The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
Evil. Her message was that ‘sexual disease’ caused by men’s
immorality was transmitted to wives who were usually ignorant
of what was wrong with them and would be kept in deliberate
ignorance by doctors as to the real nature of their illness, lest
their husbands might be embarrassed. The diseases were ‘the
great cause of physical, mental, and moral degeneracy and of
race suicide’, she said, and 75–80 per cent of men had gonorrhoea
whilst a considerable percentage of the rest had syphilis. The
cure for venereal disease was ‘Votes for women and chastity for
men.’
The feminists of the pre-war period continued to raise the
ideas which we have seen voiced by feminists in the 1890s
about the general effects on women of the form taken by male
sexuality. They saw the general effect as being to institute a
system of ‘sex-slavery’ for women, in which women were seen
only in terms of sex and of no other functions. This sexualisation
of woman led to her being considered fit for no other career
than that of sexual object and affected the opportunites of all
women for education, work, and general self-development.
Christabel Pankhurst wrote that sexual disease was due to the
‘doctrine that woman is sex and beyond that nothing’. Often,
she said, this doctrine was dressed up by men into the idea that
women were and should be mothers but this was really a
deception:
What a man who says that really means is that women are
created primarily for the sex gratification of men, and
secondarily, for the bearing of children if he happens to want
them, but of no more children that he wants. 34
The result of male desires had been that ‘the relation between
man and woman has centred in the physical’, and the
relationship had become that of ‘master and slave’.
Cicely Hamilton, a playwright and member of the Actresses
Franchise League, wrote Marriage as a Trade in 1909. She
defined marriage as a trade because it entailed the exchange of
women’s bodies for subsistence. She charged men with having
emphasised only the sex faculty in woman in order to gratify
their desire.
Sex is only one of the ingredients of the natural woman—an
ingredient which has assumed undue and exaggerated
proportions in her life owing to the fact that it has for many
generations furnished her with the means of her livelihood.
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