiettes, essays, and articles, the design of which is to paint man as a base, contemptible creature, as at once a knave and an imbecile, a bird of prey and a sheep in wolf's clothing, and all as a foil to the glorious majesty of Womanhood. ”

“ The earlier chivalry, where it obtained at all, applied only to the woman who presented what were conceived of as the ideal moral feminine characteristics in some appreciable degree. The mere physical fact of sex was never for a moment regarded as of itself sufficient to entitle the woman to any special homage, consideration, or immunity, over and above the man. No one suggested that the female criminal was less guilty or more excusable than the male criminal. No one believed that a woman had a vested right to rob or swindle a man because she had had sexual relations with him. ”

“ When political and economic rights are in question, bien entendu, such as involve gain and social standing, the assumption of inferiority magically disappears before the strident assertion of the dogma of the equality of woman with man—her mental and moral equality certainly! ”

“ The above attitude, with all its inconsistencies, has at its back a strong sex-conscious party, or sex union, as we may term it, among women, and a floating mass of inconsequent, slushy sentiment among men. There is more than one popular prejudice which obscures the meaning and significance of Modern Feminism with many people. There is a common theory, for instance, based upon what really obtained to some extent before the prevalence of Modern Feminism, that in any case of antagonism between the two sexes, women always take the man's side against the woman. ”

“ It is by this kind of bluff that the claims of Feminism are sustained. The following is a fair example of the statements of Feminist writers:—“As for accusing the world at large of fatuous indulgence for womanhood in general, the idea is too preposterous for words. The true ‘legends of the Old Bailey’ tell, not of women absurdly acquitted, but of miserable girls sent to the gallows for murders committed in half delirious dread of the ruthlessness of hypocritical Society.” Now it is this sort of legend that it is one of the chief objects of the following pages to explode. ”

“ At this point it may be well to say a word on the one rule of the divorce law which Feminists are perennially trotting out as a proof of the shocking injustice of the marriage law to women: that to obtain her divorce the woman has to prove cruelty in addition to adultery against her husband, while in the case of the husband it is sufficient to prove adultery alone. Now to make of this rule a grievance for the woman is, I submit, evidence of the destitution of the Feminist case. ”

“ The law of husband and wife, as modified by statute in the course of the nineteenth century, as I have often enough had occasion to point out, is a monument of legalised tyranny over the husband in the interests of the wife. ”

“ Now a complete investigation of the psychology of this curious phenomenon we have been considering—namely, the hatred so common with men for their fellow-men as a sex—is a task which has never yet been properly taken in hand. Its obverse side is to be seen on all hands in the conferring and confirming of sex prerogative on women. Not very long ago, as we have seen, one of its most striking manifestations came strongly under public notice—namely, the "rule of the sea," by which women, by virtue of their sex, can claim to be saved from a sinking ship before men. ”

“ That favourite crank of the Feminist, of raising the age of consent with the result of increasing the number of victims of the designing young female should speak for itself to every unbiassed person. One of the proposals which finds most favour with the Sentimental Feminist is the demand that in the case of the murder by a woman of her illegitimate child, the putative father should be placed in the dock as an accessory! In other words, a man should be punished for a crime of which he is wholly innocent, because the guilty person was forsooth a woman. ”

“ For the sake of brevity we call the first Political Feminism, for, although its demands are not confined to the political sphere, it is first and foremost a political movement, and its typical claim at the present time, the Franchise, is a purely political one; and the second Sentimental Feminism, inasmuch as it commonly does not profess to be based on any general principle whatever, whether of equity or otherwise, but relies exclusively on the traditional and conventional sex sentiment of Man towards Woman. ”

“ We seem surely to have here, if Mr Ward's premises be accepted as to the primitive insignificance of the male element—at first overshadowed and dominated by the female stem, but gradually evolving in importance, character and fruition, till we arrive at man the highest product of evolution up to date—a powerful argument for anti-Feminism. On Mr Ward's own showing, we find that incontestible superiority, both in size and power of body and brain, has manifested itself in Androcracy, when the female is relegated, in the natural course of things, to the function of child-bearing. ”

“ That the propertied classes should take arson and wilful destruction of property in general, with such comparative equanimity because the culprits are women, acting in the assumed interest of a cause that aims at increasing the influence of women in the State, is the most striking illustration we can have of the power of Feminism. We have here a double phenomenon, the unreasoning hatred of man as a sex, by men, and their equally unreasoning indulgence towards the other sex. ”

“ Let us first of all consider the dogma at the basis of the positive side of Modern Feminism, which claims rational grounds of fact and reason for itself, and professes to be able to make good its case by virtue of such grounds. This dogma consists in the assertion of equality in intellectual capacity, in spite of appearances to the contrary, of women with men. I think it will be admitted that the articulate objects of Modern Feminism, taking them one with another, rest on this dogma, and on this dogma alone. ”

“ The patience, forbearance, and kindliness, with which, from Socrates downwards, men as a rule have encountered the whims, the tempers, and the tantrums of their often unworthy womankind is indeed a marvel. But it is a still greater marvel that Modern Feminism in this, as in other things, should have succeeded in hocussing public opinion into the delusion that the exact opposite of the truth represents the real state of the case. This, however, is a marvel which runs through the history of the controversial exploits of the whole Feminist Movement. ”

“ The attribution of greater bodily weakness to the female sex than to the male undoubtedly expresses a truth, but no less does the attribution of greater bodily strength to the female than to the male sex equally express a truth. In size, weight and muscular development, average man has an unquestionable, and in most cases enormous, advantage over average woman. It is in this sense that the bodily structure of the human female can with some show of justice be described as frail. ”

“ Here is no question of bodily strength or weakness, either muscular or constitutional. In this respect, for the nonce, all are on a level. But it is a case of life itself. A number of poor wretches are doomed to a watery grave, simply and solely because they have not had the luck to be born of the privileged female sex.
Such is “chivalry” as understood to-day—the deprivation, the robbery from men of the most elementary personal rights in order to endow women with privileges at the expense of men. During the ages of chivalry and for long after it was not so. ”

“ The truth in question consists in the fact, undeniable to all those not rendered impervious to facts by preconceived dogma, that, as I have elsewhere put it, while man has a sex, woman is a sex. Let us hear Weininger on this point. “Woman is only sexual, man is also sexual. Alike in time and space this difference may be traced in man, parts of his body susceptible to sexual excitement are small in number and strictly localised. In woman sexuality is diffused over the whole body, every contact on whatever part excites her sexually.” ”

“ Let us now turn to the question of the psychology of Political Feminism. Political Feminism, as regards its immediate demand of female suffrage, is based directly on the modern conception of democracy. This is its avowed basis. With modern notions of universal suffrage it is declared that the exclusion of women from the franchise is logically incompatible. If you include in the parliamentary voting lists all sorts and conditions of men, it is said, it is plainly a violation of the principle of democracy to exclude more than one half of the adult population from the polls. ”