The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE ‘PRUDES’ AND THE ‘PROGRESSIVES’
research destroyed in 1933. In Britain, according to Dora
Russell’s biography, the impetus to sex reform died out in the
1930s also, under the impact of the depression, the threat of
fascism and preparation for war. The ideas of the sex reformers
were by no means wiped out and forgotten, however, though
they may not have developed any further in the 1930s. The
papers and participants at the 1929 congress show the strength,
influence and respectability which the sex reform movment had
gained and the extent to which sex reforming ideas had become
the common parlance of many academic disciplines.
The Congress was organised by the British branch of the
World League for Sex Reform. The main work was done by
Dora Russell and Norman Haire. The Congress brought together
many of those whose work and influence are considered in this
book. The contributors included Dora Russell, Dr Helene
Stoecker, Marie Stopes, Stella Browne, Laurence Housman,
Norman Haire and Magnus Hirschfeld. Amongst the supporters
and/or members of the congress were Havelock Ellis and August
Forel (who were, along with Hirschfeld, presidents of the World
League), Gallichan, Max Hodan, and Wilhelm Stekel. The
contributors and supporters also included an impressive crosssection
of the most well-known names in the arts, the academic
world, particularly anthropology and the biological sciences,
medicine and psychoanalysis, and in politics. Literary figures
included Vera Brittain, Naomi Mitchison, Ethel Mannin, George
Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennet, E.M.Forster, D.H.Lawrence and
Somerset Maugham. The Congress brought together many
whom one might otherwise have thought to have little in
common. This apparently disparate collection of men and
women disagreed on many details of the sex reform programme
such as birth control and sterilisation, and infanticide of the
unfit. They were, however, in agreement over the main themes
of the Congress. These were: an attack on ‘puritanism’, the
problem of women’s frigidity, the vital importance of sexual
intercourse.
Some of the aims of the ‘progressive’ sex reformers, such as
the promotion of sex education and birth control, would have
been of some benefit to women. However it was not women’s
interests which actually lay at the root of these aims, and the
advantage which would have accrued to women was limited
by the hidden agenda of the sex reformers which was very clear
at the Sex Reform Congress of 1929. There were no papers
which dealt with male homosexuality—though many of the
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