The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
and made inroads into the puritan sexual morality of the
nineteenth century, for having proclaimed that sex was good
and enjoyable, for having destroyed the myth of woman’s sexual
anaesthesia and for having established her right to pleasure.
From a feminist perspective his contribution does not look so
positive. Ellis promoted three ideas which were to be crucially
important in the debate around sexuality in the early twentieth
century. He did not invent these ideas. Lillian Faderman explains
in her book Surpassing the Love of Men (1981) that the
sexologists incorporated in their work ideas which had been
staple motifs of men’s pornography for centuries. 6 Ellis’s views
can be recognised as staples of antifeminist ideology today.
The first of these ideas was Ellis’s assertion that there were
innate biological differences between the sexes, particularly in
the area of sexuality, which were immutable. The second was
to prescribe that sexual relations between women and men
should take the form of male dominance and female submission.
The third was to create an ideology of the ‘ideal’ woman, which
was represented as a form of feminism, and consisted of the
glorification of motherhood.
The assertion of innate biological differences formed the
bedrock for his later work, and they were explained in his first
substantial work Man and Woman in 1894. In his introduction
to the 1934 edition he explained that the book: ‘Was put forward
as the study of the secondary sexual characters intended to clear
the ground, and so act as an introduction, for the seven volumes
of the Studies in the Psychology of Sex.’ 7 After examining the
evidence for sex differences in what purported to be an objective
fashion, Ellis was able to conclude:
Woman’s special sphere is the bearing and the rearing of
children, with the care of human life in the home. Man’s
primary sphere remains the exploration of life outside the
home, in industry and inventions and the cultivation of the
arts. 8
In this way Ellis was able to justify the status quo and raise a
serious obstacle for those feminists and spinsters who had been
working for fifty years to break down the idea that there should
be separate spheres for men and women. Since the very basis of
Ellis’s work was in contradiction to the principles of feminism,
it should not surprise us to discover that the whole force of the
sexual philosophy that he promoted was to be a sledgehammer
blow at the heart of women’s movement for emancipation.
129