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Eleanor
Marx, Belfort Bax and “the Woman Question”
The barrister and writer Ernest Belfort Bax (1854-1925), even though he
was a prominent member of the Social Democratic Federation and had even
been for a while in the Socialist League with William Morris, was
notoriously prejudiced against women, even to the extent of arguing
against giving them the vote and of regarding them as being in a
privileged position compared with men.
This was a very strange position to be taken up by the co-author with
William Morris of Socialism From the Root Up or Socialism Its Growth
and Outcome and of a number of other articles expressing socialist
ideas. So strange in fact that his socialist credentials have to be
challenged.
One person who did challenge him on the issue was Marx’s daughter,
Eleanor, then calling herself Eleanor Marx Aveling, adding to her name
that of the man she was living with without being married.
Bax had written an article on “The Woman Question” that was published
in the SDF’s paper Justice in its 27 July 1895 issue (see
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1895/07/woman.htm). This expressed
the position he summed up in a later article (30 November) as:
“( . . .) In conclusion I will give, once for all, in a few words my
position on this question, cleared of the prejudice imported into it by
railing accusations of woman-hating and other objectionable qualities.
1. I utterly dispute the validity of the attempted analogy between
women as a sex and the proletariat as a class, on which analogy the
plausibility of the “woman movement” for Socialists so largely rests.
2. While fully recognising the oppression of the capitalist system on
women as on men, I deny that, on the whole, it presses more on women
than on men, as such.
3. Coming to the question of direct sex-tyranny, if we are to talk of
this I am prepared to prove that, at least in all countries where the
Anglo-Saxon is dominant, viz., in Britain and its colonies, in the
United States, &c., it is invariably men who, both by law and
public opinion, are oppressed in the supposed interests of women and
not vice versa.
4. That the few (mainly formal) disabilities of women in politics or
elsewhere which are perpetually being trotted out, are more than
compensated for, by special privileges in other directions.
5. That the woman’s rights agitation as hitherto conducted, in which
the “brute man” plays the role of villain, was born of hysterics and
“sour grapes,” and is kept alive by a bare-faced system of “bluff,” and
both the suppression and perversion of fact, intended to work on the
sentimental male with a view of placing women in a safe citadel of
privilege and sex-domination – the talk of equality being a mere blind.
I am prepared to maintain any or all of these propositions in writing
with anyone.”
This sparked off a discussion in the paper’s correspondence column and
led to Eleanor Marx issuing the following challenge to Bax to debate
the matter at a public meeting:
“Dear Comrade, - As JUSTICE, “the Organ of the Social Democracy,”
appears to adopt comrade Bax as the exponent on the sex (not woman)
question, and as the subject is certainly one worthy consideration and
debate, I desire, through your columns, to challenge my friend Bax to a
public debate with me on the subject. The debate to take place in some
hall in London before the end of the year, so that the proceeds of it
(whether from payments for admission or collection on the evening) may
be handed over to H. Quelch, hon. Treasurer of the Zurich Committee for
the International Trades Union and Socialist Workers’ Congress, 1896.
The debate to follow the usual lines, 30 minutes on each side, and then
two quarters of an hour for each speaker consecutively. Bax, as
propounder of the general proposition , to open. Chairman to be
mutually agreed upon. - Fraternally yours,
ELEANOR MARX AVELING.” (Justice, 16 November 1895)
Bax turned down the proposal of a public debate and instead proposed a
written exchange, as the following item from the 23 November issue of
Justice reported:
“Mrs. Aveling sends us the following for publication: -
National Liberal Club,
Whitehall Place, S. W.
Saturday.
Dear Mrs Aveling, - I am perfectly ready to undertake a debate on the
woman question in writing with you or any other accredited
representative of “Woman’s Rights”, but I am too little au fait with
oratorical tricks and platform claptrap to be able to successfully
defend the most simple and obvious propositions under the conditions
proposed even if there were no shrieking crowd against which my voice
would find it impossible to contend.
