The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE DECLINE OF MILITANT FEMINISM
to persuade railway companies in the 1920s to provide singlesex
accommodation for women and girls so that they might
escape men’s sexual harassment. The need for such carriages
was a constant theme in feminist journals of the period. The
Vote of 1925 promoted a campaign of letter-writing to railway
companies. The Women’s Freedom League used the following
wording in their prototype letter:
We submit that cases of assault or annoyance to women by
men on trains are all too frequent, and as women now form
a large part of the travelling public, we think that their
interests should be taken into consideration by the railway
companies, and that they should be protected from the risk
of insult, annoyance, or assault while travelling in the
companies’ railway carriages. 36
We saw in Chapter 3 what happened to the feminist campaign
against sexual abuse of girls in the 1920s, when its force was
undermined by the intrusion of psychological explanations.
Other aspects of the earlier feminist campaign around sexuality
seem to have been entirely absent in the 1920s. The immense
propaganda effort which had been directed towards demanding
a transformation of male sexual behaviour faded away. Marital
rape was no longer a strong focus of concern, and the single
standard of sexual morality was no longer a burning issue,
although it was on the list of aims of the National Union of
Societies for Equal Citizenship as well as that of the Women’s
Freedom League. Eleanor Rathbone explained her lack of
enthusiasm for pursuing these goals in the same way that she
abandoned other feminist goals. This was to say that the equal
moral standard was too difficult to achieve and could not be
simply put through by the means of reform which she favoured,
act of Parliament:
An Equal Moral Standard is something intangible. It cannot
be brought about by one or a dozen parliamentary Bills,
only by a change of heart, of mental outlook, on the part of
society and its members…. These questions are much more
difficult and delicate and controversial than those embodied
in the Bills which are approaching their completion. General
public opinion is more backward; expert public opinion is
more divided; the existence of a strong ad hoc Society entirely
devoted to these questions and affiliated to our Union restricts
the part which a wholly women’s organisation like ours can
profitably play. 37
163