The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
The virulence of pre-war antifeminism can perhaps best be
explained as a reaction to the success of the militant suffrage
movement. Walter Heape’s Sex Antagonism is an antifeminist
classic of the period. Heape was a biologist who sought to
explain how sex antagonism developed at different periods of
human history by looking at the growth of civilisation from
primitive society to his own time. His major cause for concern
about the women’s movement of the time was the way that
feminists were speaking of male sexuality and his reply was
that women must accept the biological inevitability of the form
taken by male sexuality:
It is the fashion to talk glibly of the need for the suppression
of brutal sexual instincts, of the control of sexual passion,
and so forth. Such demands are made by woman and addressed
to man as a perverted creature, as an abnormal product of
civilisation. The fact is that woman’s sexuality is on quite a
different plane to that of man; she is wholly ignorant as a
rule of man’s normal requirements, and her virtuous demands,
essentially designed for her own benefit as she conceives,
are opposed to natural law. 40
A recurring theme of Heape’s book, and of the work of later
anti-feminists, is the technique of divide and rule. He states
that the ‘two classes of women’, the wife and the spinster, have
‘quite different aims in life’. He forecast a deep division between
these two classes:
Privileges which the spinster most desires the wife is
indifferent to, and concessions to the sex which would be a
gain to the former would prejudice the interests of the latter.
Truly, if the woman’s question begins with inter-, it is likely
to end in intrasexual strife’. 41
His alarm at spinsters stemmed from the fact that ‘the bulk of
those who take an active part in the [women’s] movement are
undoubtedly spinsters; a dissatisfied, and we may assume, an
unsatisfied class of women.’ 42 He was appalled at the prospect
of women gaining the vote since he foresaw that it would be
spinsters who would use the vote to their own advantage by
gaining legislation to secure their interests. They would, he
declared, use the power of the vote ‘most freely’ presumably
because they would not be under the restraining influence of a
husband. They were dangerous partly because if elderly they
were likely to be mad as a result of not having used their
143