The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
were not general-purpose feminist organisations. Doughan
suggests that this fragmentation and multiplication of women’s
organisations caused feminists to lose sight of the unity of their
campaign and ‘weakened their theoretical base’.
There were umbrella feminist organisations in the early 1920s
which were active in much the same areas and with the same
tactics, though they were quite separate from one another. These
were the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, the
Women’s Freedom League, the Six Point Group, the National
Council for Women and the London and National Society for
Women’s Service (later the Fawcett Society). This was different
from contemporary feminism, in which specialist groups see
themselves as a part of a Women’s Liberation Movement rather
than each organisation having to fight each battle independently.
There is still no really adequate explanation as to why feminism
lost its vital spark and degenerated into this multiplicity of
fragmented organisations. Doughan directs us, helpfully, to
consider the opposition to feminism in the form of the new
fascists, the Freudians, Lawrence and Hemingway, the cult of
machismo combined with increasingly obvious machismo on
the political left, the way in which free love was becoming seen
as progressive, and the impact of consumerism and press
hositility.
Olive Banks, in her book Faces of Feminism, offers a rather
different explanation of the changing form of feminism. 4 She
describes how ‘welfare feminism’ developed in Britain in the
1920s as it had done in the USA. ‘Welfare feminism’ was
concerned with the relief of poverty, the endowment of
motherhood, and the health of children and attracted the support
of women from the growing labour movement. A socialist
woman, Wilma Meikle, in her 1916 book Towards a Sane
Feminism, indicated the lines along which this alliance was to
develop. She berated the ‘older’ more ‘ladylike’ feminists for
their lack of enthusiasm for marriage and for sex with men.
She described them as: ‘the women who crammed their shelves
with pamphlets on venereal diseases, who suspected all their
male acquaintances of harbouring a venereal taint…who
regarded the majority of men as conscious and wilful
oppressors.’ 5 She attacked their concentration on agitating for
the vote and explained that feminism’s main task should be to
organise around working women. She argued that agitation for
the vote should be a platform for other reforms and it is her
listing of these which shows the alliance between welfare
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