The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
reproduction, but on the contrary they reduced sex simply to
one specifically reproductive practice.
In the 1920s feminists had not entirely abandoned
campaigning around those issues in the field of sexuality which
had exercised pre-war feminists, although the impetus was much
blunted. In the area of prostitution the feminists campaigned to
achieve an equitable law regarding women and men gained a
pyrrhic victory. Feminists working within organisations like
the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene wanted to make
it illegal for either men or women wilfully to cause annoyance
to any person in the street. They wanted it to be necessary for
the person annoyed to appear in court so that no one might be
prosecuted simply on the word of a policeman. These provisions
were introduced into Parliament in a Bill entitled The Public
Places Order Bill’ in 1925. The Bill failed, but feminists do
seem to have been having some effect through the pressure of
their opinion on police and magistrates. An article in the
Woman’s Leader in 1925 explained that the figures for arrests
of prostitutes in London had fallen from 2,504 in 1921 to 538
in 1923. 34 The article suggested that this change came about
because ‘magistrates stiffened by the opinion of the public and
the press are reluctant to convict a woman on the sole word of
a policeman, and the police either cannot or do not produce an
independent witness.’
The 1928 McMillan Report on Prostitution recommended
precisely the kind of law on annoyance in the streets that the
feminists wanted. This should have been a crowning success
but the recommendations were never implemented. In 1959 the
solicitation laws against women were made even more severe
and in 1960 the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene
admitted defeat after nearly a century of struggle for the civil
rights of prostitutes. They concluded: ‘The law makes the
prostitute the scapegoat for the sins of society…in these matters
the man enjoys a favoured position due to a false position and
our comfortable acceptance of a double moral standard.’ 35 The
feminist campaigners had recognised very clearly that the basic
idea on which prostitution was justfied and considered to be
necessary, was that of the man’s uncontrollable sex drive. They
sought to point out that men were not injured by occasional
continence. With the idea that continence was harmful the
sexologists undermined the gathering strength of the feminist
assault on the abuse of women in prostitution.
One campaign in which feminists were successful was that
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