The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CHAPTER 10
The ‘Prudes’ and the ‘Progressives’
The terms of the debate around sexuality had changed
dramatically by the late 1920s. The combined impact of the
work of the orthodox sexologists, who were inventing the ‘frigid
woman’, and the work of the ‘progressive’ sex reformers, was
to transform the whole way in which sex could be spoken about
or thought about. The pre-First World War challenge to male
sexual behaviour had become unthinkable. There were only
two positions possible on sexuality: the pro-sex position and
the anti-sex position. The pro-sex camp, which included the
sexologists and the sex reformers, characterised the feminists
as ‘anti-sex’, as prudes and puritans.
The sex reformers represented themselves as knights tilting
at the enemy—the ‘puritan’ attitude. Puritanism was commonly
seen to be the result of the ‘ascetic ideals’ of the Christian
religion, which were seen as having survived for 2000 years for
want of the brave challenge of sex reform. Max Hodan’s History
of Modern Morals was published in 1937, translated by Stella
Browne. Hodan had been involved in the sex reform movement
in Germany. His book gives us a good example of the pride
which the sex reformers took in what they saw as the dangerous
struggle with puritanical ideas. Hodan wrote that the history of
sexology was a ‘record of the resistance of the champions of
obsolete ideas and customs, threatened in their security and
supremacy by the pioneers of constructive progress’. 1
The Congress of the World League for Sex Reform which
took place in London in 1929 marks the high point of sex reform
in Britain. By the early 1930s the sex reform movement, and
particularly its radical and socialist elements such as Magnus
Hirschfeld and Wilhelm Reich, were under attack in Europe.
Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute was raided and the books and
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