REFORMING SEX

The first generation of feminist campaigners in this field, often described as social purity feminists, were understandably concerned to challenge the dominant cultural construction offemininity and female sexuality.

The first opportunity for feminists to articulate their opposition to the double-standard was in the campaigns against state-regulated prostitution. Although issues such as custody of children and married women's property had engaged early feminists with women's sexuality in an oblique way, it was the issue of prostitution which galvanised them into speaking out on a sub­ject formerly regarded as taboo for respectable women.

[Prostitution was a question] which directly strikes at the physical and moral life of tens of thousands of women... which threatens the purity and stability of our homes, which stabs at the very heart of pure affection, which degrades all womanhood through foul associations of thought and feeling, and which murders chivalry and generosity towards women in the hearts of our sons and brothers.³³

Prostitution degraded all women and poisoned the relations between the sexes. Moreover, argued Butler, by condoning prostitution, as was the case in all west European jurisdictions, those who supported its existence upheld a system which consigned ‘respectable' women to ignorance in sexual matters. The campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in England and Wales, spearheaded by the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Con­tagious Diseases Acts, and parallel feminist challenges to the state regulation of prostitution on the European continent, was a challenge to the notion that respectable women should have nothing to do with sex. Respectable, middle-class women found themselves speaking in public about women's bodies, the sex act and ‘instrumental rape' as they described the forced med­ical examination by a man with a ‘steel penis' or speculum. They surprised themselves in their boldness but also wrong-footed their male opponents who did not know how to deal with what one British Member of Parlia­ment described as the ‘revolt of the women'. Surprising as it may seem, social purity feminists allied themselves with prostitutes on the grounds that all women were the victims of men's unrestrained passions and were economic­ally dependent on them. ‘So long as men are vicious and women have no employment this evil will go on', concluded Butler in 1871.34

Prostitution was an issue that radicalised feminist campaigns elsewhere in western Europe, partly as a result ofJosephine Butler's energetic proselytising on behalf of what became known as abolitionism — the total dismantling of state-regulated prostitution.

Feminists who campaigned against the double-standard had taken the first step in challenging the view of female sexuality as inherently dangerous and unruly. Despite their appropriation of a model of female passivity and self­control they had made some progress towards women taking back control over their own bodies. It allowed women to speak out in public against the injustices — rape, incest and domestic violence — perpetrated against them. And it pres­aged the beginning of a recognition amongst feminists that reform of the pri­vate sphere was a prerequisite for reform in the public sphere. Women could not reform their position in society until they reformed their dominant notions of female sexuality.

Sexual purity, as a feminist strategy, was not long-lived. It was superseded in the late 1880s and 1890s by a more libertine strategy: the inversion of the idealised ‘pure' woman into the ‘liberated' women who embraced sexual freedom. The pioneers were known as the ‘new women'. They had benefited from the efforts of their feminist predecessors in opening up the debate about the double-standard, but at the same time they were also continuing a tradition of socialist-feminist thought on heterosexual relations which con­trasted significantly with the rather conservative social purity stance pre­ferred by moderate feminists. These women were stimulated to transform their critique of the double-standard into an agenda for sexual emancipation by the influence of science and the radical response to the new ‘knowledges' about sex by the ‘new feminists' of the 1880s and 1890s. Women like Eleanor Marx (1856—98) and Olive Schreiner (1855—1920) in Britain, Helene Stocker (1869—1943) in Germany, Ellen Key in Sweden and Madeleine Pelletier (1874—1939) in France, shifted the terrain towards a more critical stance on heterosexual relations.

In 1880, Henrik Ibsen's play The Doll’s House was premiered in Copenhagen and thereafter, in translation, was produced on stages around Europe. It caused uproar for its portrayal of a middle-class woman — Nora — leaving her husband and children and her home, or ‘doll's house', within whose walls she had been stifled. A few years later, in 1883, Olive Schreiner's novel The Story of an African Farm paralleled Ibsen's portrayal of a frustrated and unfulfilled wife and mother by introducing its readers to the heroine Lyndall who, like Nora, refuses to accept the sanctioned mode of life of a woman of her social position.

