The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
actual needs of creation.’ 21 If this were so then women would
not have to be humiliated by being used against their will,
‘Women would no longer need to feel indignity or humiliation
if in the act of union they knew they had never given themselves
to their husbands only, but always to God and to the race.’ Re-
Bartlett’s words give us an idea of how the women we have
been looking at felt when their bodies were used for their
husbands’ pleasure. It is small wonder they sought to ennoble
the experience.
Re-Bartlett’s plea for a more spiritually satisfying relationship
between men and women reflects all the loneliness and aching
dissatisfaction which married middle-class women in the period
were feeling at finding that their relationships with men took
the form of having to provide their bodies for the satisfaction of
male sexual demands. She expressed bitter contempt for the
form which marriage took: ‘It is often said that marriage exists
for the protection of women, but in its present form it is often
her prison and her degradation.’ 22 Re-Bartlett, like the other
feminists considered here, thought that it was vital for
motherhood to be a matter of choice for women. This was to be
achieved by limiting ‘creative action’ to ‘creative desire’, i.e.
sexual intercourse only for reproduction. Artificial contraception
was anathema to her since this, the use of appliances, allowed
the dominance of male sexual demands which the woman had
no excuse to avoid:
those artifical means which in the educated classes are so
largely resorted to in order to prevent results leave the
animality resulting from the undue use of the sexual act the
same as in the populace, adding to it a new element of
degradation through the violation of physical nature which
in the populace rarely, and in the animal never appears. 23
Her desire to provide women with dignity and self-respect in
their relationships with men through control over their own
bodies, coupled with a deeper form of love and communication,
could not be achieved by use of a form of birth control which
merely meant more sexual intercourse. This was the root of the
feminist objection to birth control which was maintained by
some feminists well into the 1920s when ‘artificial’ birth control
was officially accepted by mainstream feminists such as the
National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship in 1925. One
woman who maintained her resistance, Margery Smith, wrote
in a letter to the NUSEC journal in 1925, ‘we regard artificial
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