The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
deploring the post-war change in morals in her book
Motherhood and its Enemies (1927). Haldane was a novelist
and married to a well-known Cambridge biologist. She had
been a suffragette in her youth and explained ‘Lest anyone accuse
me of bias, let me here confess that at 18 I myself joined the
Women’s Social and Political Union, and sold its weekly
paper…on Hampstead Heath.’ 5 She attributed the change in
morals to the effects of the war and specifically to the
phenomenon of war babies. The historian Arthur Marwick uses
an extract from the diary of Mary Agnes Hamilton to
demonstrate the war’s effect on morality:
Life was less than cheap: it was thrown away. The religious
teaching that the body was the temple of the Holy Ghost
could mean little or nothing to those who saw it mutilated
and destroyed in millions by Christian nations engaged in
war. All moral standards were held for a short time and
irretrievably lost…. The great destroyer of the old ideal of
female chastity, as accepted by women themselves, was here.
How and why refuse appeals, backed up by the hot beating
of your own heart, or what at the moment you thought to be
your heart, which were put with passion and even pathos by
a hero here today, and gone tomorrow. 6
War babies became a cause célèbre not so much because there
was a small rise in the illegitimacy rate as because the
government felt compelled, under wartime conditions, to reward
these ‘fallen’ women with financial help, since they had fallen
pregnant by the soldier heroes of the day and were bearing the
soldier heroes of tomorrow. The war babies may not have
evidenced a change in women’s sexual behaviour so much as
the difficulty during the war of women marrying whilst pregnant
because of military postings.
It seems unlikely that the phenomenon of ‘free love’ was the
most significant change in sexual ideology and behaviour in
the 1920s. The greatest change was in the eroticising of the
married woman. The 1920s saw a massive campaign by
sexologists and sex advice writers to conscript women into
marriage and ensure that once within it they would engage
cheerfully and frequently in sexual intercourse. Marriage was
seen to be primarily about sexual intercourse which was to be
the pivot and focus of the relationship.
Ideal Marriage, by the Dutch sexologist Van de Velde, was
published in 1926. This book achieved such success that it was
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