The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
sexual intercourse after having two abortions due to failure of
the husband’s contraceptives. She is described as ‘obtaining
sexual gratification at times through mere external contact or
auto-erotic practice’, i.e. practices other than penetration of the
vagina by the penis. 31 The husband told his wife that he had
begun to ejaculate frequently, even at the sight of an attractive
woman passing by. The birth control campaigners did not see
it as their task to ask why the men were suffering such acute
physiological difficulties simply as a result of being deprived of
one variety of sexual practice. The necessity of sexual intercourse
was assumed, and the women were expected to adjust their
bodies and minds to this necessity. Ottesen-Jensen gave an
example of a woman who was forced, by her husband’s
emotional blackmail, to engage in sexual intercourse even
though her vagina was, as she described it, ‘like an open
wound’. 32 The woman was given birth control and hygiene
advice, so that she might divert her husband’s psychological
violence by engaging in sexual intercourse. Ottesen-Jensen offers
no criticism of the husband’s behaviour.
Historians have consistently made the error of seeing birth
control as a causal factor in the development of women’s sexual
freedom, despite the fact that birth control is associated with
only one form of heterosexual practice, and that a ‘sexual
freedom’ which was only a freedom to do more sexual
intercourse, with no alternative, was no real freedom at all.
Feminist historians in particular have seen this supposed ‘sexual
freedom’ as resulting from the way in which birth control
allowed a separation between ‘sex’ and ‘reproduction’. Sheila
Rowbotham pursues this line of analysis in Hidden From
History (1973):
the separation of sexual pleasure from procreation, contained
a vital political freedom for women in making differentiation
between the ‘erotic and the reproductive functions’
practicable. Only when women were freed from ‘that terror
of undesired pregnancy’ could they begin to enjoy sex freely. 33
Here Rowbotham is commenting on Stella Browne’s work as a
birth control campaigner. She makes the mistake of equating
sex with sexual intercourse; sexual activity between women
after all had never contained the threat of conception, and nor
indeed did many sexual practices between women and men.
Birth control campaigners who promoted birth control as crucial
to the liberation of women’s sexuality did not separate sex from
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