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The Spinster and Her Enemies

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The Spinster and Her Enemies Sheila Jeffreys is a lesbian and a revolutionary feminist who has been active in feminist campaigns against male violence, pornography and prostitution in Britain and in Australia for twenty years. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne, where she teaches sexual politics and lesbian and gay politics. She has written three previous books on the politics of sexuality, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (1990), The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution (1993), and The Idea of Prostitution (1997). OTHER BOOKS BY SHEILA JEFFREYS Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (1990) The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution (1993) The Idea of Prostitution (1997) The Sexuality Papers: Male Sexuality and the Social Control of Women (1987) Co-editor Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History (1989) Contributing editor THE SPINSTER AND HER ENEMIES FEMINISM AND SEXUALITY 1880–1930 Sheila Jeffreys Spinifex Press Pty Ltd 504 Queensberry Street North Melbourne, Vic. 3051 Australia [email protected] http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/~women Copyright © Sheila Jeffreys, 1985 First published by Pandora Press, London This edition published by Spinifex Press, 1997 Copyright © introduction to this edition Sheila Jeffreys, 1997 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book. Copying for educational purposes Where copies of part or the whole of the book are made under part VB of the Copyright Act, the law requires that prescribed procedures be followed. For information, contact the Copyright Agency Limited. Cover design by Kim Roberts Made and printed in Australia by Australian Print Group National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Jeffreys, Sheila. The spinster and her enemies: feminism and sexuality, 1880–1930. {New ed.}. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 875559 63 9 1. Feminism—England—History. 2. Sexual ethics for women— England—History. 3. Single women—England—Sexual behaviour—History. I. Title 305.420942 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Preface to 1997 edition ix Introduction 1 1 Feminism and Social Purity 6 2 Continence and Psychic Love 27 3 ‘The sort of thing that might happen to any man’: Feminist campaigns and politics around the sexual abuse of children 54 4 ‘Henpecking’: Women’s campaigns to gain legislation against the sexual abuse of girls 72 5 Spinsterhood and Celibacy 86 6 Women’s Friendships and Lesbianism 102 7 Antifeminism and Sex Reform before the First World War 128 8 The Decline of Militant Feminism 147 9 The Invention of the Frigid Woman 165 10 The ‘Prudes’ and the ‘Progressives’ 186 v CONTENTS Afterword 194 Notes 197 Bibliography 215 Index 227 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the Patriarchy Study Group from 1978 to 1981 I was able to refine my ideas on sexuality through weekends of intense and exciting discussion with other revolutionary feminists including Al Garthwaite, Jackie Plaister, Lal Coveney, Leslie Kay, Margaret Jackson, Marianne Hester, Pat Mahoney, Sandra McNeill, Valerie Sinclair. I am grateful to them all. The lesbians I have worked with in Women against Violence against Women have sustained me both personally and politically, particularly Linda Bellos and Jill Radford. I would like to thank the women in the South West London Women’s Studies Group through which I was launched into women’s studies teaching, and the women in my classes who have been consistently supportive and encouraging. I would like to thank those who gave me practical help in my research. I am grateful to Jalna Hanmer and Hilary Rose of the Department of Applied Social Studies at the University of Brad-ford for encouraging me to take up research and providing the facilities to begin this project. David Doughan of the Fawcett Library has shown unfailing interest and given me invaluable assistance. Special thanks to Maggie Christie who compiled the index and to my editor, Philippa Brewster. Most of all I am indebted to Carolle S.Berry for the love and support which she has given me throughout the writing of this book. She has spent a great number of hours listening to me, contributing her thoughts and clarifications and organising piles of papers and lists of what I was to do next. If this acknowledgments page sounds like a tribute to womens’s love and friendship that is because it is that love and friendship that has enabled me to keep my ideas running against the grain for so long. vii PREFACE TO 1997 EDITION I began the research which became this book in 1978. At that time I was involved in the recently formed Leeds Rape Crisis Centre in the UK. I was concerned to develop my knowledge and responses to child sexual abuse, a form of men’s sexual violence which was just becoming an important issue for feminist