The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
women…woman’s function in life can never be the same as
man’s, if only because women are the mothers of the race.’ 24
Ellis called his redefinition of feminism the ‘new phase of
the woman’s movement’. For an example of this new phase in
action he directed his readers to Germany where he claimed
that there was a new movement of German women
‘fundamentally emotional in character’ crying for ‘emotional’
as well as political rights which had spread through the German
Empire and even to the Dutch and Scandinavians. The object
of the agitation was the ‘demands of the mother’ and the new
movement bore a ‘decisive unlikeness’ to the earlier movement.
Where the earlier movement was based on ‘the perpetual
assumption that women must be allowed to do everything that
men do’ the new teutonic movement was based on what ‘marks
the woman as unlike the man’. The title of this new movement
was ‘Mutterschutz’ and it was connected integrally to the
movement for sexual reform in Germany and supported by
recent developments in German science particularly in the field
of sexual pathology, according to Ellis. ‘Mutterschutz’ was
originally the title of a ‘Journal for the reform of sexual morals’
established in 1905 and edited by Helene Stoecker of Berlin
and which was by 1913 called Die Neue Generation. The journal
discussed ‘all questions that radiate out from the sexual function’
including love, prostitution, sexual hygiene and sex education.
The journal was originally the organ of an association for the
protection of mothers, more especially unmarried mothers,
entitled the ‘Bund für Mutterschutz’.
Ellis’s connection of his new ideal form of feminism with the
Mutterschutz presages the development in the British women’s
movement in the 1920s of the movement for the endowment of
motherhood which, as we shall see in the next chapter, drew
connections between eugenics and feminism and exalted
motherhood at the expense of other feminist concerns. The
exaltation of motherhood by the Mutterschutz tallied neatly
with the developing fascist ideal of woman’s destiny in Germany
of the 1920s and 1930s. Ellis pointed out that the older women’s
rights movement held aloof from the Protection of Mothers and
Sexual Reform Congress which was held in Dresden in 1911 in
connection with a great exhibition of hygiene. At the Congress
an international union was set up of those interested in sexual
reform based upon the recognition of the importance of
motherhood which covered Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden
and Holland. Ellis directed readers who wanted to understand
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