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. Law and custom then was the same for men as for women in its incidence. To quote the familiar proverb in a slightly altered form, then—“what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose.” Not until the nineteenth century did this state of things change. Then for the first time the law began to respect persons and to distinguish in favour of sex.
Even taking the matter on the conventional ground of weakness and granting, for the sake of argument, the relative muscular weakness of the female as ground for her being allowed the immunity claimed by Modern Feminists of the sentimental school, the distinction is altogether lost sight of between weakness as such and aggressive
weakness. Now I submit there is a very considerable difference between what is due to weakness that is harmless and unprovocative, and weakness that is aggressive, still more when this aggressive weakness presumes on itself as weakness, and on the consideration extended to it, in order to become tyrannical and oppressive. Weakness as such assuredly deserves all consideration, but aggressive weakness deserves none save to be crushed beneath the iron heel of strength. Woman at the present day has been encouraged by a Feminist public opinion to become meanly aggressive under the protection of her weakness. She has been encouraged to forge her gift of weakness into a weapon of tyranny against man, unwitting that in so doing she has deprived her weakness of all just claim to consideration or even to toleration.
CHAPTER VI
SOME FEMINIST LIES AND FALLACIES
By Feminist lies I understand false statements put forward by persons, many of whom should be perfectly well aware that they are false, apparently with the deliberate intention of misleading public opinion as to the real position of woman before the law. By fallacies I understand statements doubtless dictated by Feminist prepossessions or Feminist bias, but not necessarily suggesting conscious or deliberate mala fides.
Of the first order, the statements are made apparently with intentional dishonesty in so far as many of the persons making them are concerned, since we may reasonably suppose them to have intelligence and knowledge enough to be aware that they are contrary to fact. The talk about the wife being a chattel, for example, is so palpably absurd in the face of the existing law that it is nowadays scarcely worth making (although we do hear it occasionally even now). But it was not even true under the old common law of England, which, for certain disabilities on the one hand, conceded
to the wife certain corresponding privileges on the other. 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.
If in the face of the facts the word chattel, as applied to the wife, has become a little too preposterous even for Feminist controversial methods, there is another falsehood scarcely less brazen that we hear from Feminist fanatics every day. The wife, we are told, is the only unpaid servant! A more blatant lie could scarcely be imagined. As every educated person possessing the slightest acquaintance with the laws of England knows, the law requires the husband to maintain his wife in a manner according with his own social position; has, in other words, to feed, clothe and afford her all reasonable luxuries, which the law, with a view to the economic standing of the husband, regards as necessaries. This although the husband has no claim on the wife’s property or income, however wealthy she may be. Furthermore, it need scarcely be said, a servant who is inefficient, lazy, or otherwise intolerable, can be dismissed or her wage can be lowered. Not so that privileged person, the legally wedded wife. It matters not whether she perform her duties well, badly, indifferently, or not at all, the husband’s legal