The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘HENPECKING’
Mrs Fawcett pointed out in her paper, they were both exceptional
in law. There was no time limit for the commencement of
proceedings in other offences such as felony or murder, and no
such thing as a defence of reasonable cause to believe in other
offences which concerned the age of the victim. The explanation
for such innovations in the law lay with the attitudes of the
male MPs who made clear in the debates in Parliament that
they wished to protect men, particularly young ones of their
own class, from the operation of the law. 5
The minutes of the NVA legal sub-committee are littered
with examples of cases they could not proceed with because of
the time limit. The fact that no action could be taken in such
cases caused considerable anger and frustration to those who
came across them. 6 Many cases only came to light when the
girls were obviously pregnant or were delivered of babies and
at that stage the only action which could be taken was to seek
affiliation orders, for maintenance, against the fathers of the
children. This was a situation which the NVA found particularly
galling when the man involved was the girl’s father and incest
was not recognised as an offence.
Benjamin Waugh, founder of the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, was deeply concerned about
sexual abuse of children, and his interest led to the NSPCC
being strongly focussed on the issue throughout the 1890s and
the early twentieth century. In 1886 he asked the NVA to consider
trying to get the reasonable cause to believe clause removed.
The NVA also sought to make children’s evidence more
acceptable in court. Many of their cases were reported to have
failed because of lack of evidence or corroboration. In 1886 the
NVA proposed that the depositions of young children, taken
before a magistrate while the matter was still fresh in the child’s
mind, should be allowed to be used in court. Another proposed
amendment in the same year was to raise the age of consent for
indecent assault from 13 to 16. There were also moves to raise
the age of consent beyond 16 and in 1889 the NVA sent a
resolution to the women’s congress in Paris for the raising of
the age of consent to 18. 7 At various times over the next 30
years, organisations or individual women within them called
for the raising of the age of consent to 17, 18, 19 or even 21.
Such moves, presumably motivated by women’s lack of
enthusiasm for male sexuality, aroused tremendous alarm in
men who saw themselves being deprived of sexual access to
women. In 1924 one anti-feminist writer accused feminists of
75