Ernest Belfort Bax on ‘The False Idol of Equality Between the Sexes’ (1886)

Excerpt from ‘Some Bourgeois Idols’ (1886) – Ernest Belfort Bax

Let us take another idol. This time we tread on sacred ground indeed – equality between the sexes. Well may the iconoclastic hand tremble before levelling a blow at this new Serapis. Nevertheless here also – as the phrase is understood by the ordinary modern woman’s rights advocate – we are bound to recognise a vampire. In earlier stages of social development, woman was placed in a condition of undoubted social inferiority to man. Into the grounds of this inferiority it is unnecessary here to enter. Suffice it to say it existed, and that against the state of things it implied the cry of “equality between the sexes” was raised, at first in a veiled, and afterwards in an open manner. For some time it represented a real tendency towards equality by the removal of certain undoubted grievances. But for some time past the tendency of the bourgeois world, as expressed in its legislation and sentiment, has been towards a factitious exaltation of the woman at the expense of the man – in other words, the cry for “equality between the sexes” has in the course of its realisation become a sham, masking a de facto inequality. The inequality in question presses as usual, heaviest on working-man, whose wife, to all intents and purposes has him completely in her power. If dissolute or drunken, she can sell up his goods or break up his home at pleasure, and still compel him to keep her and live with her to her life’s end. There is no law to protect him. On the other hand, let him but raise a finger in a moment of exasperation against this precious representative of the sacred principle of “womanhood,” and straightway he is consigned to the treadmill for his six months amid the jubilation of the D.T. and its kindred, who pronounce him a brute and sing paeans over the power of the “law” to protect the innocent and helpless female. Thus does bourgeois society offer sacrifice to the idol “equality between the sexes.” For the law jealously guards, the earnings or property of the wife from possible spoliation. She on any colourable pretext can obtain magisterial separation and “protection.”

Again, we have the same principle illustrated in the truly bestial outcry raised every now and again by certain persons for the infliction of the punishment of flogging on men, for particular offences, notably “assaults on women and children.” As a matter of fact, in the worst cases of cruelty to children, women are the criminals. Some few months back there was a horrible instance in which a little girl was done to death by a stepmother in circumstances of the most loathsome barbarity: yet these horror-stricken advocates of the lash never venture to support flogging as a wholesome corrective to viragos of this description. It would be opposed to middle-class sentiment, which would regard such a proposition as blasphemy against the sacred principle of “femality.” No other explanation is possible, since it can hardly be assumed that even the bourgeois mind is incapable of grasping the obvious fact that a man pinioned and in the hands of half a dozen prison-warders, is in precisely as helpless a condition as any woman in a like cage, and that, therefore, the brutality or cowardice of the proceeding is no greater in the one case than in the other. The bourgeois conception of “equality between the sexes” is aptly embodied in that infamous clause of the “Criminal Law Amendment Act,” which provides that in case of illicit intercourse, between a boy and girl under sixteen years of age, though the girl escapes scot free, the boy is liable, to five years imprisonment in a reformatory.

Even the great Radical nostrum which is supposed to involve the quintessence of political equality, is, when closely viewed, the hollowest of shams. The revolutionary socialist perhaps does not much concern himself about questions of the suffrage, esteeming but lightly the privilege of electing men to help to carry on the present system of society, which he believes destined to perish before long. But looked at from the ordinary point of view, it is quite clear that considering the fact that the female population of England is in excess of the male by about a million, female suffrage, in spite of its apparent embodiment of the principle of equality, really means, if it means anything at all (which may be doubtful) the handing over of the complete control of the state to one sex. These are only a few of the illustrations which might be multiplied almost indefinitely, of the truth that the tendency of the modern middle-class world, is, while proclaiming the principle of “equality between the sexes” in opposition to the feudal subjection of woman, to erect, the female sex into a quasi-privileged class. The real equality between the sexes aimed at by socialism is as, I take it, much opposed to this Brummagem sentiment and sham equality, as it is to the female slavery of ancient times of which, of course, we do not wish to deny that survivals remain even at the present day. With the economic emancipation of woman and the gradual transformation of the state-system of to-day into an international league free communes, the feudal subjection of women to man and the middle-class subjection of man to woman will be alike at an end.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1886/04/idols.htm

The Strong Arm Squad of the Future (ca. 1912)

Votes For Women & Sexual Morality

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Excerpt from ‘Votes for Women’ (Paula Bartley) Hodder Education

The Contagious Diseases Act & The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a number of women were dismayed by the sexual double standard whereby women had to remain virginal before marriage and faithful inside it. On the other hand, a blind eye was turned if men had sex with more than one partner. One of women’s greatest victories was the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDAs). These Acts, the first of which had been passed in 1864, allowed police in a number of garrison towns and naval ports the right to arrest women suspected of being common prostitutes and require them to be medically examined for sexually transmitted diseases. If found infected, women could be detained for treatment. This, according to feminists, was unfair, because it blamed prostitutes for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, not the men who used their services. Under the leadership of Josephine Butler, the Ladies’ National Association led a campaign to repeal these acts and eventually succeeded 22 years after they had been passed.

