The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘HENPECKING’
campaign. They were almost wholly concerned throughout their
lifespan with the fight against state regulation of prostitutes
which was also the main focus for the AMSH. Alison Neilans,
who became secretary of the AMSH in 1913 and remained so
for 25 years, had been a militant suffragette in the Women’s
Freedom League and had been imprisoned three times. Her
obituary in the Guardian in 1938 stated that she had ‘manfully
[?] stood for the fundamental unity of the moral law and ideal
for all persons, races and sexes, and the great principle
underlying her work had been the equality of the moral law as
applied to both sexes’. 4 Though the main work of the AMSH
was to campaign against the state regulation of prostitution in
Britain and abroad (it was the British branch of the International
Abolitionist Federation), much of its activity was directed
towards gaining legislation which would ensur e that the clients
of prostitutes were prosecuted and towards making it an offence
for any man to solicit or annoy any woman in the street. Both
the organisations, the NVA and the AMSH, which were to lead
the campaign against sexual abuse were founded upon the desire
to eliminate the double standard of sexual morality and its
injustices for women. Their biases were different, as we shall
see. The AMSH was concerned to protect the civil rights of
women at all times whereas the NVA, in its later years, was
prepared to be punitive towards women at the sacrifice of their
civil liberties.
The campaign to amend the 1885 Act
The experience of putting the 1885 Act into effect for the
protection of girls, convinced the organisations involved,
particularly the NVA, that the Act had serious deficiencies which
required remedy and the campaign to amend it began almost
immediately. Mrs Fawcett outlined the amendments she wanted
in a paper to the 1892 conference of women workers among
women and children. These were changes in the time limit and
in the law on affiliation, the abolition of the reasonable cause
to believe clause, legal punishment for incest and severer
punishment for men who abused positions of authority. The
reasonable cause to believe clause, which decreed that believing
a girl was over 16 was a defence to age of consent charges, and
the time limit clause, which required that prosecutions must be
got under way within three months of an offence being
committed, were believed by NVA members to have been
introduced into the Act to protect men against prosecution. As
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