The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
intercourse. To the feminists considered here lust meant the
male desire for sexual intercourse, imposed on woman against
her will, or with indifference as to her consent, with appalling
consequences to women in diseases, unwanted pregnancy, and
ill-health, and with little or no attention to tenderness, affection
or what might give the woman pleasure. Sexual intercourse
was seen as an experience which undermined a woman’s feelings
of self-respect and equality in her relationship with a man. The
lauding of psychic love gave women a justification to avoid
and disdain male sexual demands and provided a way of
achieving those satisfactions which sexual intercourse did not
provide. Whilst sexual intercourse could highlight the other
glaring inequalities of the relationship in which she was
involved, psychic love, which contained a large element of
fantasy, enabled these to be disregarded. It seems to have been
those women who were actively involved in relationships with
men who put most of the energy into promoting psychic love or
one of its spiritual equivalents.
There were other potent reasons why the feminists saw it as
necessary to devalue sexual activity between men and women.
They saw that the sexualisation of woman limited her
possibilities and exposed her to abuse. Prostitution, sexual abuse
of children and sexual assault, were seen to be inextricably
linked with man’s view of woman as simply a sexual function
and the notion that he could not survive without a sexual outlet.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many feminists
saw the replacement of sexual intercourse with some form of
psychic love, as a way of solving these problems. Elmy and
Swiney were major figures in the promotion of the ideas of
continence and psychic love, but they were by no means alone
in holding them. They were representative of mainstream
feminist opinion. Other feminists used different tactics and
promoted slightly different solutions, but they shared the same
basic philosophy.
Margaret Shurmer Sibthorp was a woman who talked, like
Swiney, of an individual spiritual satisfaction which women
could aspire to if they were able to rise above fleshly concerns.
Sibthorp produced, almost singlehandedly, a feminist publication
entitled Shafts, for a few years in the 1890s. In a review of a
book, The Physiology of Love, by Henry Seymour, she outlined
her philosophy about sex and spirituality. She wrote of the book
that:
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