The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
feminists who were critical of male sexuality and that small
group of feminists who had recently embraced sex reform. Stella
Browne, a socialist feminist campaigner for birth control and
abortion, whom we will come across in the next chapter making
a bitter attack on a ‘spinster’ who criticised male sexuality,
was interested in sex reform and a disciple of Havelock Ellis.
She proclaimed with enthusiasm in the Freewoman in 1912,
‘Let us admit our joy and gratitude for the beauty and pleasure
of sex.’ 49 She meant by sex, sexual intercourse. Other women
who did not feel in the least grateful were trying to articulate
their discontents and work out what a woman-centred sexuality
might consist of.
A woman signing herself a ‘grateful reader’ wrote in to
‘suggest a point of view’ which she felt had not been covered in
the Freewoman debate, ‘the absolute indifference or dislike of
the sexual act in many women’. 50 This writer was speaking
specifically of sexual intercourse, as she made clear when she
said that this dislike existed in women who had been ‘unwise’,
i.e. engaged in premarital sexual intercourse and liked
‘lovemaking’ but ‘consistently hated the sexual act itself’. It did
not depend on lack of ‘sex attraction’. She suggested that it
might be due to the girls’ ignorance. It might also be due to the
fact that men knew ‘exactly what they want’ and women did
not. She suggested a further reason for women’s dislike of sexual
intercourse, ‘I think many women, besides their life-long training
in personal modesty, feel instinctively that…the man does
despise them and hold them in contempt and they despise
themelves.’ This letter worked towards a critical analysis of
women’s experience of sexual intercourse and why they might
not find it full of ‘beauty and pleasure’. This could be because
of men’s attitudes to women as expressed in that act or because
other forms of ‘lovemaking’ were more pleasureable. The
possibilities offered by this delicate exploration of women’s sexual
experience could not be followed up towards the creation of a
woman-determined sexuality because the propaganda of the
male-defined sex reform movement eliminated any feminist
critique, as we shall see in later chapters.
The feminist ideas we have been looking at here were applied
practically in women’s campaigns around sexuality. These
campaigns can only be understood in this context. In the absence
of any understanding of this feminist perspective, historians
have labelled the women campaigners prudes and puritans. In
the next two chapters we will look at the massive campaign
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