The success of this campaign prompted feminists to launch a crusade against the sexual exploitation of young girls. In 1885 they achieved a victory when the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of sexual consent to 16, was passed. Feminists and others founded the National Vigilance Association to ensure that this act was put into practice and to promote equal high moral standards between the sexes. Edwardian feminists, such as Christabel Pankhurst, took up the social purity cause and demanded that men improve their moral code by remaining chaste outside marriage. Although feminists achieved a small victory in repealing CDAs, the campaign to raise moral standards can be considered to have failed miserably. Today sex before marriage is accepted by the majority of people living in Britain, a fact that would have dismayed these early reformers.

The Suffragettes and Sexual Morality

Until the work of feminist historians in the 1970’s, most history texts ignored the emphasis placed on sex and morality by the suffragists and suffragettes. The few historians who did mention it ridiculed the suffragettes. For instance, the suffragette slogan ‘Votes for Women and Chastity for Men‘ is seen as an amusing peculiarity by George Dangerfield in the 1930’s and Roger Fulford in the 1950’s and as an example of spinsterish eccentricity by Andrew Rosen in the 1970s. However, the relationship between sexuality and the vote has enjoyed a long history in the annals of women’s suffrage. Both the suffragists and the suffragettes placed women’s franchise within the wider context of sexual politics and took the question of sexuality very earnestly indeed. For some suffrage campaigners such as Millicent Fawcett and Christabel Pankhurst the vote was as much about improving men’s sexual morality as it was about improving women’s working conditions.

Anti-Suffragette Postcards Posters & Cartoons

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A collection of cartoons and posters mocking the suffragette campaigns for votes for women :

Suffragette Plain Things

Suffragettes Who Have Never Been Kissed c.1910 UK

Origin and Development of a Suffragette

When Women Wear Pants, c.1915 USA

We Want the Vote 1910 UK

Woman’s Rights 1910 USA

Did I Save My Country For This?

Flapper 1925 USA anti-feminist postcard

We Don’t Know What We Want But We’ll Get It

Anti-Suffrage postcard, unknown date

Nobody Loves Me

Home for Lost, Stolen or Strayed Suffragettes

The Suffragette. “I told you so.” [Postcard]
Copyright 1909, by Walter Wellman

The poster reads:
“The Morning Suffragette Bulletin.
A New Era of Prosperity at Hand.
With the news that a suffragette has been elected as our next presidentess, several flatiron and rolling pin factories have resumed on full time.
It is stated that 10,000,000 faltirons have been ordered by the new War Department alone.”

Card reads:
“If you will only marry me you can have all woman’s rights
Such as staying up on evenings when I’m out late at nights
And should such things not satisfy the longings of your soul
You can wash up all the dishes and carry all the coal
As a really model husband I feel I’m bound to shine
So say that you take me to be Your Valentine”

A Procession of Suffragettes

Suffragists On The War Path

Suffragettes Attacking House of Commons

Call of the Wild

The Wild Rose

What I Would Do With The Suffragists

A History of Feminism

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Feminism exists as a defender of the selfish sexual and reproductive interests of aging and/or unattractive women. This is its entire raison d’etre, the reason it first came into existence with the social purity movement reformers of the 19th century, led by their harridan battle cry – ‘armed with the ballot the mothers of America will legislate morality’.

And legislate morality these pioneering feminists quickly did, even before they had won the vote. That is, they successfully lobbied for restrictions on prostitution, a rise in the age of consent from 12 to 16, or even 18, and the closing down of saloons where their husbands might mix freely with unattached young women.

To feminists, and indeed, to the vast majority of the female sex who give feminists the power to speak on their behalf, morality is little more than ensuring the reproductive and sexual interests of a post-peak fertility female who relies on heavy parental investment from a committed male partner. The extent of female desire for involvement in the political process is directly proportionate to the threat that women feel in a free sexual market.

And as that threat grows, so the ostensible power of feminism grows.

