The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
adequately with the conditions of life because it has ‘its hands
on the sources of life’. In his youth Ellis is seen as having had
socialist ideals. By this time socialism had certainly given way
to genetic engineering in his blueprint for change. Ellis set out
to reinterpret the aims of the ‘woman’ movement totally to fit
in with his project of improving the race. His new model for
this movement was that of an organisation of mothers seeking
to help in the creation of a ‘selectively bred race’:
The breeding of men lies largely in the hands of women.
That is why the question of Eugenics is to a great extent one
with the woman question. The realisation of eugenics in our
social life can only be attained with the realisation of the
woman movement in its latest and completest phase as an
enlightened culture of motherhood, in all that motherhood
involves alike on the physical and the psychic sides. 22
In a chapter entitled ‘The Changing Status of Women’ he
proceeded to attack and brush aside the form taken by feminism
at that time in favour of his new prescription. The description
of the new equality he envisaged as the result of the changing
status of women is very different from that for which most
feminists were fighting—could be called ‘complementarity’ but
hardly equality:
It is necessary to remember that the kind of equality of the
sexes towards which this change of status is leading, is social
equality,—that is, equality of freedom. It is not an intellectual
equality, still less is it likeness…. Even complete economic
equality is not attainable. Among animals which live in herds
under the guidance of a leader, this leader is nearly always a
male; there are few exceptions. In woman, the long period
of pregnancy and lactation, and the prolonged helplessness
of her child, render her for a considerable period of her life
economically dependent. 23
A strange sort of equality this, in which women were always to
be followers and men leaders. He criticised the women’s
movement in Britain for having always confined itself to
‘imitating men and to obtaining the same work and the same
rights as men’, and for having aimed to ‘secure woman’s claims
as a human being rather than as a woman’. Ellis proclaimed
that this was only half the task of the women’s movement since:
‘Women can never be like men, any more than men can be like
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