The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE ‘PRUDES’ AND THE ‘PROGRESSIVES’
require months or perhaps years of training. Rather than being
about the opening up to men and women of the possibility of
sexual choice, the 1920s sexual revolution was about narrowing
women’s options to the role of complements to men in the act of
sexual intercourse. The 1920s paved the way for the continuing
progress of the ‘sexual revolution’ from the late 1950s onwards.
The process does not seem to have been inevitable at any point,
and certainly was not the result of women spearheading a
crusade for sexual freedom, but a story of man’s war against
woman’s resistance to the use of her body as the basis for the
maintenance of the structures of male dominance.
193