The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘HENPECKING’
all those practical goals that the campaigners had been fighting
for were recommended by the Departmental Committee report
in 1925. They could have been implemented by statute or
government directive, but no action was taken. The AMSH put
pressure on the government to implement the recommendations
right up to the Second World War as well as producing abortive
Bills of its own. It seems likely that public concern over sexual
abuse was waning and the report came too late.
The change in attitudes to sexual abuse which weakened the
strength of the campaign resulted from a change in the dominant
sexual ideology as much as from the decline of feminism. These
two phenomena were closely connected as can be seen in Chapters
7 and 8. The scientific mystification of sexuality and sexual
aggression towards women which issued from the work of the
male sexologists, psychologists and pschoanalysts placed the
initiative firmly in the hands of the professionals. It became
less easy for women to approach the problem of sexual abuse
simply from their own experience and feminist theory. The
development of the ‘medical model’ had two significant
implications. Women’s anger against men was deflated when
responsibility was taken away from the male offender and
attributed to his ‘disease’. ‘Sick’ offenders could be seen as
exceptions whose behaviour had little relevance to that of men
in general. The issue of sexual abuse was removed from the
context of crimes against women. Despite dissentient voices,
the move to see offenders as sick had taken over from the fiercely
indignant largely feminist campaign against sexual abuse by
the 1930s. In this current wave of feminism, feminists have had
to demolish the ‘wisdom’ of the scientific establishment and
rely again on their own experience and judgement in
reestablishing a campaign against the sexual abuse of girls. 28
In Chapters 7, 8 and 9 we will look in detail at the work of
the sexologists and their impact on feminism. In the next two
Chapters we look at the effects upon women’s lives and
relationships of the new sexual demands and categories being
created for women by the sex reformers and the sexologists.
Spinsters and lesbians were prominent in the feminist campaigns
around sexuality before the First World War as they are today.
By the 1920s both categories of women were being subjected to
bitter attack from sex reformers and even other feminists. The
attack upon spinsters and lesbians who had been so important
in the campaigns was yet one more factor which helped to
undermine the feminist challenge.
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