The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
certainly wonderful and possibly glorious about this mystery
called sex and that it was their business to discover it. 21
Marie Stopes did not see herself as a feminist campaigner but
her ideas were similar to those of the sex reform tendency and
derived from her study of sexological literature in the British
Library, and resembled the ideas of the sex reforming new
feminists. She elevated sexual intercourse to the status of a
blissful religions ritual which fitted into a kind of pagan universe
reminiscent of D.H.Lawrence:
Welling up in her [woman] are the wonderful tides, scented
and enriched by the myriad experiences of the human race
from its ancient days of leisure and flower-wreathed lovemaking,
urging her to transports and self-expressions, were
the man but ready to take the first step in the initiative or to
recognise and welcome it in her. Seldom dare any woman
still more seldom dare a wife, risk the blow at her heart
which would be given were she to offer charming love-play
to which the man did not respond. To the initiate she will be
able to reveal that the tide is up by a hundred subtle signs,
upon which he will seize with delight. 22
Stopes, in her sex advice books, along with Lawrence in his
novels, helped to create a religion of sexual intercourse by
providing the sensual and emotional scenery that was absent
from the more arid sexual descriptions of the sexologists. In
Stopes’s work the woman is almost entirely passive and is
allowed no sexual opportunities beyond sexual intercourse. But
Stopes had in her writings a vital ingredient which the male
sexologists could not emulate. She wrote about sex from a
woman’s point of view, showing a clear and urgent
understanding of the pain and distress caused to women by
men who satisfied their sexual needs on women in a blatantly
insensitive manner:
It can therefore be readily imagined that when the man tries
to enter a woman whom he has not wooed to the point of
stimulating her natural physical reactions of preparation, he
is endeavouring to force his entry through a dry-walled
opening too small for it. He may thus cause the woman
actual pain, apart from the mental revolt and loathing she is
likely to feel for a man who so regardlessly uses her. 23
Marie Stopes’s promotion of the use of birth control through
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