The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

AFTERWORD
and girls, chal lenges the notion that men have an uncontrollable
sex drive, and resists the enforcement of compulsory
heterosexuality. These feminists today are being attacked as
anti-sex, prudish, puritanical, reactionary and as potential allies
of the moral majority. These detractors are supported by some
socialist and socialist feminist historians who compare the
women fighting male violence within feminism today, with the
pre-First World War feminists who were fighting similar
struggles, in an attempt to discredit the contemporary feminists
by distorting the work and ideals of our foresisters. Two
American historians, Linda Gordon and Ellen Dubois (1983),
use this approach in an article in the British journal Feminist
Review:
We have tried to show that social purity politics, although
an understandable reaction to women’s nineteenth century
experience, was a limited and limiting vision for women.
Thus we called it conservative. Today, there seems to be a
revival of social purity politics within feminism, and it is
concern about this tendency that motivates us in recalling its
history. Like its nineteenth century predecessor, the
contemporary feminist attack on pornography and sexual
‘perversion’ shades at the edges into a right-wing and
antifeminist version of social purity, the moral majority and
pro-family movements of the new right. 1
Gordon and Dubois do not include within their version of
feminism a critique of men’s use of women in prostitution and
pornography. Consequently they have no grounds for
understanding feminist anger at the institution of prostitution
in the late nineteenth century and attribute it to an irrational
‘fear of prostitution’. They have similar difficulty in
understanding the feminist campaign against pornography today.
They avoid the need to clearly express their politics by spreading
confusion and distorting feminist campaigns now and in the
past through the use of unsubstantiated allegations and smears.
The confusion evidenced in the above article is an example of
the difficulty most historians have had in differentiating between
a critique of male sexual behaviour and being anti-sex.
The ideas of the sexual ‘progressives’ have had such an impact
on the way sex is thought about, that historians are still trapped,
for the most part, in the belief that there are only two positions
possible on sex—pro and anti. In fact there is a third possibility.
This is a revolutionary feminist position, which is currently
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