The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
feminists, Francis Swiney in particular, she was horrified to
discover from contemporary medical sources how many female
ailments could be attributed to sexual intercourse. She was wrong
about menstruation but right about the pains and complications
of unwanted childbirth, which clearly originated from this source,
along with many other infections and complications of the
female reproductive system.
Francis Swiney
Francis Swiney began writing in the 1890s and published a
great quantity of books, pamphlets and articles up to the First
World War. Wolstenholme Elmy described Swiney in her letters
as a very reliable woman in Cheltenham who could be trusted
to look after woman suffrage affairs in that town. Ignota
reviewed her Awakening of Woman in 1899 in the Westminster
Review with great enthusiasm. Her ideas seem to have had
most influence on the militant wing of the women’s movement.
Her works were advertised in the Suffragette, journal of the
Women’s Social and Political Union. Treatment of her by
historians has tended to be cursory and dismissive, interpreting
her as either a crank or a prude. Like Wolstenholme Elmy she
saw the sexual subjection of women as fundamental to the
oppression of women by men. She offered a similar solution in
the elimination of genital sexual activity between men and
women as far as possible, and the promotion of sexual selfcontrol
for men. Wolstenholme Elmy’s solution was ‘psychic
love’. Swiney’s was her own unique brand of theosophy promoted
through the League of Isis which she organised herself.
There is no doubt as to the strength of Swiney’s feminism.
She wrote of women’s oppression with passionate rage:
For, consider what man-rule, man-made religion, man’s moral
code has implied to woman. She has seen her female child,
Nature’s highest development in organic evolution, ruthlessly
murdered as superfluousness. She has seen her son the
‘defective variation’ biologically the outcome of malnutrition
and adverse conditions, and therby imperfect, placed over
her as master, Lord, and tyrant. 11
The murder of the female child to which she referred is the
practice of infanticide of girls in subsistence economies where
girls, particularly when dowries were required for them, were
seen as an economic burden. At the root of women’s wrongs,
according to Swiney, lay women’s sexual subjection to men.
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