Olive Schreiner and her contemporaries were less the daughters of the social purity feminists and more the inheritors of a much earlier school of thought known as utopian socialism. In France in the 1830s and 1840s, a group known as the Saint Simonians followed by the utopian socialists, espoused a new social order incorporating the emancipation of women and the individual’s right to free love. At the heart of the vision was a belief in social harmony, an emphasis on the emotional or sexual basis of relationships, and an opposition to the exploitation of women, especially within marriage. The critique of marriage was at the heart of utopian socialist thought since it was this institution, according to the social visionary and communitarian Charles Fourier (1772—1837), that trapped women in dependence and milit­ated against their liberation. For Fourier and his followers, the ideal society would be run on along communal lines, theoretically freeing women from housework and child care.

It was to be another forty years or so before the disciples of those early trailblazers were able to put their principles into practice without having to endure quite the same degree of opprobrium heaped on the early pioneers of alternative lifestyles. By 1900, voices calling for the legal and moral reform of marriage were widespread amongst feminists. They built upon the cri­tiques put forward by liberal feminists such as the German Louise Dittmar (1807—84), who, in the 1840s, had put the case for marriage founded upon love rather than material considerations. These later, more radical voices compared marriage to the institution of slavery incorporating the double­standard. In The Sexual Emancipation of Women published in 1911, the French feminist Madeleine Pelletier advanced her view that marriage should encom­pass sexual equality. Following a trenchant criticism of the ‘conventional morality' of bourgeois marriage she commented: ‘There is no equality in con­jugal love. The man possesses and the woman is possessed; what is a right for him is a duty for her.'⁴² For Pelletier, marriage was merely the institutional reflection of the sexual inequality which permitted men licence and confined ‘respectable' women to their homes. In arguing that women should have the freedom to walk down the street, attend the theatre or go to a cafe alone, she was making a claim for women's right to inhabit public space without fear of character assassination.

Pelletier never married, but like most feminist critics she was not opposed to marriage in principle, only the form of conjugal union buttressed by pat­riarchal law codes. Yet there were others who went a step further. Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx, was seemingly the quintessential new woman. She was clever, politically committed and for most of her adult life she lived in a ‘free union' with the scientist, atheist and socialist Edward Aveling. The couple did not marry, but unlike her friend Olive Schreiner, it was not principle that made her eschew marriage. For Olive, marriage would have been an imprisonment: ‘no-one will ever absorb me and make me lose myself utterly, and unless someone did I should never marry. In fact I am married now, to my books! I love them better every day, and find them more satisfying.'⁴³ Eleanor Marx, it seems, would have married but believed the couple were legally barred owing to the fact that Aveling was still married to his first wife. A similar situation pertained for the novelist George Eliot (1819—80) and her long-term partner. Certainly Marx was a critic of a sexual morality which degraded women, but she was above all a socialist for whom economic relations were the key to sexual equality. In the socialist state, she wrote, ‘the contract between man and woman will be of a purely private nature... the woman will no longer be the man's slave, but his equal.'⁴⁴

The key to understanding the tenor of these various critiques of marriage and of the double-standard enshrined within it, is to focus on women's demands for personal autonomy rather than sexual freedom. What united feminists, both those primarily concerned with sexual danger or male abuse and those who sought to liberate women to experience the pleasures of sex, was agreement about the importance of education and protection. As Madeleine Pelletier argued in A Feminist Education for Girls in 1914: ‘the educator... must give her daughter a sex education so that she is capable of that self-protection.'⁴⁵ So-called new women, sex reformers, freethinkers, radicals and feminists did not so much espouse free love which had been so damaging to the utopian socialists some decades earlier, as a new morality which allowed women ‘the right to be sexual'.⁴⁶