MIA > Archive > Bax > Fraud of Feminism
THE following essay was published at the end of 1913 and is now reissued as originally written. Since the year before the World War the situation of woman has, of course, changed. Feminism in this and in some other countries has won well-nigh all its formal demands. Mr Asquith, who before the war declared he would have nothing to do with a House of Commons elected by a female vote, during the war, for no assignable reason, suddenly made a volte-face and became a strong advocate of female franchise. The acquisition of the suffrage has as its result carried with it the right to all occupations and offices, as decreed by the “Sex-Disability Repeal Act,” and so the pitch-forking of women into administrative posts proceeds galore. But the main contentions of The Fraud of Feminism have not been affected by the change in question. Though women have been conceded all the rights of men, their privileges as females have remained untouched, while the sentimental “pull” they have over men, and the favouritism shown them in the courts, civil and criminal, often in flagrant violation of elementary justice, continues as before. The result of their position on juries, as evinced in certain trials, has rather confirmed the remarks made in Chapter II anent hysteria than otherwise. The sex-bias of men in favour of women and the love of the advanced woman towards her sex-self show no sign of abatement. Proposals to the effect that in the event of infanticide by a mother the putative father should be placed in the dock merely because he is a man are received with applause. The other day, at a court held in a fashionable town of the south coast, on a prostitute being brought up charged with soliciting, a female “justice,” recently appointed, declaimed against the wickedness of punishing prostitutes for soliciting while men were never brought up charged with the offence. (Needless to say, there was the usual male fool to be found in the body of the court, who shouted: “Hear! Hear!”) Now is it conceivable, I ask, that anybody can be so infatuated with Feminism as not to see that a prostitute who solicits nightly in the exercise of her trade – i.e. for the purpose of money-making – is in a different position from a man who, once in a way, may, urged by natural passion, make advances to a woman? Such a person must be unable to see distinctions in anything, one would think. Besides, it is not true that men, if charged with the annoyance or molestation of women, cannot be, and have not been, prosecuted for the offence. The lady “justice” in question would probably like to see a man paired with a prostitute in the dock every time the latter gave occasion for police action. Such is the Feminist notion of justice.
There are a vast number of men who cultivate the pretence of having a contempt for, or a prejudice against, their own sex. The idea seems to be to pander to the sex-vanity of the “New Woman.” Every popular writer caters for this prejudice. No one can have failed to notice the persistent journalistic and literary “stunt” by which the man is portrayed in the light of a miserable and abject living creature as a foil to the “noble animal” woman. There is scarcely a play, short story or novel the plot of which in any way admits of it where this now stale device is not dragged in some form or shape. Even Shaw, with all his somewhat ostentatious flouting of convention, cannot resist the temptation of yielding to it in one or two of his plays – e.g. Catherine the Great. This sort of thing is not without its influence on the course of justice, as the daily papers still continue to show us.
Times have not changed in this respect. The war, which has altered the face of things otherwise and in the matter of the social and political aspect of sex-relations, has been the occasion of revolutionary transformation in the shape of political sex-equality, has left female privilege, civil and criminal, as it was in 1913. There is no indication that the general public has a dawning sense that, to adapt the common metaphor, “What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” Everywhere we hear the same old bogus grievances of the female sex trotted out as crying for remedy, but never the injustice of a man being compelled, whatever his economic position, to keep his wife, while a woman is under no corresponding obligation to keep her husband. No urgency is suggested for removing the anomaly that a husband is amenable for his wife’s libels and slanders; none that a boy of fourteen is punishable for a sexual offence to which he has been incited by a girl of sixteen, who gets off scot-free; none that the obligation of a husband, whose wife wishes to bring an action for divorce against him, to furnish her with the money to fight him, should be abolished. On the other hand, every law, every judicial decision, every case in the courts, civil and criminal, that on the most superficial view can be exploited by the conventional Feminist claptrap to prove the wickedness of “man-made law” to woman, is gripped by the beak of the Feminist harpy to help build up her nest of lying sex-prejudice, whence she and her confraternity may sally forth and by their raids on male sentiment not merely help to buttress up existing female privilege, but wherever possible to increase the already one-sided injustice of the law and its administration towards men in the interest of the other sex.
August 1921
Last updated on 26.7.2005