I will enter upon a literary debate on similar lines to that I had with
Bradlaugh on Socialism, and shall be pleased to arrange for such a
discussion. My weapons in this controversy are fact and argument and
not ill-manners and name-calling either direct or indirect. This being
so I naturally prefer the written method, when fact and argument are
“ausschlaggeben.” - Yours sincerely,
E. BELFORT BAX.
To the above the following reply has been sent: -
Green Street Green,
Orpington,
Nov, 19, 1895.
Dear Bax, - I am in receipt of your letter (undated). I offered to
debate with you on the Sex Question. I am, of course a Socialist, not a
representative of “Woman’s Rights”. It is the Sex Question and its
economic basis that I proposed to discuss with you. The so-called
“Woman’s Rights” question (which appears to be the only one you
understand) is a bourgeois idea. I proposed to deal with the Sex
Question from the point of view of the working class and the class
struggle.
I may remind you that “tricks” and “claptrap” are not confined to the
platform. There are, as you know, literary tricks and journalistic
claptrap. With a fair and able chairman there would be no shrieking
crowd; and you have no more right to assume that those holding the
views I should attempt to put forward would “shriek” than I have to
assume that your supporters would howl. I remind you that you recently
gave an address, followed by an open debate, upon this very subject, at
Essex Hall, Strand. I fail to see, therefore, why you do not take up my
challenge now. I here repeat it, and will, if you wish it, debate at
Essex Hall. And if you still refuse I shall give a lecture, probably at
the Athenaeum Hall, Tottenham Court Road, some Saturday in December, on
“Mr Bax and the Sex Question”. The proceeds of this lecture will be
given to the Zurich Committee Fund for the International Socialist and
Trade Union Congress to be held in London in 1896, - Yours faithfully,
ELEANOR MARX AVELING.”
Eleanor Marx went ahead with her lecture, with the following notice
appearing in Justice of 7 December:
The Sex Question
Eleanor Marx Aveling
will lecture on
“Mr. Bax and the Sex Question”
at the
ATHENAEUM HALL,
73, Tottenham Court Road.
At 8 P.M., on
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21st, 1895.
Admission 1s, 6d, and 3d.
All proceeds to go to the funds of the Zurich Committee,
International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress,
London, 1896.
Unfortunately, no report of what she said appeared in Justice, so we
can only surmise, from the hints in the above letters, that she would
have analysed the “Woman’s Rights” movement as one of woman
property-owners to secure equal rights with men property-owners and
argued that women workers were exploited alongside men workers and that
both should join together in waging the class struggle that would
eventually end in the establishment of socialism which would be “a
society in which all the means of production are the property of the
community, a society which recognises the full equality of all without
distinction of sex” as she and Aveling quoted from Bebel’s Woman—Past,
Present and Future which they jointly reviewed for the Westminster
Review in 1886 http://www.marxists.org/archive/eleanor-marx/works/womanq.htm
Bax insisted on having the last word, accusing Eleanor Marx of having
refused to debate in writing, while in fact it was he who had refused
her challenge to a public oral debate (despite being a barrister), and
re-iterating his prejudiced views on women:
“Dear Comrade, - Now that the “Woman” controversy in JUSTICE is over,
and that Mrs. Aveling has prudently shirked my offer to meet her in
debate on mutually fair terms, I should be obliged if you will allow me
to state that I am still prepared to debate in writing on the basis of
the five points laid down by me in my last JUSTICE letter on the
subject, with any representative advocate of (so-called) “Woman’s
Rights” (i.e., the further increase of the sex-privileges of women), or
with any representative Socialist who is opposed to me in this question
. . .(Justice, 4 January, 1896).
Bax, incidentally, wrote his letters from the National Liberal Club, an
all-male establishment (of course) which included leading members of
the Liberal Party, to which the SDF was supposed to be implacably
opposed. Henry Hyndman, the SDF’s leader, was also a member, an
indication of how reformist the top leaders of the SDF had become.
It only remains to add that things ended tragically for Eleanor Marx,
who committed suicide in 1898, at the age of 43, after she learned that
Aveling had gone off with another woman.
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