The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
because an inequality of the rights of the two sexes created
‘sexual anomalies’. His description of what he meant by
emancipation showed that he was concerned for the maintenance
of a totally separate sphere for womanhood but a recognition
of the importance of her work in this sphere, motherhood,
through the removal of legal disabilities. He did not envisage
any real change in woman’s lifestyle or opportunities:
The emancipation of women is not intended to transform
them into men, but simply to give them their human rights,
I might even say their natural animal rights. It in no way
wishes to impose work on women nor to make them
unaccustomed to it…. It is our duty to give them the
independent position in society which corresponds to their
normal attributes…. Their sexual role is so important that it
gives them the right to the highest social considerations in
this domain. 35
Women should be given equal rights, he declared, so that they
could ‘react freely according to their feminine genius’.
This new version of feminism clearly had its attractions for
women, even some who had been associated with what Ellis
called the ‘old women’s movement’. Mrs Gasquoigne-Hartley
was one of those who was seduced by it. She promoted an ideal
of womanhood based upon woman’s role as mother and her
responsibility to the race. She acknowledged the importance of
Ellis and Ellen Key in her thinking and her book, The Truth
About Woman (1913), is a good example of the way in which
sex reforming ideas were propagated and used to support a
full-scale attack on the form taken by feminism at that time.
Her book was considered important enough to be reviewed in
nearly every feminist publication, though not with universal
enthusiasm.
Gasquoigne-Hartley wrote with all the fervour of a one-time
sympathiser with feminism making a complete renunciation.
She included in the introduction an apology for her earlier views
about women which seem to have been straightforwardly
feminist. She says that she began work as the headmistress of a
school for girls. She was young and inexperienced and ‘believed
that [she] was able to train up a new type of woman’:
For a long time I wandered in the wrong path. My desire
was to find proofs that would enable me to ignore all those
facts of woman’s organic constitution which make her unlike
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