The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
reproductive organs. He does not admit to being worried lest
the spinsters use political power in a way which would decrease
men’s privileges, but claims that his concern is for the wife and
mother since her interests, which were so different from those
of the spinster, would be damaged by the spinster vote:
Thus extended power given to women threatens to result in
legislation for the advantage of that relatively superfluous
part of the population, and since their interests are directly
antagonistic to the interests of the woman who is concerned
in the production of children, legislation enacted on their
behalf will tend to be opposed to the interests of the mothers
themselves. 43
Heape allowed no useful place in society to unmarried women
and described them as the ‘waste products of our female
population’. 44 One of his answers to the problem of feminism
which was responsible for literature ‘freely exposed for sale’ in
London in which ‘man, as a sex, is held up to execration as the
brute beast’, was to prophesy and in doing so to help foment, a
deep division in the ranks of women between the spinster and
the wife and mother.
Walter Heape’s main interest in his book Sex Antagonism
seems to have been antifeminism rather than sexology though
he used sexological arguments to support his ideas. Walter
Gallichan, on the other hand, was genuinely concerned to
popularise sex reforming ideas which happened to be antifeminist
in content. His other main obsessions were bird-watching and
fly-fishing. He was a contributor to many journals and a prolific
writer on the topics of morality, marriage and sex reform from
the 1890s to 1930. In 1909 he contributed to the antifeminist
platform with a book entitled Modern Woman and How to
Manage Her. He described the antagonism between the sexes
as ‘an age-long conflict’ and gave a graphic picture of the ‘manhating’
woman: ‘The present is the era of the man-condemning,
man-hating woman. There is not a woman’s club in London
wherein you will not hear avowed dislike of men among a
fairly large number of the members.’ 45 He considered that the
man-hating women were fighting a losing battle against the
laws of nature and tried to belittle the phenomenon though he
recognised that it was currently increasing:
Among the great army of sex, the regiment of aggressively
man-hating women is of full strength, and signs of the times
144