The Fraud of Feminism 7

The Fraud of Feminism 7

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 husband, if a poor man,

on her release will be compelled to take her back to live with him.

The case came under the notice of the writer a few years ago in which

a humane magistrate was constrained to let off a woman who had nearly

murdered a husband on the condition of her graciously consenting to a

separation, but she had presumably still to be supported by her victim.

 

The decision in the notorious Jackson case precluded the husband from

compelling his wife to obey an order of the court for the restitution

of conjugal rights. The persistent Feminist tendency of all case-law is

illustrated by a decision of the House of Lords in 1894 in reference

to the law of Scotland constituting desertion for four years a ground

_ipso facto_ for a divorce with the right of remarriage. Here divorce

was refused to a man whose wife had left him for four years and taken

her child with her. The Law Lords justified their own interpretation

of the law on the ground that the man did not really want her to come

back. But inasmuch as this plea can be started in every case where

it cannot be proved that the husband had absolutely grovelled before

his wife, imploring her to return, and possibly even then—since the

sincerity even of this grovelling might conceivably be called in

question—it is clear that the decision practically rendered this old

Scottish law inoperative for the husband.

 

As regards the offence of bigamy, for which a man commonly receives

a heavy sentence of penal servitude, I think I may venture to state,

without risking contradiction, that no woman during recent years has

been imprisoned for this offence. The statute law, while conferring

distinct privileges upon married women as to the control of their

property, and for trading separately and apart from their husbands,

renders them exempt from the ordinary liabilities incurred by a male

trader as regards proceedings under the Debtors Acts and the Bankruptcy

Law. See Acts of 1822 (45 & 46 Vict. c. 75); 1893 (56 & 57 Vict. c.

63), and cases Scott _v._ Morley, 57 L.J.R.Q.B. 43. L.R. 20 Q.B.D. In

_re_ Hannah Lines _exparte_ Lester C.A. (1893), 2. 2. B. 113.

 

In the case of Lady Bateman _v._ Faber and others reported in

Chancery Appeal Cases (1898 Law Reports) the Master of the Rolls

(Sir N. Lindley) is reported to have said: “The authorities showed

that a married woman could not by hook or by crook—even by her own

fraud—deprive herself of restraint upon anticipation. He would say

nothing as to the policy of the law, but it had been affirmed by the

Married Woman’s Property Act” (the Act of 1882 above referred to) “and

the result was that a married woman could play fast and loose to an

extent to which no other person could.” (_N.B._—Presumably a male

person.)

 

It has indeed been held, to such a length does the law extend its

protection and privileges to the female, that even the concealment

by a wife from the husband at the time of marriage that she was then

pregnant by another man was no ground for declaring the marriage null

and void.

 

The above may be taken as a fair all-round, although by no means an

exhaustive, statement of the present one-sided condition of the civil

law as regards the relation of husband and wife. We will now pass on to

the consideration of the relative incidence of the criminal law on the

two sexes. We will begin with the crime of murder. The law of murder is

still ostensibly the same for both sexes, but in effect the application

of its provisions in the two cases is markedly different. As, however,

these differences lie, as just stated, not in the law itself but rather

in its administration, we can only give in this place, where we are

dealing with the principles of law rather than with their application,

a general formula of the mode in which the administration of the

law of murder proceeds, which, briefly stated, is as follows: The

evidence even to secure conviction in the case of a woman must be many

times stronger than that which would suffice to hang a man. Should a

conviction be obtained, the death penalty, though pronounced, is not

given effect to, the female prisoner being almost invariably reprieved.

In most cases where there is conviction at all, it is for manslaughter

and not for murder, when a light or almost nominal sentence is passed.

Cases confirming what is here said will be given later on. There is one

point, however, to be observed here, and that is the crushing incidence

of the law of libel. This means that no case of any woman, however

notoriously guilty on the evidence, can be quoted, after she has been

acquitted by a Feminist jury, as the law holds such to be innocent and

provides them with “a remedy” in a libel action. Now, seeing that most

women accused of murder are acquitted irrespective of the evidence, it

is clear that the writer is fatally handicapped so far as confirmation

of his thesis by cases is concerned.

 

Women are to all intents and purposes allowed to harass men, when they

conceive they have a grievance, at their own sweet will, the magistrate

usually telling their victim that he cannot interfere. In the opposite

case, that of a man harassing a woman, the latter has invariably to

find sureties for his future good behaviour, or else go to gaol.

 

One of the most infamous enactments indicative of Feminist sex bias

is the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1886. The Act itself was led

up to with the usual effect by an unscrupulous newspaper agitation

in the Feminist and Puritan interest, designed to create a panic in

the public mind, under the influence of which legislation of this

description can generally be rushed through Parliament. The reckless

disregard of the commonest principles of justice and common-sense of

this abominable statute may be seen in the shameless sex privilege it

accords the female in the matter of seduction. Under its provisions a

boy of fourteen years can be prosecuted and sent to gaol for an offence

to which he has been instigated by a girl just under sixteen years,

whom the law, of course, on the basis of the aforesaid sex privilege,

holds guiltless. The outrageous infamy of this provision is especially

apparent when we consider the greater precocity of the average girl as