The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
they could jolly well do without them. In exactly the same
way the worker, rising in the social scale, seeks to prove
himself a Bourgeois. Both efforts are mistaken! Each class
and sex has a special contribution to make. 28
There’s not much room here for spinsters. Russell’s sex and
class determinism makes her feminism look as dubious as her
socialism. Russell worked with Norman Haire, an eminent male
homosexual sexologist who opened the Walworth Marriage
Advice Centre in 1921. They organised the 1929 congress of
the World League for Sex Reform which was held in London.
Dora Russell was influential in propagating sex reforming ideas
within that wing of the feminist movement which was allied to
the labour movement. She is important today because she is
held up by historians as an example of a progressive rightthinking
feminist of the time. Both Dora Russell and Stella
Browne, who also carried the sex reform torch into the feminist
arena, were closely involved with the labour movement, and
might have suffered from constraint and the need for men’s
approval when writing about sex. They both emphasised the
joys of sexual intercourse with little criticism of it. The campaign
around sexuality which Browne and Russell promoted, within
the feminist movement and on the left, was very different from
earlier feminist campaigns on the issue. They did not seek to
transform men or agitate against the sexual abuse of women
and girls. They accepted the importance of sexual intercourse
and sought to remove some of the disadvantages for women of
this sexual practice. Both women were involved in campaigning
for birth control. There can be no doubt that the possession of
birth control information and appliances was important in
improving the quality of women’s lives, and became more vital
the less option women had regarding their sexual practice. But
by itself it was first aid and did not challenge the sexual status
quo, in which women were expected to be dependent on men
and to do sexual intercourse whether they liked it or not. They
did not seek to question the form of heterosexuality but only to
relieve its symptoms.
As we saw in Chapter 4, earlier feminists had opposed birth
control on the grounds that it contributed to reducing the woman
to an object on whom the male could act out his sexual desires
and because they saw the avoidance of sexual intercourse as a
more effective and palatable form of contraception than what
they described as ‘artificial’ methods. The transformation of
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