The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
on the male mutation could be seen as an extreme feminist
version of eugenics in which the whole of the male gender was
seen as an avoidable eugenic tragedy.
Swiney also wrote of the sex slavery of women outside
marriage. She wrote about prostitution, sexual abuse of children,
incest and the white slave traffic. She wanted the age of consent
raised for girls to 18 or more. She bewailed the ineffectiveness
of the 1908 Incest Act caused by the male bias of juries and
magistrates and called for legislation to make the abuse of
authority for the purposes of sexual exploitation an offence.
She described the effects of the registration of prostitutes as
making a woman who worked in prostitution, ‘no longer a
person with human rights, but a scheduled tool in the inventory
of legalised immorality’.
The importance of Swiney’s contribution to feminist ideas
on sexuality lies in the clarity with which she expressed her
central idea, which was that women’s oppression was based on
and maintained through, sexual subjection, and in the persuasive
force with which she uttered it. She was an extremely prolific
writer, showed little of the usual Victorian reticence about calling
sperm, sperm, and directed a passionate rage and indignation
at men which is unsurpassed in the literature of the time. An
example of her passionate denunciation of men should suffice
to show how powerful her appeal must have been to women
who sought an expression for their anger at men:
Church and State, religion, law, prejudice, custom, tradition,
greed, lust, hatred, injustice, selfishness, ignorance, and
arrogance have all conspired against her under the sexual
rule of the human male. Vices, however, like curses, come
back to roost. In his own enfeebled frame, in his diseased
tissues, in his weak will, his gibbering idiocy, his raving
insanity, and hideous criminality, he reaps the fruits of a
dishonoured motherhood, an outraged womanhood, an
unnatural, abnormal stimulated childbirth, and a starved
poison-fed infancy. 18
Variations on psychic love
It was common for feminists in this period to praise love and
endow it with spiritual, semi-mystical qualities which sound
strange to our ears. The ideal of passionate or non-genital love
served many purposes. It offered a mental and sometimes, it
would seem, physical satisfaction which did not involve sexual
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