| FRAUD OF FEMINISM. |
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| THE FRAUD OF FEMINISM BY E. BELFORT BAX ---------------------------------------------------------------- |
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL
THE position of women in social life was for a
long time a matter of course. It did not arise as
a question, because it was taken for granted. The
dominance of men seemed to derive so obviously
from natural causes, from the possession of faculties
physical, moral and intellectual, in men, which
were wanting in women, that no one thought of
questioning the situation. At the same time, the
inferiority of woman was never conceived as so
great as to diminish seriously, much less to eliminate
altogether, her responsibility for crimes she might
commit. There were cases, of course, such as that
of offences committed by women under coverture
[legal "covering" by the husband], in which a diminution
of responsibility was recognised and was given effect
to
in condonation of the offence and in mitigation of the
punishment. But there was no sentiment in general in
favour of a female more than of a male criminal. It
entered into the head of no one to weep tears of pity
over the murderess of a lover or husband rather than
over the murderer of a sweetheart or wife. Simi-
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larly, minor offenders, a female blackmailer, a female
thief, a female perpetrator of an assault, was not
deemed less guilty or worthy of more lenient
treatment than a male offender in like cases. The
law, it was assumed, and the assumption was acted
upon, was the same for both sexes. The sexes
were equal before the law. The laws were
harsher in some respects than now, although not
perhaps in all. But there was no special line of
demarcation as regards the punishment of offences
as between men and women. The penalty
ordained by the law for crime or misdemeanour
was the same for both and in general applied
equally to both. Likewise in civil suits, pro-
ceedings were not specially weighted against the
man and in favour of the woman. There was, as
a general rule, no very noticeable sex partiality
in the administration of the law.
This state of affairs continued in England till
well into the nineteenth century. Thenceforward
a change began to take place. Modern Feminism
rose slowly above the horizon. Modern Feminism
has two distinct sides to it: (1) an articulate
political and economic side embracing demands for
so-called rights; and (2) a sentimental side which
insists in an accentuation of the privileges and
immunities which have grown up, not articulately
or as the result of definite demands, but as the
consequence of sentimental pleading in particular
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cases. In this way, however, a public opinion became
established, finding expression in a sex favouritism
in the law and even still more in its administration,
in favour of women as against men.
These two sides of Modern Feminism are not
necessarily combined in the same person. One may,
for example, find opponents of female suffrage
who are strong advocates of sentimental favourit-
ism towards women in matters of law and its
administration. On the other hand you may find,
though this is more rare, strong advocates of political
and other rights for the female sex, who sincerely
deprecate the present inequality of the law in
favour of women. As a rule, however, the two
sides go together, the vast bulk of the advocates
of "Women's Rights" being equally keen on the
retention and extension of women's privileges.
Indeed, it would seem as though the main object
of the bulk of the advocates of the "Woman's
Movement" was to convert the female sex into the
position of a dominant sexe noblesse [sex nobility].
The two sides of Feminism have advanced hand in
hand for the last two generations, though it was the
purely sentimental side that first appeared as a
factor in public opinion.
The attempt to paint women in a different light
to the traditional one of physical, intellectual and
moral inferiority to men, probably received its
first literary expression in a treatise published in
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1532 by Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim entitled
De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Feminei Sexus and
dedicated to Margaret, Regent of the Netherlands,
whose favour Agrippa was at that time desirous of
courting. The ancient world has nothing to offer
in the shape of literary forerunners of Modern
Feminism, although that industrious collector of
historical odds and ends, Valerius Maximus, re-
lates the story of one Afrania who, with some of her
friends, created disturbances in the Law Courts of
ancient Rome in her attempt to make women's
voices heard before the tribunals. As regards
more recent ages, after Agrippa, we have to wait
till the early years of the eighteenth century for
another instance of Feminism before its time, in an
essay on the subject of woman by Daniel Defoe.
But it was not till the closing years of the
eighteenth century that any considerable ex-
pression of opinion in favour of changing the
relative positions of the sexes, by upsetting the
view of their respective values, founded on the
general experience of mankind, made itself notice-
able.
The names of Mary Wollstonecraft in English
literature and of Condorcet in French, will hardly fail
to occur to the reader in this connection. During
the French Revolution the crazy Olympe de
Gouges achieved ephemeral notoriety by her claim
for the intellectual equality of women with men.
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Up to this time (the close of the eighteenth
century) no advance whatever had been made
by legislation in recognising the modern theory
of sex quality. The claims of women and their
apologists for entering upon the functions of men,
political, social or otherwise, although put forward
from time to time by isolated individuals, received
little countenance from public opinion, and still
less from the law. What I have called, how-
ever, the sentimental aspect of Modern Feminism
undoubtedly did make some headway in public
opinion by the end of the eighteenth century, and
grew in volume during the early years of the
nineteenth century. It effectuated in the Act
passed in 1820 by the English Parliament abolish-
ing the punishment of flogging for female criminals.
This was the first beginning of the differentiation of
the sexes in the matter of the criminal law. The
parliamentary debate on the Bill in question shows
clearly enough the power that Sentimental 1 Femi-
1 I should explain that I attach a distinct meaning to
the
word sentimental ; as used by me it does not signify,
as it does
with most people, an excess of sentiment over and
above what
I feel myself, but a sentiment unequally distributed.
As used
in this sense, the repulsion to the flogging of women
while no
repulsion is felt to the flogging of men is
sentimentalism pure
and simple. On the other hand the objection to
flogging
altogether as punishment for men or women could
not be de-
scribed as sentimentalism, whatever else it might be.
In the
same way the anti-vivisectionist's aversion to
"physiological"
experiments on animals, if confined to household
pets and not 15
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