The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE ‘PRUDES’ AND THE ‘PROGRESSIVES’
in feminine attire and behave with deference to men, show great
alarm at the development of determinedly independent and
critical women. There had been a general weakening of the
pressures which had, in the nineteenth century, kept women,
and particularly women of the middle classes, dependent on
men and trapped within marriage, in the form of educational,
legal and economic restraints. The dependence of women upon
men in heterosexual relationships which provided the foundation
stone of male dominance, appeared to the sex reformers to be
under serious threat. The apparently surprising alliances which
developed to fight for sex reform, of socialists, liberals,
conservatives and even protofascists, can be explained by
recognising that there was a common fear of and determination
to end, the threats to male dominance felt by representatives of
all shades of political opinion.
In this period of flux in the relations between the sexes it was
necessary, if male dominance was to survive, to strengthen those
structures which underpinned it. The execration of the spinster,
the glorification of motherhood and the idea that sexual
intercourse was a vital necessity of everday life, were all used
to strengthen the basic heterosexual relationship. Sexual
intercourse was seen to be essential for the welding together of
the married couple in a way in which it never had been in the
nineteenth century. By the many writers who assumed that female
submission was an inevitable concomitant or result of sexual
intercourse, that activity was promoted to shore up male power
in marriage. Concubinage was promoted as a way of
conscripting independent women into this activity and into
relationships with men.
One serious threat which the sex reform movement was able
to defeat, was that posed to male pleasure by the criticism of
male sexual behaviour. The much vaunted change in sexual
mores was not a change in the expected behaviour of men, but
a change in the expectations made of women through a massive
campaign to conscript women into enthusiastic participation in
sexual intercourse with men. The pre-war feminist critique which
had been building up momentum throughout the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, threatened to deprive men of the use of
prostitutes without providing them with a substitute in the form
of wifely enthusiasm. The decline in prostitution required
compensation. The 1920s witnessed a concerted onslaught on
the problem of the ‘resisting’ woman, to persuade, blackmail
or therapise her into the performance of an activity, namely
sexual intercourse, for which it was recognised that she would
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