The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘HENPECKING’
him. She uses all the artifices of her sex to achieve her object.
She gradually sees him being lashed into the elemental and
aggressive male, and when that point is reached he is like a
runaway horse; his control has gone. He pursues and he
succumbs. 26
He used the argument frequently used today to defend men
against charges of rape and sexual abuse, that male sexuality
is uncontrollable. It was precisely this idea that feminists were
challenging most fiercely. But, despite this uncontrollability,
and the fact that the male had the ‘instinct of pursuit’, he was
prepared to assert that ‘modest’ women had nothing to fear.
sex attraction is one of the elemental things of life, and it
will be agreed that when you get down to the instincts which
move men and women in sex matters, the outstanding instinct
of the male is pursuit…. The instinct of the female is
resistance, reserve, followed, if she is won, by surrender, but
broadly speaking, she has the reserve, and the
resistance…and the most potent individual force that makes
for sexual morality in a community is woman’s modesty. 27
This is a very complicated prescription. Women had the instinct
of reserve, yet sometimes, as we have seen, they led men on.
They also had instincts of both resistance and surrender which
sounds tricky. The important message from all this deliberate
confusion is that woman was always to blame and men need
take no responsibility for their sexual behaviour at all.
The 1922 Act was the last occasion on which major legislation
on sexual offences passed through parliament before the late
1950s. There was, though, a special piece of legislation in 1928
which extended the time limit to 12 months.
Why did the massive wave of female indignation over the
sexual abuse of girls die away? From the 1930s to the present
wave of feminism, the subject of sexual abuse, and particularly
incest, has been confined to academic journals rather than being
in the forefront of public consciousness, and has not been seen
as a crime against women by men. It was feminist energy which
fuelled the campaign at its height and the general decline of
militant feminism in the 1920s must have played its part in
undermining the campaign. Some of the campaigners’ demands
were satisfied in the 1922 Act, but many, especially those
concerned with the treatment of the child victim by police and
courts and the validity of children’s evidence, were not. Virtually
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