The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

FEMINISM AND SOCIAL PURITY
consent, through drawing-room meetings of women. Such
meetings were a very common form of women’s political
organising in the nineteenth century. One aspect of its work,
which it saw as very important, was to provide communication
between and therefore strengthen, other societies which existed
to protect women and children from sexual exploitation. From
the beginning these societies included the Social Purity Alliance,
the Society for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice, the
Society for the Suppression of the Traffic in Girls, societies for
the protection of young servants, the YMCA, and the Vigilance
Association for the Defence of Personal Rights, amongst many
others.
The overall project was to transform the sexual behaviour
of men, or, as Mrs Bruce of Boston urged at the Union’s first
meeting, ‘to demand purity and righteousness in men’. The
Union was vigorous in taking the battle into the enemy camp
by exposing and aiding in the prosecution of individual men as
well as denouncing the behaviour of men as a group. The Union
received many applications for assistance and advice in cases
of corruption and seduction. Where appropriate these were
handed on to other organisations, including after 1885, the
National Vigilance Association. The Union talked of gaining
legislation to allow for prosecution of seducers of women of all
ages, not just very young women. The members also wanted
‘protection [to be] afforded to women and girls against
persecution by immoral men’ and protested strongly when Great
Yarmouth town council passed new by-laws directed only at
women who solicited and not at men. 34 In response to attempts
made to apply a character test to women voters in municipal
elections, which outraged women members, the Union began
to call for the disqualification of male holders of public positions
who had been accused in courts of justice of ‘gross and disgusting
criminal immorality’ towards women. After the woman who
ran an exclusive brothel to which MPs and members of the
aristocracy repaired in great numbers, was imprisoned and the
clients had received no penalty, the Union circulated an article
entitled, ‘The naming of some of the high-placed accomplices
of Mrs Jeffries’. 35 The Union was concerned about incest and
appealed for a ‘stronger law to deal with crimes against morality
in cases of near relationship’. At this time there was no legislation
against incest. Union members also discussed with alarm the
implications of the fact that Canada had enacted into statute
law ‘the revolting dictum that a husband may force his wife
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