The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
an important part, can be seen as a token compensation for all
she was to lose, rather than a step forward into sexual freedom.
What she would lose was the right to be a spinster, to engage in
passionate relationships with women unless they took the form
dictated by his lesbian stereotypes, to compete with men for
jobs and opportunities and to challenge male sexual behaviour.
The movement for the glorification and protection of
motherhood which spread across Europe from Germany was
promoted by male sex reformers and incorporated the ideas of
sex reform whilst representing itself as being part of the
movement for the emancipation of women. What was the
connection between the motherhood movement and sex reform?
A look at the literature from Germany disabuses the reader of
any notion that sex reform or even the promotion of sexual
pleasure for women was necessarily in the interests of women.
Two German works translated into English in 1908 and 1909
are recognised as landmarks in the history of the sex reform
movement. Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time was
translated by Eden Paul, member of the Independent Labour
Party, a prominent voice in the birth control movement in
Britain, and later a leading member of the British Society for
the Study of Sex Psychology and contributor to the London
congress of the World League for Sex Reform in 1929. Like
other sex reformers Bloch assumed that there were basic
biological and psychological differences between men and
women. He used the symbolism of the activities of sperm and
ova to illustrate these differences and wrote, ‘Spermatozoa and
ova are the original representatives of the respective spiritual
natures of man and woman.’ 31 He acknowledged his debt to
Ellis’s Man and Woman in the development of his ideas. Bloch
described the sexual difference thus: The nature of man is
aggressive, progressive, variable; that of woman is receptive,
more susceptible to stimuli, simpler.’ 32
From Bloch’s work we get an insight into the meaning of the
link between sex reform and motherhood. He quotes the author
of ‘Splitter’ who he says, has ‘well characterised woman’s
extended sexual sphere’:
Women are in fact pure sex from knees to neck. We men
have concentrated our apparatus in a single place, we have
extracted it, separated it from the rest of the body, because
prêt a partir [ready to go]. They [women] are a sexual surface
or target; we have only a sexual arrow. Procreation is their
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