The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

FEMINISM AND SOCIAL PURITY
League which shows her to have been as powerful a
propagandist as Butler or Hopkins. Ormiston Chant writes that
she received a letter from a friend which stated that it was more
dreadful for a woman to ‘fall into sin’ than for a man. Chant’s
reply was a firm denial of this idea. She explained that women
had been taught to accept that double standard and that:
Unchastity is necessary for men—that it is the masculine
prerogative—that a certain class of women must be sacrificed
to this necessity, and that no good woman does, or ought, to
know, anything about it; and that such a thing as chastity in
the bridegroom, who requires it as an absolute necessity in
his bride, is really asking too much of the so-called stronger
sex. 24
After attacking the Contagious Diseases Acts as being designed
to make unchastity safe for men, by medical inspection of
prostitutes, she employed a dramatic example of role reversal
to bring the iniquity of the double standard home to her readers:
Think of good women and men, knowing that I was a rake
(feminine), inviting me to their houses, winking at my
loathesomeness, but making feeble attempts to shut my victim
up in a refuge, and branding him as ‘fallen’! And think, oh
think, of my blatantly talking of my brutality as necessity—
of my requiring my husband to believe it—a coward, a liar,
and a perjuror, who vowed a marriage vow, and deliberately
broke it. 25
Jane Ellice Hopkins was very strongly involved in the campaign
to prevent men’s abuse of girl children. She campaigned for the
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which raised the age of
consent for sexual intercourse to 16, with the aim of reducing
the use of young girls in prostitution. She gave evidence before
the 1881 House of Lords Commission on the protection of girls,
stimulated petitioning up and down the country—particularly
through the Ladies Associations for Friendless Girls, which were
her inspiration—on the age of consent, and spent the two years
prior to the passing of the Act in an exhausting national speaking
tour on the subject. It was her concern with preventing the abuse
of children which led her into an aspect of her work which was
strongly criticised by feminists. She was worried that children
who lived in brothels would take up the same career as their
mothers. She supported the passing of the Industrial Schools
Act of 1880 which allowed local authorities to remove children
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