The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

FEMINISM AND SOCIAL PURITY
Not simply because women are the weaker sex; in all but
the strictly physical sense this is becoming more and more
untrue; but (1) because of the great dignity of the position of
wife and mother to which every woman may be called, and
(2) because in marriage or otherwise woman has a soul of
her own and a spiritual destiny of her own to work out. She
is not to be the servant of man’s convenience or pleasure,
either in marriage or apart from it…woman is not to be
patronised; she is different, not inferior. 19
She asserts the Christian virtues of wifehood and motherhood
and that women have different roles, yet at the same time her
sentiments about woman’s relationship to man are strongly
feminist. Hopkins’s writing recognised that there was a
confrontation between the interests of men and women. In the
sexual system she described, women were the objects of men’s
exploitation and men the aggressors. This was a very different
message from that which emerges from our contemporary
equivalents to social purity. The writings of Mary Whitehouse,
for instance, attack the sexual behaviour of ‘people’ rather than
men, and Whitehouse makes no personal identification with
women and what is happening to them. Hopkins’s condemnation
of men for the abuse of women and her anger at them, are
unequivocal in the following statement from her social purity
pamphlet The Ride of Death. Hopkins described prostitutes
who had ‘lost their way’ and were close to ‘disease, degradation
curses, drink, despair’. She asked:
For who has driven them into that position? Men; men who
ought to have protected them, instead of degrading them;
men who have taken advantage of a woman’s weakness to
gratify their own selfish pleasure, not seeing that a woman’s
weakness was given to call out a man’s strength. Ay, I know
that it is often the woman who tempts; these poor creatures
must tempt or starve. But that does not touch the broad issue,
that it is men who endow the degradation of women; it is
men who, making the demand, create the supply. Stop the
money of men and the whole thing would be starved out in
three months’ time. 20
Hopkins saw men’s demands as the underlying cause of
prostitution. She recognised that poverty and the limited
opportunities allowed to women for making a decent living,
were the reasons many women entered prostitution and she
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