The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
man. I stumbled blindly into the fatal error of following
masculine ideals. I desired freedom for women to enable
them to live the same lives that men live and to do the same
work that men do. I did not understand that this was a wastage
of the force of womanhood; that no freedom can be of service
to women unless it is a freedom to follow her own nature. 36
Gasquoigne-Hartley made this change of heart and was doubtless
educated in the error of her ways on her marriage to Walter
Gallichan who was a populariser of sex reform ideas and editor
of the Free Review, a magazine which carried progressive sex
reforming ideas. He was, as we shall see, an accomplished
antifeminist. Gasquoigne-Hartley recognised that feminists would
oppose her new model of feminism in which women’s main
task was to be motherhood and service to the race. In answer to
the expected criticism she reiterated her opposition to the
oppression of women:
And this I contest against all the Feminists; the real need of
the normal woman is the full and free satisfaction of the
race-instinct. Do I then accept the subjection of the woman.
Assuredly not! To me it is manifest that it is just because of
her sex-needs and her sex-power that women must be free. 37
Gasquoigne-Hartley opposed the idea that women should
compete with men at work. Woman’s real work, she maintained,
was motherhood and women might only do work which was in
accordance with their nature and that which men wanted them
to do.
Why did women who saw themselves as progressive embrace
what we now see to be a form of antifeminism? A moving force
behind antifeminism in women throughout the ninteenth and
twentieth centuries seems to have been a desire to validate the
roles of wife and mother which they felt themselves to have
freely chosen. The glorification of motherhood enhances the
status of woman’s reproductive role and appears to give women
respect for an activity which women rightly deduce as being a
badge of inferiority under male domination. When there is little
alternative offered to the occupation of wife and mother and
any other choice means a very difficult struggle for women,
praise for motherhood must have offered reassurance. Just before
the First World War the appeal of the motherhood ideal was
reinforced by all the authority of ‘science’ and the whole of the
new discipline of sexology. It could be perceived then, as radical
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