The Fraud of Feminism

by Ernest Belfort Bax

of rogues, the English law of libel, precludes me from referring to individually. As regards the disparity in punishment, however, we have an apt and recent illustration in the execution of the youth of nineteen, convicted on doubtful evidence of the murder of his sweetheart, and the reprieve of the woman convicted on her own admission of the murder of her paramour by soaking him in paraffin during his sleep and setting him alight!

Another effect of the influence of Sentimental Feminism, is seen in crimes of the “unwritten law” description, the crime passionel of the French. The most atrocious and dastardly murders and other crimes of violence are condoned and even glorified if they can but be covered by the excuse that they are dictated by a desire to avenge a woman’s “honour” or to enable her to obtain the object of her wishes. The incident in Sir J. M. Barrie’s play of the lady who murders a man by throwing him out of a railway carriage over a dispute respecting the opening of a window, and gets acquitted on the excuse that her little girl had got a cold, represents a not exaggerated picture of “modern justice”—for women only! The outrageous application of the principles, if such you may call them, of Sentimental Feminism in this country in the case of the suffragettes, has made English justice and penal administration the laughing-stock of the world. But the way in which the crimes of the suffragettes

have been dealt with, is after all only a slight exaggeration of the immunity from all the severer penalties of the law enjoyed by female convicts generally. This has been carried in the case of suffragette criminals to the utmost limits of absurdity. In fact, the deference exhibited towards these deliberate perpetrators of crimes of wanton destruction is sometimes comic, as in the case of the Richmond magistrate who rebuked the policeman-witness in an arson charge for omitting the “Miss” in referring to one of the female prisoners in the dock: as well as in the “high character” usually attributed to the perpetrators of these deeds of outrage and violence even by certain functionaries of Church and State. They did not speak in this strain morebetoken, when mere male anarchists or Fenians were involved in difficulties with the law due to overzeal for their cause!

The whole movement, it is quite evident, depends for its success, largely, at least, on the apathy of men. The bulk of men undoubtedly do not sympathise with the pretensions of the Feminist agitation, but the bulk of men are indifferent one way or the other. They do not take the Feminist Movement seriously. The bare notion of women, as such, being a danger to men as such, strikes them as absurd. They do not realise that the question is not of the physical strength of women as women, but of the whole forces of the State

being at the disposal of women to set in motion to gratify their whims and passions. The idea of a sex war in which women take the field against men, such as represents the inwardness of the whole Feminist Movement of to-day, seems to them ridiculous. The feeling at the root of most men’s good-humoured patronage of, or indifference to, Modern Feminist claims, is roughly expressed in a remark of the late William Morris in replying to some animadversions of mine on the subject:—“What does it matter? A man ought to be always able to deal with a woman if necessary. Why, I could tackle a half dozen women at once for that matter!” This is a common attitude of mind on the subject among otherwise sane and sensible men. 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.”

Modern Feminism, tacking itself on to an older

tradition which it travesties beyond all recognition, has succeeded in affecting modern public opinion with an overpowering sense of the sacrosanctity of human femality as such. It is not content with respect for the ideal of good womanhood but it would fain place on a pedestal the mere fact of femalehood in itself. This is illustrated in a thousand ways. Thus while public opinion tolerates the most bestial and infamous forms of corporal punishment for men in gaols, it will regard the slight chastisement by the medical head of an institution for mental cases, of a girl who is admittedly obstinate and refractory rather than mentally afflicted in the ordinary sense of the term, as “degrading.”

Again, in order to sustain its favourite thesis, the intellectual equality of woman with man, it resorts, whenever a plausible case presents itself, to its usual policy of the falsification of fact. Take the instance of Madame Curie. When radium was first discovered in the laboratory of the late Professor Curie we were told that the latter had made the discovery, it being at the same time mentioned that he possessed in his wife a valuable aid in his laboratory work. We were afterwards told that the discovery of radium was the joint work of both, the implication being that the honours were equally divided. Now, Feminist influence has succeeded in getting Madame Curie spoken of

as herself the discoverer of radium! I venture to affirm that there is no evidence whatever for assuming that radium would ever have seen the light had the late Professor Curie not himself experimented in his laboratory, not to speak of his predecessor Becquerel.

We have seen that Feminists are, in this country, at least, zealous in championing the Puritan view of sexual morality. Many of them, in the vehemence of their Anti-man crusade, look forward with relish to the opportunity they anticipate will be afforded them when women get the vote, of passing laws rigorously enforcing asceticism on men by means of severe penal enactments. All forms of indulgence (by men), sexual or otherwise, uncongenial to the puritanic mind, would be equally placed under the ban of the criminal law! Anyone desirous of testing the truth of the above statement has only to read the suffragette papers and other expositions of the gospel of Feminism as held by its most devoted advocates.