The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
following writer stressed that women in all classes shared a
common situation in this respect:
No amount of State help can help the suffering of mothers
until men are taught many things in regard to the right use
of the organs of reproduction, and until he realises that the
wife’s body belongs to herself, and until the marriage relations
take a higher sense of morality and bare justice. And what I
imply not only exists in the lower strata of society, but is just
as prevalent in the higher. So it’s men who need to be educated
most…. No animal will submit to this; why should the
woman? Why simply because of the marriage laws, of the
woman belonging to the man, to have and to own, etc. 47
It may be that the male sexologists used the myth that nonwestern
women and working-class women were ever willing
and eager for sex with men to pressure women of their own
class into sexual compliance. Josephine Butler and other women
involved in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts
in the 1870s and 1880s particularly attacked the abuse and
exploitation of working-class women by middle-class men. It
could be that the sexual stereotyping of the sexologists helped
to justify such exploitation and draw the sting of the feminist
critique. The sexologists and their popularisers were skilled in
the technique of playing off one group of women against another
in order to achieve their propaganda objectives. So the desires
of western and eastern women were counterposed, similarly
the desires of working-class and middle-class women. In the
same fashion the interests of the spinster and the married woman
were represented as not only different but contradictory. This is
the technique of divide and rule.
The non-participation of spinsters in sexual intercourse was
held to be as dangerous to the interests of men and society as
the ‘frigidity’ of the married woman. Alec Craig, the socialist
and sexual ‘modernist’ was very worried that spinster
schoolteachers might be dangerous to the young because they
were not doing sexual intercourse; ‘energy which is dammed
up sexual urge, seeking another channel or outlet is rarely
satisfactory in its results. Much might be said about the evils
resulting from the almost exclusive employment of women in
the teaching profession.’ 48 Gallichan warned specifically against
the employment of the ‘frigide’ as a teacher, because he thought
she would make girls critical of men. 49
The stereotype of the spinster which these writers were
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