The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CHAPTER 7
Antifeminism and Sex Reform before the First
World War
The birth of sexology in the period from the 1890s to the First
World War enabled antifeminists to mount an onslaught upon
feminism with all the authority of ‘science’. The claims of
‘science’ were still relatively new and there was no healthy
scepticism abroad to protect women from ‘scientific’ assertions.
The introduction to the printed papers of the 1929 Sex Reform
Congress, cites Havelock Ellis, Iwan Bloch and August Forel as
the founding fathers of the new ‘science’ of sexology. 1 The work
of the sexologists and their popularisers introduced a whole
new way of thinking and talking about sex. The superstitions
and prejudices of the sexologists were given, under the cloak of
science, a spurious objectivity. Their ideas were directly at
variance with those of the feminists involved in the campaign
to challenge the construction of male sexuality.
The works of Havelock Ellis are an example of the way in
which sexology undermined feminism. His work is important
because of its fundamental influence on British sex advice
literature throughout the twentieth century. 2 In his lifetime he
had an international reputation and was widely quoted and
referenced by sexologists in Europe and America. He is presently
being reclaimed as a guru of the sexual revolution by
contemporary historians and commentators. He has been given
the reputation of a sexual revolutionary. Edward Brecher writes
of ‘the first of the yea-sayers’ who inaugurated ‘the gradual
convalescence of our culture from a debilitating sexual disease’. 3
Ellis’s biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, described him as ‘one of
the seminal figures responsible for the creation of a modern
sensibility’. 4 Jeff Weeks writes, ‘His work is one of the springs
from which the broad stream of sexual liberalism has flowed
with apparent ease.’ 5 As the mythology of the sexual revolution
was created, Ellis was given the reputation of having attacked
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