The Fraud of Feminism 12

The Fraud of Feminism 12

But these considerations afford only one more illustration of the utter

irrationality of the whole movement of Sentimental Feminism identified

with the notion of “chivalry.” For the rest, we may find illustrations

of this galore. A very flagrant case is that infamous “rule of the

sea” which came so much into prominence at the time of the _Titanic_

disaster. According to this preposterous “chivalric” Feminism, in the

case of a ship foundering, it is the unwritten law of the seas, not

that the passengers shall leave the ship and be rescued in their order

as they come, but that the whole female portion shall have the right of

being rescued before any man is allowed to leave the ship. Now this

abominable piece of sex favouritism, on the face of it, cries aloud in

its irrational injustice. Here is no question of bodily strength or

weakness, either muscular or constitutional. In this respect, for the

nonce, all are on a level. But it is a case of life itself. A number of

poor wretches are doomed to a watery grave, simply and solely because

they have not had the luck to be born of the privileged female sex.

 

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 obligations remain just the same. It will be

seen, therefore, that the wife in any case receives from the husband

economic advantages compared with which the wages of the most highly

paid servant in existence are a mere pauper’s pittance. This talk we

hear _ad nauseam_, from the Feminist side, of the wife being an “unpaid

servant,” is typical of the whole Feminist agitation. We find the same

deliberate and unscrupulous dishonesty characterising it throughout.

Facts are not merely perverted or exaggerated, they are simply turned

upside down.

 

Another statement commonly made is that women’s lower wages as compared

with men’s is the result of not possessing the parliamentary franchise.

Now this statement, though not perhaps bearing on its face the wilful

deception characterising the one just mentioned, is not any the less a

perversion of economic fact, and we can hardly regard it otherwise than

as intentional. It is quite clear that up to date the wages of men have

not been raised by legislation, and yet sections of the working classes

have possessed the franchise at least since 1867. What legislation

has done for the men has been simply to remove obstacles in the way

of industrial organisation on the part of the workman in freeing the

trade unions from disabilities, and even this was begun, owing to

working-class pressure from outside, long before—as long ago as the

twenties of the last century under the auspices of Joseph Hume and

Francis Place. Now women’s unions enjoy precisely the same freedom as

men’s unions, and nothing stands in the way of working women organising

and agitating for higher wages. Those who talk of the franchise as

being necessary for working women in order to obtain equal industrial

and economic advantages with working men must realise perfectly well

that they are performing the oratorical operation colloquially known as

“talking through their hat.” The reasons why the wages of women workers

are lower than those of men, whatever else may be their grounds, and

these are, I think, pretty obvious, clearly are not traceable to

anything which the concession of the franchise would remove. If it be

suggested that a law could be enacted compulsorily enforcing equal

rates of payment for women as for men, what the result would be the

merest tyro in such matters can foresee—to wit, that it would mean the

wholesale displacement of female by male labour over large branches of

industry, and this, we imagine, is not precisely what the advocates of

female suffrage are desirous of effecting.

 

Male labour, owing to its greater efficiency and other causes, being

generally preferred by employers to female labour, it is not likely

that, even for the sake of female _beaux yeux_, they are going to

accept female labour in the place of male, on an equal wage basis.

All this, of course, is quite apart from the question referred

to on a previous page, as to the economic responsibilities in the

interests of women, which our Feminist law-makers have saddled on the

man—namely, the responsibility of the husband, and the husband alone,

for the maintenance of his wife and family, obligations from anything

corresponding to which the female sex is wholly free.

 

In a leaflet issued by the “Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage”

it is affirmed that “many laws are on the statute book which inflict

injustice on Women.” We challenge this statement as an unmitigated

falsehood. Its makers ought to know perfectly well that they cannot

justify it. There are no laws on the statute book inflicting injustice

on women as a Sex, but there are many laws inflicting injustice on

men in the supposed interests of women. The worn-out tag which has so

long done duty with Feminists in this connection—viz. the rule of the

Divorce Court, that in order to procure divorce a wife has to prove

cruelty as well as adultery on the part of a husband, whereas a husband

has to prove adultery alone on the part of a wife—has already been

dealt with and its rottenness as a specimen of a grievance sufficiently

exposed in this work and elsewhere by the present writer. Is what the

authors of the leaflet may possibly have in their mind (if they have

anything at all) when they talk about statutes inflicting injustice

on women, that the law does not carry sex vindictiveness against men

far enough to please them? With all its flogging, penal servitude,

hard labour and the rest, for offences against women, some of them of

a comparatively trivial kind, does the law as regards severity on men

not even yet satisfy the ferocious Feminist souls of the members of the

“Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage”? This is the only explanation

of the statement in question other than that it is sheer bald bluff

designed to mislead those ignorant of the law.

 

Another flagrant falsehood perpetually being dinned into our ears by

the suffragists is the statement that _women have to obey the same laws

as men_. The conclusion drawn from this false statement is, of course,

that since they have to obey these laws equally with men, they have

an equal claim with men to take part in the making or the modifying

of them. Now without pausing to consider the fallacy underlying the

conclusion, we would point out that it is sufficient for our present

purpose to call attention to the falsity of the initial assumption

itself. It needs only one who follows current events and reads his

newspaper with impartial mind to see that to allege that women _have

to_, in the true sense of the words (_i.e._ are compelled to), obey

the same laws as men is a glaringly mendacious statement. It is

unnecessary in this place to go over once more the mass of evidence