The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
To healthy young adults, a certain amount of sexual
intercourse is necessary in order to keep their bodies and
minds in the best possible condition. The evil results of
abstinence are especially noticeable in women, probably
because abstinence is considerably less frequent among men.
Undoubtedly it is unsatisfied sexual longing that is responsible
for the greater part of the hysteria, chlorosis, and menstrual
disorders which are common among young unmarried
women. 38
The first volume of the Adult contained a hostile review of
Wolstenholme Elmy’s Phases of Love by Orford Northcote.
Battle was now joined. The distinction between the ideas of the
sex reformers and the majority of feminists became ever clearer.
Northcote praised The Human Flower but was very unhappy
at the concentration on psychic love in the later book: ‘To exalt
the mental sex states over the physical desire to which they are
due, as is done in this book, is to rehabilitate the ascetic notions
of medievalism, under a new but equally dangerous form.’ 39
A refutation of the uncontrollability of the male sex urge
was as vital to the pre-war feminists as it has been to women
working around the issue of male violence in the contemporary
wave of feminism. If the imperative male sex urge existed then
the sex-slavery of women might seem inevitable. Its existence
was used then as now to justify men’s use of prostitutes, the
sexual abuse of children, rape and assault. The feminists argued,
as they had been doing since the women’s movement began,
that the male urge was constructed and not a natural endowment
of man. It could, therefore be retrained and transformed. Francis
Swiney had scorned the ‘large majority of persons, ignorant of
physiology [who] still believe in the exploded fallacy of man’s
necessity for physical sexual expression and the need for its
gratification’. 40 She was determined that men could be trained
into continence, especially as women were now realising its
importance and could educate men. It was important because
‘woman’s redemption from sex-slavery can only be achieved
through man’s redemption from sex-obsession.’
Christabel Pankhurst devoted a large part of The Great
Scourge to refuting the idea that it was men’s ‘nature’ that
necessitated the sexual abuse of women. She demanded to know
why such ‘human nature’ arguments were not used to justify
killing and robbing and suggested that the idea was invented to
shield immoral men. She refused to adopt the idea which she
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