The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
the ideals underlying the movement to the work of Ellen Key
who believed in the fundamental differences between the sexes
and considered it foolish to put women to do ‘men’s work’. 25
Ellis’s overall ideal was the ‘desire to breed a firmly-fibred,
clean-minded, and self-reliant race of manly men and womanly
women’. 26
In his writings in the 1930s Ellis expressed his relief that the
kind of feminism in which women had sought ‘equality’ with
men was dead. As Ellis enthused about the death of feminism
he made his concept of the ‘new feminism’ really clear:
Those who propagandised this now rather antiquated notion
of the ‘equality’ of the sexes, in the sense of resemblance if
not identity, were justified in so far as they were protesting
against that superstition of the inferiority of women which
had proved so influential, and, as many of us think, so
mischievous in its applications within the social sphere. But
the banner of Equality under which they fought, while a
wholesome and necessary assertion in the social and political
realms, had no biological foundation. 27
He believed in ‘equivalence’ not equality. This meant that the
‘two halves of the race are compensatory in their unlikeness’. 28
He saw the two sexes as having quite separate biologically
determined roles. Woman’s role was that of wife and mother.
Ellis was alarmed at the idea that women should have ‘the
same education as men, the same occupations as men, even the
same sports’. 29 This idea he described as ‘the source of all that
was unbalanced, sometimes both a little pathetic and a little
absurd, in the old women’s movement’. 30 Ellis has gained
something of a reputation for being pro-feminist because he
frequently denounced the idea that women were ‘inferior’ and
their historical ‘subjection’ to men. Ellis wanted to remove legal
inequalities and he wanted women to have ‘economic
independence’. This independence was to be achieved by the
endowment of motherhood, i.e. paying women to fulfil their
role as mothers. Ellis wanted to remove the unsightly and
obvious symbols of women’s subjection, whilst maintaining
men’s power through the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’ for men
and women.
One of the rewards for women’s fulfilment of their separate
sphere was that they were to be eroticised, i.e. have the right to
sexual pleasure. The sexualising of woman in the context of
heterosexual intercourse, a development in which Ellis played
137