The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
be regarded as an utterly shameful and wicked, as well as
foolish, act, she declares it never took place by her own will
at all. 19
Ellis’s third important contribution to the anti-feminist platform
was the glorification of motherhood. Ellis’s ideas on motherhood
reflect a general concern in Britain and in other imperialist
nations in the first decade of the twentieth century with the
health and quality of the nation’s children. From the 1880s
onwards, those concerned for the future of the empire had been
worried about the declining birthrate and increasing infant
mortality rate. Concern for the health of older children developed
after the introduction of compulsory education led to revelations
about the poor physical condition of schoolchildren. The
disastrous military performance of Britain in the Boer War,
combined with the high rejection rate of recruits on account of
physical disability, increased the national alarm. The British
Empire was seen to be under threat at this time from the
economic competition of rival nations such as Germany, the
USA and Japan. As Anna Davin points out in her work on both
official and voluntary efforts to rehabilitate the nation’s children,
there was a ‘surge of concern about the bearing and rearing of
children—the next generation of soldiers and workers, the
Imperial race.’ 20 The responsibility for the health of the nation’s
children was attributed to the mothers. Mothers had to be taught
to produce better offspring. Davin explains how the work of the
eugenicists, those who sought to improve the ‘race’ by selective
breeding, helped to reinforce this concentration on motherhood
since ‘good motherhood was an essential component in their
ideology of racial health and purity.’ 21
In his book The Task of Social Hygiene (1913) Ellis redefined
the purpose and form of feminism in the service of his concern
for motherhood. The term the ‘Woman’ movement Which was
used by some writers at this time in place of the term ‘women’s’
movement is symptomatic of the redefinition that was taking
place whereby a concern for the perfection of ‘womanhood’
took the place of an interest in the emancipation of women.
The main task of social hygiene, according to Ellis, was to be
the ‘regeneration of the race’ and the ‘evolution of a supermankind’.
He explained that the difference between ‘social
hygiene’ and ‘social reform’ was that ‘social hygiene’ would
utilise the understanding of eugenics and instead of ‘painfully
struggling to improve the conditions of life’ it would deal
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