The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

FEMINISM AND SOCIAL PURITY
Bradford, Dundee and Perth and during the 1880s they were
formed in many other towns after a visit and a rousing speech
and general advice from Hopkins.
It is only church historians who have paid much attention to
Hopkins’s work. Where she has been mentioned by those
concerned with the history of sexuality, she has been represented
as a straightforward prude, and little attention has been paid to
interpretation of her work. One aspect that has met with derision
and misunderstanding from historians is the encouragement to
Ladies Association members to give talks to working-class
mothers involving simple sex instruction and advice which she
believed would lower the risk of incest, such as not bathing
children of both sexes together or letting them sleep together.
Her concern about incest was not ‘prudish’. She believed that it
had very damaging effects on the female children who
experienced it. There was a recognition amongst social purity
workers of the link between incestuous abuse and prostitution
through the possibility that a girl whose body was sexually
used by male relatives as a child would find it only too easy to
take up a career in which she was sexually exploited in later
life. Hopkins was personally hostile to what she termed the
‘dregs of asceticism’ which led to bodies being seen as ‘more or
less the seat of evil, [and the idea] that there is something low
and shameful about some of their highest functions which leads
the British parent to make a conscience of ignoring the whole
subject.’ 28 She did not believe in sexual ignorance and
encouraged the middle-class women in the Ladies Associations
to train up their own sons to an awareness of the necessity for
chastity and respect for women, and this required the discussion
of subjects which they would rather have avoided.
Judith Walkowitz, an American historian, when writing of
the impact of a Ladies’ Association on Plymouth, summed up
Hopkins thus: ‘Ellice Hopkins, with her inadvertent appeal to
middle class male prurience, represented one of the strands of
social purity that arrived on the scene in Plymouth.’ 29 There
was in fact nothing inadvertent about her work. Her appeal to
men of all classes, and the White Cross Army started amongst
working men, depended upon the creation of guilt which would
provide internal controls on their sexual behaviour.
The Moral Reform Union
An organisation which published and sold quantities of
pamphlets by Hopkins was the Moral Reform Union, active
18