The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CHAPTER 1
Feminism and Social Purity
In the 1880s in Britain, a movement, described by its proponents
as being for the advancement of ‘social purity’, was gathering
momentum. The social purity movement reached through
hundreds of societies into the lives of a considerable proportion
of the male and female population. Historians, whose vision
has been blinkered by the ideology of the ‘sexual revolution’,
have tended to see social purity as simply an evangelical, antisex,
repressive movement. Robert Bristow, in his book Vice
and Vigilance, includes 1880s social purity within what he sees
as four peaks of ‘anti-vice’ agitation. 1 He places these in the
1690s, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
1880s and the early twentieth century. His explanation for the
birth of each is the same: ‘Each was fed by the religious revivals
that converted young men and channelled waves of sublimated
anti-sexual energy against the erotic.’ 2 Another approach has
been to speak of the anxieties caused by social disruption being
displaced onto a concern about sexuality, and to represent the
social purity movement as a form of moral panic. 3 These writers
acknowledge the involvement of feminists in nineteenth-century
social purity but regard the feminist input as a red-herring caused
by the difficulty those feminists had in overcoming their oldfashioned
puritanical ideas about sex. In fact feminist ideas
and personnel played a vitally important part in the 1880s social
purity movement and can be seen as having shaped its direction
and concerns.
The primary aims of social purity were the elimination of
prostitution and of the sexual abuse of girls. Women and girls
are the objects of prostitution and sexual abuse, and men are
the exploiters. It cannot therefore be expected that one form of
explanation could describe why both men and women were
involved in campaigning against a form of sexual behaviour to
which men and women bore such a very different relationship.
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