The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
leaps and bounds. The syphilis bacillus was isolated in 1905
and the Wasserman blood test developed to test for it. Doctors
were beginning to realise how far-reaching the effects of venereal
disease could be in the causation of congenital deformities and
the various ills produced in the lifetime of the sufferer. The
general public anxiety led to the setting up of the Royal
Commission on Venereal Disease in 1912. When Christabel
Pankhurst decided to take up the issue in 1913 there was a
great deal of information at her disposal. Revelations about the
damage which the disease could cause to wives and children
when passed on by men were genuinely shocking and provided
good inflammatory material.
In an article entitled ‘The Virtue of Plain Speaking’ in the
Suffragette in April 1913, she announced and explained her
adoption of the issue. She wrote that suffragists had gradually
added to their ‘armoury of arguments’, as they realised the
‘greater fullness’ of the suffrage cause.
But there is one—and it is the latest development of the
movement—which is going to do far more than all else put
together to arouse women to strive for the vote with all their
soul and might. It is the realisation that the moral purity and
the physical health of the race depend upon votes for women. 32
She stated that a strong, if not the strongest, force opposed to
the enfranchisement of women was the desire of men to carry
on indulging in ‘sexual vice’ and their understanding that votes
for women could threaten this.
Under all the excuses and arguments against votes for women,
sexual vice is to be found lurking.
The opposition argues thus; if women are to become
politically free they will become spiritually strong and
economically independent, and thus they will not any longer
give or sell themselves to be the playthings of men. That, in
a nutshell, is the case against votes for woman. 33
Raising the issue of sexual vice was a final massive effort to
inspire women with anger and energy which would gain success
in the suffrage campaign. ‘We have here’, Christabel explained,
‘the thing which will appeal to and unite all women.’
Throughout 1913 the Suffragette carried articles by Christabel
Pankhurst on ‘sexual vice’, concentrating on venereal disease,
which were published as a pamphlet entitled The Great Scourge
and How to end It, or alternatively, Plain Facts about a Great
46