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| ISBN-13: | 9781742194691 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Spinifex Press |
| Publication date: | 10/28/1997 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 237 |
| Sales rank: | 717,465 |
| File size: | 268 KB |
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The Spinster And Her Enemies
Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930
By Sheila Jeffreys
Spinifex Press Pty Ltd
Copyright © 1997 introduction to this edition Sheila JeffreysAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74219-469-1
CHAPTER 1
Feminism and Social Purity
In the 1880s in Britain, a movement, described by its proponents as being for the advancement of 'social purity', was gathering momentum. The social purity movement reached through hundreds of societies into the lives of a considerable proportion of the male and female population. Historians, whose vision has been blinkered by the ideology of the 'sexual revolution', have tended to see social purity as simply an evangelical, anti-sex, repressive movement. Robert Bristow, in his book Vice and Vigilance, includes 1880s social purity within what he sees as four peaks of 'anti-vice' agitation. He places these in the 1690s, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the 1880s and the early twentieth century. His explanation for the birth of each is the same: 'Each was fed by the religious revivals that converted young men and channelled waves of sublimated anti-sexual energy against the erotic.' Another approach has been to speak of the anxieties caused by social disruption being displaced onto a concern about sexuality, and to represent the social purity movement as a form of moral panic. These writers acknowledge the involvement of feminists in nineteenth-century social purity but regard the feminist input as a red-herring caused by the difficulty those feminists had in overcoming their old-fashioned puritanical ideas about sex. In fact feminist ideas and personnel played a vitally important part in the 1880s social purity movement and can be seen as having shaped its direction and concerns.
The primary aims of social purity were the elimination of prostitution and of the sexual abuse of girls. Women and girls are the objects of prostitution and sexual abuse, and men are the exploiters. It cannot therefore be expected that one form of explanation could describe why both men and women were involved in campaigning against a form of sexual behaviour to which men and women bore such a very different relationship. The explanations of the male historians may well help us to understand the involvement of men in social purity. The men were concerned, for whatever reason, in controlling the behaviour of their own sex. Women were concerned with preventing the exploitation of theirs. In analysing the motives of the women and men involved in what has been seen by some as the contemporary equivalent of social purity, organisations like the British National Viewers and Listeners' Association or the Responsible Society, the same problem of interpretation exists. However these contemporary phenomena have no feminist input and have an antifeminist stance on most important issues. The 1880s social purity movement was very different, since feminist ideas and personnel played such an important part in it.
Two distinctly different currents flowed into the social purity movement of the 1880s. One was religious revivalism and the other was the agitation against the Contagious Diseases Acts. These Acts of the 1860s allowed compulsory examination of women suspected of working as prostitutes in garrrison towns and ports. The campaign for their repeal gave women the experience of thinking and speaking about previously tabooed topics. The feminists who opposed the Acts pointed out that the examinations were an infringement of women's civil rights.
Feminists in the Ladies National Association, inspired by Josephine Butler, inveighed against the double standard of sexual morality which enforced such abuse of women in order to protect the health of men who, as they pointed out, had infected the prostitutes in the first place. The progenitors of the social purity movement of the 1880s included men and women who had been involved in the repeal campaign. The Social Purity Alliance was set up in 1873 by men involved in the campaign to unite those of their sex who wished to transform their conduct and that of other men, so that self-control could be promoted and prostitution rendered unnecessary. From the 1880s onwards and particularly from 1886 when the Contagious Diseases Acts were finally repealed, women who had been involved in the abolition campaign and others who espoused the same principles, joined the proliferating social purity organisations in large numbers and brought with them a strong and determined feminist viewpoint. The social purity movement provided a vehicle which the feminists could use to make their influence felt. Feminists within social purity saw prostitution as the sacrifice of women for men. They fought the assumption that prostitution was necessary because of the particular biological nature of male sexuality, and stated that the male sexual urge was a social and not a biological phenomenon. They were particularly outraged at the way in which the exercise of male sexuality created a division of women into the 'pure' and the 'fallen' and prevented the unity of the 'sisterhood of women'. They insisted that men were responsible for prostitution and that the way to end such abuse of women was to curb the demand for prostitutes by enjoining chastity upon men, rather than by punishing those who provided the supply. They employed the same arguments in their fight against other aspects of male sexual behaviour which they regarded as damaging to women, such as sexual abuse of children, incest, rape and sexual harassment in the street. This chapter will look at some of those social purity organisations in which women's influence was dominant, whether these women saw themselves as self-conscious feminists or not, in order to assess their motives and ideas.