The history of feminism is the history of a female sexual trade union, growing in political power in exact correspondence with the steady loss of female sexual power caused by the continual widening of the sexual market. The opening up of the sex market, the ever increasing opportunities for men to gain access to cheap and anonymous sex, is the result of constantly emerging new technology, and itself completely out of the hands of feminists, or anybody else, to control or put a stop to.

Recently, W.F.Price at the Spearhead revealed that proto-feminists were lobbying the British government as far back as the 17th century when their sexual interests were seen as threatened by the emergence of male frequented coffee houses. This was a prelude to the social purity movements of the 19th century, described above, which feminist academics have always acknowledged as the birth pangs of the campaign for the vote.

But the vote was always seen as a means to the end of controlling male sexuality. Industrialisation had brought men out of the countryside and into the cities, working in close contact with women and girls in the new factories – girls who were no longer married off as soon as they reached puberty. Those same factories mass produced cheap condoms (bitterly opposed by feminists at the time), and men no longer had to fear syphilis – and could now enjoy the hundreds of thousands of prostitutes who flocked to the new cities to take their share of the working man’s growing income.

The suffragettes achieved the vote as a result of violence and of male Enlightenment thinking which saw women’s enfranchisement as a natural progression of other civil rights movements.

But in fact, women did not exercise their newly won franchise very differently then their husbands, and when they did vote differently, it was to vote in fascist dictatorships throughout Europe. It was not until the 1960′s, and the second wave of feminism, that women began voting significantly differently from men…

The 1960′s saw the beginning of possibly the most remarkable event in human history – the end of ‘patriarchy.’ Within the space of a generation, a social system that had endured in every corner of the globe throughout recorded history had more or less crumbled.

In every corner of the globe…except the Islamic world.

In his book The Decline of the Male, anthropologist Lionel Tiger identifies the introduction of the contraceptive pill as the trigger for this unparalleled social revolution, the ‘second wave of feminism.’ For Lionel Tiger, the pill shifted reproductive power from men to women, for men could no longer be sure as to the paternity of their offspring.

I don’t accept all of the details of Tiger’s thesis, but I agree wholeheartedly that the pill was a catalyst for the second wave of feminism

An unforeseen technological innovation had revolutionised sexual relations and, in a blind and uncontrollable way, had transformed society almost overnight.

According to most feminist thinkers (and many MRAs), the pill gave women power over men. I disagree. In fact, it was male sexuality that was liberated by the pill, and women – or at least older/unattractive women – were left dangerously exposed in the free sexual market that had suddenly been created.

Suddenly, women became active in politics. Suddenly, women demanded (and won) the right to university education, to a career, to easy divorce, to an abortion. Suddenly male politicians had to legislate according to the female vote.

The pill did not give women power over men.

The pill forced women to take power from men.

But, of course, this did not happen in the majority of Muslim societies. Under Islam, there is still no free sexual market, and thus unattractive Muslim women have no need for feminism.

The astonishing and sudden representation of women at all levels of government over the last decade may fairly be described as the Third Wave of Feminism. In just one or two decades, from having virtually zero representation in high government, the female sex has come to near dominate many of the leading democracies of the West, even in South America.

Alongside formal governmental representation, largely female dominated non-governmental pressure groups have suddenly come to hold massive sway over an increasingly powerful United Nations, as well as other international bodies such as the European Union.

Why has this astonishing Third Wave, no less extraordinary than the Second, suddenly come about? That this is the first generation of women raised as feminists no doubt has played a part but it cannot alone explain the sheer rapidity of change. Like the first and second waves of feminism, the third has been propelled by technological progress threatening the sexual interests of ordinary women.

The globalisation of society and of communications has threatened to further open up the free sexual market to an extent as great as the pill itself did.

Suddenly men had before them a whole new array of alternatives to a ‘real’ sexual relationship, from the cheap Polish hooker at the street corner, to the nubile young slut showing herself on cam from her bedroom half way across the world.

This was a brave new sexual world that an already politicised generation of middle-aged women could not tolerate for long…and certainly not entrust to men to control or put an end to.

The Future of Feminism

The future of feminism will be dictated by the same forces that have shaped its history – blind and largely uncontrollable economic and technological changes continuing to widen the free sexual market.

The further increase in mass global communications, advances in robotics, 3D and holographic porn, virtual sex, and the growing realism and popularity of male sex toys, are all rapidly coalescing into a perfect storm that will either achieve sexual and emotional independence for men…or a fourth wave of feminism even more terrible and damaging than the rest.