The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

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
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