Josephine Butler
Josephine Butler was involved in many other feminist campaigns besides that against the Contagious Diseases Acts, notably the movement for higher education for women. Her feminism was informed by her interest in the defence of individual liberty as pursued by the National Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights. This was a liberal, radical organisation, concerned with defending the individual against state interference with rights and liberties. On the issue of sexuality Butler's feminism was strong and clear. She did not merely fight state interference, in the form of the Contagious Diseases Acts, with women's civil rights, she also conducted a propaganda campaign against men's abuse of women in the institution of prostitution. In a pamphlet entitled Social Purity and published on behalf of the Social Purity Alliance, Josephine Butler outlined the gist of the feminist message behind the social purity movement. The pamphlet reproduces an address given by Butler at Cambridge in May 1879 to undergraduates. The question she was asked by the young men was, 'What can we do practically to promote Social Purity and to combat the evil around us?' Josephine Butler proclaimed that the root of the evils of prostitution and impurity was: 'the unequal standard in morality; the false idea that there is one code of morality for men and another for women ... which has within the last century been publicly proclaimed as an axiom by almost all the governments of the civilised and Christian world.' She explained that the double standard led to the condemnation of women and the excusing of men and quoted proverbial expressions which illustrated this — expressions which could only be used of men, such as 'He is only sowing his wild oats' and 'A reformed profligate makes a good husband'. The women who attacked the double standard were assaulting traditional male privileges in a way that was intended to be embarrassing and difficult for men. The result of the double standard, according to Butler, was 'that a large section of female society has to be told off — set aside, so to speak, to minister to the irregularities of the excusable man'. She attributed the blame for this situation to men and particularly those of the upper classes such as were in her audience:
Licentiousness is blasting the souls and bodies of thousands of men and women, chiefly through the guilt of the men of the upper and educated classes. The homes of the poor are blighted — the women among the poor are crushed — by this licentiousness, which ever goes hand-in-hand with the most galling tyranny of the strong over the weak.
Then, as now, men of all classes were involved in the use of women in prostitution. The radical part of Butler's attack was to target the middle and upper-class men who were in the habit of sounding off about the immorality of the 'lower orders' whilst hiding behind a mask of respectability. After outlining the problem, Butler explained that she did not think that her audience was suited to rescue work, their role was in the forming of a 'just public opinion'.
J. Ellice Hopkins
The name of J. Ellice Hopkins, unlike that of Josephine Butler, is not generally mentioned in connection with the history of feminism. She had more influence than any other woman or man on the development of 1880s social purity. She is one of those who became involved in social purity through religious revivalism and had no previous involvement in feminist causes. Yet if we look closely at what she had to say it is clear that in relation to sexuality her position was almost identical to that of the most radical feminist campaigners. Hopkins was born and brought up in Cambridge and began her evangelical work there with a mission for working men. She moved to Brighton in 1866 and became involved in the preventive work of a rescue home in that town. Preventive work was concerned with keeping young women out of prostitution and could include help with finding jobs or the setting up of homes for girls considered to be in danger of falling into prostitution, to ease their passage into other ways of making a living. Rescue workers set up refuges for women working in prostitution with the aim of rehabilitating them. From her time in Brighton onwards, Hopkins dedicated herself to the task of preventive work, both directly with those women who might become prostitutes and with the potential clients, by working to transform the sexual behaviour of men. Her work and influence lie behind the creation of the Ladies Association for Friendless Girls, the White Cross Army and the Church of England Purity Society. She also contributed to the formation of many other purity organisations in the 1880s through her speaking tours and writings. She formed a close friendship with James Hinton, a medical specialist and philosopher, who made a death-bed appeal to her in 1875 to carry out the work he had been unable to do in preventive work among the female poor. It seems that Hopkins by no means fully implemented Hinton's aims. Hinton had believed that prostitution could be eliminated by the rehabilitation of sexuality, so that non-prostitute women would be more compliant in servicing men's needs. Havelock Ellis, who, as we shall see in Chapter 6 was one of the main progenitors of the sex reform movement which set out to eroticise women in the service of men's sexuality, claimed to have been inspired by reading Hinton's work. Hopkins saw her mission very differently. She set out to restrict men's sexual behaviour. This is a good example of the way in which the desire to eliminate prostitution could inspire men and women in very different ways. The main motivation of the women involved in 1880s social purity was to transform men's sexual behaviour through challenging the idea that men had an urgent sexual need which required to be serviced by women. The sex reform movement, on the other hand, totally accepted the imperative nature of men's sexual urges, and sought to conscript all women into the active servicing of male sexuality.
In 1879 Hopkins submitted to a committee of convocation A Plea for the Wider Action of the Church of England in the Prevention of the Degradation of Women, later published as a pamphlet. The 'Plea' is a very courageous attack on the hypocrisy of the church and its indifference to the elimination of prostitution, and an impassioned demand for action. The committee of convocation had been set up specifically to deal with the problem of prostitution and Hopkins expressed in the preface to the pamphlet, the hope that it would result in the formation of a powerful church organisation to 'attack it root and branch, and proclaim the absolute authority, for men and women alike, of those great moral laws on which the welfare and health of nations have most depended'. The tenor of Hopkins's approach is suggested by her use of the phrase 'degradation of women' in place of 'prostitution'. Her interest lay, not in punishing women who 'fell', but in protecting women from the damage caused to them by the double standard and men's sexual practice. The effect of male sexual behaviour she described thus: 'at the heart of our great Christian civilisation there has grown up an immense outcast class of helpless women, and still more helpless children.' The plight of girl children was exacerbated by the English law which recognised:
That a woman comes of age, at the age of 13, for the purposes of vice, — in other words, that if a little bird-witted child of 13 consents to be ruined for life, the law throws on that moral baby the responsibility, and the man who has betrayed a child escapes scot free.
