The Fraud of Feminism (Ernest Belfort Bax, 1913)

What it is

The Fraud of Feminism, published in 1913 by the British Marxist writer and journalist E. Belfort Bax, is one of the earliest book-length attacks on the women's movement. It argues that the women of its era already enjoyed legal and social advantages rather than facing oppression, and dismisses feminist claims as unchallenged legends or distortions across chapters such as "The Anti-Man Crusade" and "The 'Chivalry' Fake". ^[1] Long out of print, it now circulates freely online and is read mainly as a historical document.

What it anticipates

Read charitably, Bax was gesturing at something not entirely imaginary: that "oppression" and "privilege" are rarely distributed evenly, and that some Edwardian laws and courtroom conventions did treat women more leniently than men. His demand that a movement's rhetoric be measured against actual legal practice is, in the abstract, reasonable. It is largely why Bax is now retrospectively claimed as an intellectual ancestor by the modern men's-rights movement.

Where it does not hold up

The book's central move — generalising from a handful of chivalric legal exceptions to the sweeping claim that women as a class were the advantaged sex — is precisely the reasoning this site catalogues as gynocentrism: treating society's occasional deference toward women as proof that men are the truly oppressed group, while setting aside women's exclusion from the vote, from property rights, and from most professions at the time. The argument is polemical rather than evidential; it names grievances and asserts a conclusion, but never establishes it.

Verdict

Valuable as a primary source — for historians of anti-feminism, and for readers tracing where today's arguments were first assembled — but unreliable as a description of how power actually worked in 1913, and no guide at all to gender relations now.