The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
historians to characterise the feminists who thought as
Wolstenholme Ely did as ‘anti-sex’ or as prudes. In Phases of
Love she explained the political basis of what she called ‘psychic
love’. The book is described as ‘A history of the human passion
and of its advance from the physical to the psychic character
and attribute’. The first two pages describe the sensations of a
man and a woman lying on a riverbank. The modern reader
might suppose from the description that the couple were
experiencing ecstasy after an episode of genital sexual activity.
Wolstenholme Elmy then explains that what had actually taken
place was ‘psychic love’. She explained that psychic love was
only possible in those bred to a ‘realisation of justice, equality,
and sympathy between the sexes’. The rest of the book is the
history of the transformation of physical into psychic love. She
writes of previous historical systems that ‘into each of these
masculine schemes was interwoven, with a singular unanimity,
the bodily subjection (and hence the degradation) of women’. 6
Throughout history men had misused women by ‘positive
physical oppression and excess’ which had resulted in a
restriction of woman’s ‘native individuality of mental power
and action’. Her anger at the way that a woman was reduced
by men’s obsession with physical love to a merely sexual function
is echoed again and again through the development of feminist
thought from the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1920s.
Wolstenholme Elmy’s solution was to promote the ideal of sexual
self-control and its counterpart of ‘psychic love’. Her aim was
to free women from the ‘degradation of her temple to solely
animal uses’, so that she might take a full part in all the areas
of life previously arrogated to man. The only roughly equivalent
concept to exist in the contemporary wave of feminism is that
of women being seen as ‘sex objects’. The concept in the late
nineteenth century was much broader. The use of woman as
simply a sexual function was seen as underlying the whole system
of the oppression of women.
In order to justify the importance of physical selfdetermination
for women, Wolstenholme Elmy used eugenic
arguments and stressed woman’s role as mother. In Woman
Free she quoted approvingly from Professor Alfred Wallace, a
supporter of the suffrage movement, who stated that when
women were in a position to choose their mates freely without
any compulsion from poverty or social pressure, then more
would choose to stay unmarried and those that married would
select the fittest men and produce superior children. The concepts
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