The Fraud of Feminism

by Ernest Belfort Bax

On the subject of Anti-man legislation, I have already written at length elsewhere,[55:1] but for the sake of completeness I state the case briefly here. (1) The marriage laws of England to-day are a monument of Feminist sex partiality. If I may be excused the paradox, the partiality of the marriage laws begins with the law relating to breach of promise, which, as is well known, enables a woman to punish a man vindictively for refusing to marry her after having once engaged himself to her. I ought to add, and this, oftentimes, however good his grounds may be for doing so. Should the woman commit perjury, in these cases, she is never prosecuted for the

offence. Although the law of breach of promise exists also for the man, it is well known to be totally ineffective and practically a dead letter. It should be remarked that, however gross the misrepresentations or undue influences on the part of the woman may have been to induce the man to marry her, they do not cause her to lose her right to compensation. As, for instance, where an experienced woman of the world of thirty or forty entraps a boy scarcely out of his teens. (2) Again, according to the law of England, the right to maintenance accrues solely to the woman. Formerly this privilege was made dependent on her cohabitation with the man and generally decent behaviour to him. Now even these limitations cease to be operative, while the man is liable to imprisonment and confiscation of any property he may have. A wife is now at full liberty to leave her husband, while she retains her right to get her husband sent to gaol if he refuses to maintain her—to put the matter shortly, the law imposes upon the wife no legally enforceable duties whatever towards her husband. The one thing which it will enforce with iron vigour is the wife’s right of maintenance against her husband. In the case of a man of the well-to-do classes, the man’s property is confiscated by the law in favour of his wife. In the case of a working man the law compels her husband to do corvée for her, as the

feudal serf had to do for his lord. The wife, on the other hand, however wealthy, is not compelled to give a farthing towards the support of her husband, even though disabled by sickness or by accident; the single exception in the latter case being should he become chargeable to the parish, in which case the wife would have to pay the authorities a pauper’s rate for his maintenance. In a word, a wife has complete possession and control over any property she may possess, as well as over her earnings; the husband, on the other hand, is liable to confiscation of capitalised property or earnings at the behest of the law courts in favour of his wife. A wife may even make her husband bankrupt on the ground of money she alleges that she lent him; a husband, on the other hand, has no claim against his wife for any money advanced, since a husband is supposed to give, and not to lend, his wife money, or other valuables. (3) The law affords the wife a right to commit torts against third parties—e.g. libels and slanders—the husband alone being responsible, and this rule applies even although the wife is living apart from her husband, who is wholly without knowledge of her misdeeds. With the exception of murder, a wife is held by the law to be guiltless of practically any crime committed in the presence of her husband. (4) No man can obtain a legal separation or divorce from his wife (save under the Licensing

Act of 1902, a Police Court separation for habitual drunkenness alone) without a costly process in the High Court. Every wife can obtain, if not a divorce, at least a legal separation, by going whining to the nearest police court, for a few shillings, which her husband, of course, has to pay. The latter, it is needless to say, is mulcted in alimony at the “discretion of the Court.” This “discretion” is very often of a queer character for the luckless husband. Thus, a working man earning only twenty shillings a week may easily find himself in the position of having to pay from seven to ten shillings a week to a shrew out of his wages.

[55:1] Cf. Fortnightly Review, November 1911, “A Creature of Privilege,” also a pamphlet (collaboration) entitled “The Legal Subjection of Men.” Twentieth Century Press, reprinted by New Age Press, 1908.

In cases where a wife proceeds to file a petition for divorce, the way is once more smoothed for her by the law, at the husband’s expense. He has to advance her money to enable her to fight him. Should the case come on for hearing the husband finds the scale still more weighted against him; every slander of his wife is assumed to be true until he has proved its falsity, the slightest act or a word during a moment of irritation, even a long time back, being twisted into what is termed “legal cruelty,” even though such has been provoked by a long course of ill treatment and neglect on the part of the wife. The husband and his witnesses can be indicted for perjury for the slightest exaggeration or

inaccuracy in their statements, while the most calculated falsity in the evidence of the wife and her witnesses is passed over. Not the grossest allegation on the part of the wife against the husband, even though proved in court to be false, is sufficient ground for the husband to refuse to take her back again, or from preventing the court from confiscating his property if he resists doing so. Knowledge of the unfairness of the court to the husband, as all lawyers are aware, prevents a large number of men from defending divorce actions brought by their wives. A point should here be mentioned as regards the action of a husband for damages against the seducer of his wife. Such damages obviously belong to the husband as compensation for his destroyed home life. Now these damages our modern judges in their feminist zeal have converted into a fund for endowing the adulteress, depriving the husband of any compensation whatever for the wrong done him. He may not touch the income derived from the money awarded him by the jury, which is handed over by the court to his divorced wife. It would take us too long to go through all the privileges, direct and indirect, conferred by statute or created by the rulings of judges and the practice of the courts, in favour of the wife against the husband. It is the more unnecessary to go into them here as they may be found in detail with

illustrative cases in the aforesaid pamphlet in which I collaborated, entitled “The Legal Subjection of Men” (mentioned in the [footnote to p. 55]).

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. 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. Now in a society such as ours is, based upon private property-holding, it is only natural, I submit, that the law should take account of this fact. But not

only is this rule of law almost certainly doomed to repeal in the near future, but in even the present day, while it still nominally exists, it is practically a dead letter in the divorce court, since any trivial act of which the wife chooses to complain is strained by the court into evidence of cruelty in the legal and technical sense. As the matter stands, the practical effect of the rule is a much greater injustice to the husband than to the wife, since the former often finds himself convicted of “cruelty” which is virtually nothing at all, in order that the wife’s petition may be granted, and which is often made the excuse by Feminist judges for depriving the husband of the custody of his children. Misconduct on the wife’s part, or neglect of husband and children, does not weigh with the court which will not on that ground grant relief to the husband from his obligation for maintenance, etc. On the other hand, neglect of the wife by the husband is made a ground for judicial separation with the usual consequences—alimony, etc. “Thus,” as it has been put, “between the upper and the nether millstone, cruelty on the one hand, neglect on the other, the unhappy husband can be legally ground to pieces, whether he does anything or whether he does nothing.” Personal violence on the part of the husband is severely punished; on the part of a wife she will be let off with impunity. Even if she should in an extreme case be imprisoned, the