The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CHAPTER 2
Continence and Psychic Love
The women whose ideas and strategies are examined in this
chapter saw themselves as feminists and had abandoned the
constraints of Christianity and Christian-dominated social purity.
These feminists have been derided as prudes and puritans by
historians. They are women whose contributions to other areas
of feminist struggle have been seen as radical and progressive,
whilst their ideas on sexuality have been seen as rather outdated
and embarrassing. In fact these women theorists were involved
in the development of a complex philosophy of sex, designed to
show both how women’s subjection had originated and how
women were maintained in subjection to men from day to day.
As Dale Spender points out in Women of Ideas, women’s theory
has been routinely dismissed and written out of history whereas
men’s ideas have been called philosophy or politics. 1 In no
instance is this clearer than in the case of the feminist philosophy
of sex that we will be looking at here. The contempt with which
these theories have been treated doubtless owes a great deal to
the significance of their challenge to the dominant male ideology
of sex.
The language with which these feminists described sexuality,
in terms such as ‘sexual excess’ and ‘continence’, has proved a
stumbling block for contemporary feminist historians. The
language available to them when they were trying to express
their anxieties and their hopes was not created by the women
themselves. Similarly today, feminists wrestle to gain some grasp
on their feelings about sex within an ideology of compulsory
sexual activity, using terms such as ‘sexual needs’, ‘orgasm’
and ‘frustration’ which would have been quite as alien to the
feminists of the 1890s and are not necessarily more useful to us
today in articulating our experience and hopes about sexuality.
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