The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
She explained, ‘She [the female animal] stands the martyr of
the organised and systematic sexual wrongdoing on the part of
the man who should be her mate, and whom she alone has
evolved to the human plane.’ 12 She saw women’s sexual
subjection as fundamental to the establishment of ‘man-rule’.
She believed that this subjection began when men destroyed the
matriarchate in order to make women into sexual slaves who
would satisfy men’s sexual desires. The importance she attached
to the sexual aspect of women’s oppression is expressed in such
statements as ‘Now the sex-subjugation of woman has always
been more or less the father of men’s thoughts.’ 13 She accused
men of having reduced woman to a purely sexual function:
Men have sought in women only a body. They have possessed
that body They have made it the refuse heap of sexual
pathology, when they should have reverenced it as the Temple
of God, the Holy Fane of Life, the Fountain of Health to the
human race. 14
The greatest burden of this subjection was that women were
forced to submit to sexual intercourse at all times, whenever
the male desired, and even at those times which Swiney
considered should be the most sacred, during pregnancy and
immediately after childbirth. She considered such use of the
women’s body to be abusive and employed quantities of
biological, medical and anthropological evidence to prove her
point. She catalogued the effects upon women and the ‘race’
caused by a ‘selfish, lustful and diseased manhood’. She stated
that men’s sexual impositions during pregnancy led to infants
being born covered in the ‘vernix caseosa’, a ‘cheesy mess’
formed from ‘inanimate decomposed zoosperms’, since sperm
in excess was a ‘virulent poison’. This covering was said to
lead to eczema, skin diseases, eye disease and many more
ailments in children. The sperm was said to contain alcohol,
nicotine or syphilis which had dreadful effects on infant mortality
and child health. In the woman, she stated, ‘masculine excess’
could lead to painful childbirth and puerperal fever, and the
resumption of intercourse too soon after childbirth prevented
the reproductive organs from recuperating and dried up the
mother’s milk. She claimed that such sexual abuse led to the
human species being ‘diseased by sexual vice, overpopulated
with degenerates, imbeciles, and malformed individuals’. The
accuracy of Swiney’s statements was only as good as her sources,
and she relied on the medical opinion of her day. Current
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