theorists and activists (Armstrong, 1978; Rush, 1980). At this time we were quite unaware that this issue had been central to the concerns of a previous generation of feminists. I was an historian by training and was amazed to discover in the Fawcett Library, a library of resources and archives on women’s history, that there had been a massive feminist campaign against men’s sexual abuse of children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of which contemporary feminists knew almost nothing. I was excited to find out that the ideas and tactics of our foresisters were so similar to those we had reinvented in the 1970s. I discovered that this campaign was wide ranging. It was directed to changing attitudes to and treatment of the victims, gaining heavier sentences for male abusers and changing the laws to raise the age of consent. Feminists involved developed ideas about sexuality which challenged the double standard, rape and the compulsory nature of sexual intercourse. In particular they mounted a great challenge to men’s prerogatives of sexual access to women, to prostituted women, to children, to resistant wives, and supported the ideas of spinsterhood and celibacy. The campaign went on for over fifty years. I wanted to know why it had subsided. As I pursued this detective story it became clear to me that a change in the ideology of sexuality was instrumental in undermining the feminist campaign. This change was created by the new ‘science’ of sexology. With all the authority of science, sexology promoted precisely the form ix PREFACE TO 1997 EDITION of male sexual behaviour the feminists were challenging: male dominance and aggression and female submission. In the early 1980s feminist campaigners against male violence, like myself and others in the London Revolutionary Feminist Anti-Pornography Group, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), and those in rape crisis centres, were dismayed to discover the direction that some feminist thinkers on sexuality were taking. Our belief that male sexual violence could only be challenged by transforming male sexuality, dismantling the dominance/submission model and creating a very different feminist sexuality, was opposed by sexual libertarianism. We read the 1981 Sex Issue of Heresies from the US in which Pat Califia argued for lesbian sadomasochism as exciting sex and Paula Webster argued that pornography and feminism were compatible because pornography would provide women with exciting fantasies and possibilities about sex (Califia, 1981; Webster, 1981). The collection of writings on sadomasochism from the Californian group Samois, Coming to Power, provided both seedy scenarios and intellectual justifications of the practice (Samois, 1982). A serious opposition to the feminist anti-pornography campaign developed when the ordinance drawn up by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon was opposed in the US by the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT), (Duggan and Hunter, 1995). It had not occurred to those of us involved in feminist campaigns against male violence and pornography that a lobby group of women purporting to be feminists would defend precisely the practices we considered fundamental to the oppression of women. Many of these sexual libertarian women were pro-pornography; intent on gaining for women sexual ‘subjectivity’ which could only be obtained by turning other women into objects in the various practices of the sex industry. The history that I had been so pleased to discover now became contentious. The two very different sides of what came to be called the ‘feminist sexuality debates’ both sought to enlist history in support of their causes. I was rediscovering my fore-sisters’ work with admiration and respect. Sexual libertarians used it as an object lesson in the terrible dangers of being anti- prostitution and against what they saw as sexual freedom. They sought to demonstrate that contemporary anti-pornography feminists were mistakenly imitating the discredited and dangerous practices of their foresisters. Lisa Duggan, a member of FACT, asserts that all feminist historians in the US in the x PREFACE TO 1997 EDITION mid-1980s supported FACT because their study of history made them recognise the dangers of the ordinance (Duggan, 1995). Sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was suddenly the centre of attention and the subject of furious discussion. Some sexual libertarians chose as their heroes from the earlier period, not women, but the male sexologists whose work had been so influential in undermining feminist anti-violence ideas. That was a surprise. The American proponent of sadomasochism, Gayle Rubin, a Samois member, is a good example. Rubin took issue with my approach to the sexologists of this period such as Henry Havelock Ellis whom I portray as consolidating a male supremacist view of women and the idea that sex was inevitably about male dominance and female submission.
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