Josephine Butler had been unable to shock the Church of England out of its apathy towards prostitution. Ellice Hopkins was to succeed in doing so. The transformation of opinion was necessary since, in Hopkins's words, 'the majority of men, many of them good Christian men, hold the necessity of the existence of this outcast class in a civilised country, where marriage is delayed; the necessity of this wholesale sacrifice of women in body and soul'. Hopkins accused the church of making no attempt to change the attitude towards prostitution of the average Englishman who thought:
What's the use, ... of our bearing the burden of self-control which civilised life throws upon us, whilst we have plenty of women? ... What recks it that weak women are crushed and degraded, as long as we strong men find life the easier and pleasanter.
Hopkins outlined the action which she wanted the church to take. At that time the only church organisation which existed to deal with the problem was the Church Penitentiary Association. Hopkins was angry that the church saw fit to offer 'only penitentiaries' in which the women involved in prostitution would be given the chance to repent. She wanted the church to deal with the real cause of prostitution.
She had no doubt as to the identity of the real cause; it was men. She wrote that penitentiaries 'only cure the evil after it is done, when they only touch women, and leave the vital factor, the man, untouched, and only save women in infinitesimal numbers'. She declared that while penitentiaries were given by the church as the 'sole specific', then the church actually ministered to the evil cause of prostitution, by accepting the double standard, and tacitly acknowledged its existence.
Hopkins demanded the creation of men's chastity leagues to deal with the 'real cause'. It is this which most clearly distinguishes her work from that of women involved in work around prostitution before her. She carried the battle to protect women from sexual exploitation beyond the defensive activities of preventive and rescue work with women. She directed her energies to the transformation of male sexual behaviour because she believed that that was where the cause of the problem lay. She thought that men needed help in self-control and that would be best given by men banding together to help each other.
What I crave is some agency that would infuse into young men a good, strong passionate sense of the pitifulness of degrading women, inflicting a curse which they do not share with so much as their little finger — going back to their own jolly lives, their pleasant homes, their friends, their career, their power of marrying; and leaving the unhappy girl to become an outcast, cutting her off from ever being an honourable wife and mother, exposing her to a hideous disease, dooming her to live a degraded life and die a Godless, Christless, hopeless death.
Hopkins, though she was herself a strong and independent, lifelong spinster, expressed herself in terms of the Victorian ideals of wifehood and motherhood. The significance of her contribution lay not so much in her ideas on woman's role as in her plans for men's role. She was a woman directing men's behaviour in the interests of defending women. She was not the originator of the idea of men's purity leagues, as the Social Purity Alliance was already in existence, but she was responsible for converting the Church of England to the idea and for popularising it so that purity leagues mushroomed throughout the 1880s in Britain.
A White Cross League pamphlet tells us what came from herefforts. Hopkins made a speech at a church congress held in Derby in 1882 which made such a deep impression that a committee was formed to see what action could be taken. From this committee in 1883, came the formation of the Church of England Purity Society, which was the central organ of the church for 'promoting purity amongst men, and preventing the degradation of women and children'. In February of the same year, the White Cross Army was set up. Hopkins spoke at a meeting in Edinburgh presided over by the Bishop of Durham. The bishop asked all men who accepted the five obligations mentioned in her speech to come forward. Two hundred men were enrolled and received pledge cards containing the obligations which were as follows:
1 To treat all women with respect, and to endeavour to defend them from wrong.
2 To endeavour to put down all indecent language and jests.
3 To maintain the law of purity as equally binding on men and women.
4 To endeavour to spread these principles among my companions, and to try and help my younger brothers.
5 To use every possible means to fulfil the command, 'Keep THYSELF pure'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Spinster And Her Enemies by Sheila Jeffreys. Copyright © 1997 introduction to this edition Sheila Jeffreys. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press Pty Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Preface to 1997 edition,
Introduction,
1 Feminism and Social Purity,
2 Continence and Psychic Love,
3 'The sort of thing that might happen to any man': Feminist campaigns and politics around the sexual abuse of children,
4 'Henpecking': Women's campaigns to gain legislation against the sexual abuse of girls,
5 Spinsterhood and Celibacy,
6 Women's Friendships and Lesbianism,
7 Antifeminism and Sex Reform before the First World War,
8 The Decline of Militant Feminism,
9 The Invention of the Frigid Woman,
10 The 'Prudes' and the 'Progressives',
Afterword,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,