The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

FEMINISM AND SOCIAL PURITY
She had no doubt as to the identity of the real cause; it was
men. She wrote that penitentiaries ‘only cure the evil after it is
done, when they only touch women, and leave the vital factor,
the man, untouched, and only save women in infinitesimal
numbers’. 15 She declared that while penitentiaries were given
by the church as the ‘sole specific’, then the church actually
ministered to the evil cause of prostitution, by accepting the
double standard, and tacitly acknowledged its existence.
Hopkins demanded the creation of men’s chastity leagues to
deal with the ‘real cause’. It is this which most clearly
distinguishes her work from that of women involved in work
around prostitution before her. She carried the battle to protect
women from sexual exploitation beyond the defensive activities
of preventive and rescue work with women. She directed her
energies to the transformation of male sexual behaviour because
she believed that that was where the cause of the problem lay.
She thought that men needed help in self-control and that would
be best given by men banding together to help each other.
What I crave is some agency that would infuse into young
men a good, strong passionate sense of the pitif ulness of
degrading women, inflicting a curse which they do not share
with so much as their little finger—going back to their own
jolly lives, their pleasant homes, their friends, their career,
their power of marrying; and leaving the unhappy girl to
become an outcast, cutting her off from ever being an
honourable wife and mother, exposing her to a hideous
disease, dooming her to live a degraded life and die a Godless,
Christless, hopeless death. 16
Hopkins, though she was herself a strong and independent,
lifelong spinster, expressed herself in terms of the Victorian ideals
of wifehood and motherhood. The significance of her
contribution lay not so much in her ideas on woman’s role as in
her plans for men’s role. She was a woman directing men’s
behaviour in the interests of defending women. She was not the
originator of the idea of men’s purity leagues, as the Social
Purity Alliance was already in existence, but she was responsible
for converting the Church of England to the idea and for
popularising it so that purity leagues mushroomed throughout
the 1880s in Britain.
A White Cross League pamphlet tells us what came from her
efforts. Hopkins made a speech at a church congress held in
Derby in 1882 which made such a deep impression that a
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