Ernest Belfort Bax

Ernest Belfort Bax.

Ernest Belfort Bax (23 July 1854 – 26 November 1926) was an English barrister, journalist, philosopher, men's rights advocate, socialist, and historian.

Bax was a passionate advocate for the social and legal rights of men, which he saw as lacking in comparison to the legal rights of women. His first major article on the subject was Some Bourgeois Idols; Or Ideals, Reals, and Shams (1886), in which he proposed that women were privileged under law at the expense of men. He was to continue writing articles on this topic for most of his life, published notably in Social Democrat, and Justice, and later in The New Age.

In 1896, he wrote The Legal Subjection of Men whose title is a play on John Stuart Mill's 1869 essay "The Subjection of Women." In the volume, Bax draws on his extensive experience as a barrister to demonstrate the numerous ways in which the legal code favoured women to the detriment of men and boys. Chapters in the book include 'Matrimonial Privileges of Women', 'Non-Matrimonial Privileges of Women', 'The Actual Exercise of Women's Sex Privileges', and 'A Sex Noblesse'.

Bax was an active anti-feminist since, according to him, feminism was failing to address inequities for both sexes evenly. According to Bax, the "anti-man crusades" of his day were responsible for anti-man laws being both preserved from the old legal canon, and for new laws being passed that were also anti-male and sexist. Bax wrote many articles in The New Age and elsewhere about English laws partial to women against men, and women's privileged position before the law, and expressed his view that women's suffrage would unfairly tip the balance of power to women. In 1913 he published a book, The Fraud of Feminism, detailing feminism's adverse effects.

Bax's concern for men's equality fuelled his interest in socialism, to which he turned for a potential solution to what he viewed as the exploitation of males by the capitalist system:

"The highest development of modern capitalism, as exemplified in the English-speaking countries, has placed man to all intents and purposes, legally under the heel of woman. So far as the relations of the sexes are concerned, it would be the task of Socialism to emancipate man from this position, if sex-equality be the goal aimed at. The first step on the road towards such equality would necessarily consist in the abolition of modern female privilege.":

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