The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
During the First World War many feminists continued to
maintain their pre-war interests in women’s suffrage and a single
standard of sexual morality. But the diversion of energies seems
to have had a much more devastating effect on feminism at
that time than the nuclear issue is creating within the
contemporary women’s liberation movement.
In 1918 women over 30 got the vote. Historians who have
given undue importance to the struggle for the vote in the last
wave of feminism have tended to see the force of the movement
as declining inevitably once women were partially admitted to
the franchise. Such an explanation fails to give weight to the
other crucial concerns of feminism, particularly the campaign
around transforming male sexuality. We must look further than
a partial solution to the suffrage struggle to understand why
these other feminist causes declined. The National Union of
Women’s Suffrage Societies, the non-militant wing of the
suffrage campaign, was transformed after 1918 into the National
Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship with Eleanor Rathbone
at its head and the Woman’s Leader as its journal. The Women’s
Freedom League continued to campaign on the suffrage issue,
and many others, until 1928, when women were admitted to
the franchise on equal terms with men.
Those very same women whom we have seen in Chapters 2
to 5 before the First World War taking up strong and radical
positions on the issue of sexuality seem by the early 1920s to
have lost all the forcefulness of their feminism. Christabel
Pankhurst is the most notable example of this transformation.
By 1921 Christabel had found her new mission in announcing
the second coming of Christ. She went to Canada and then to
America, engaged in Christian religious revivalism. In this
respect her career has similarities with the careers of other
feminists who found one variety of religion or another, for
example, Annie Besant and Francis Swiney who took up
theosophy. Religions like theosophy and Christianity, which
made a virtue of sexual abstinence, offered consolation to women
who were anxious to escape compulsory heterosexuality and
compulsory sexual intercourse, particularly when, after the war,
sex reform was stripping away all the prestige which feminists
had sought to create for spinsterhood. In an article in the Weekly
Dispatch in 1921 entitled ‘Why I Never Married’, Christabel
Pankhurst showed how her politics had changed. In 1913, as
we have seen, Christabel’s fury at men’s sexual abuse of women
was so strong that she asserted that women should renounce
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