A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO BE SEXUAL
In 1912 the Swedish writer on sex reform and motherhood, Ellen Key, commented on the nature of sexual relations in her publication The Woman Movement. ‘The young girl of today, in spite of all intellectual development, is still won by powerful spiritual sensual love, which the woman movement has too long considered as a negligible quality.' Emphasising what she regarded as woman's most important role — motherhood — she went on to argue that it was precisely because of their understanding of their social role that girls ‘no longer consider their erotic longing as impure and ugly but as pure and beautiful'.47 Key was a controversial and influential figure.
Her writings might well appear conservative and out of step with the new morality espoused by freethinkers — the main thrust of her argument was that women had a duty to reproduce and to fulfil their role as mothers — but she also had a radical edge. Her espousal of the pleasurable aspects of sex for women and her recognition that women possessed legitimate sexual desire, were in line with those who argued that women should claim their sexuality for themselves. And her proposal that motherhood outside marriage should not be a subject of shame, reflected agitation on behalf of the rights of unmarried mothers by radical feminists.48 In her important work Love and Marriage, first published in Sweden in 1904, Key shows herself to be a thoroughly modern woman in her espousal of individual choice: ‘Our time has recognised the value to morality of personal choice. It admits as really ethical only such acts as result from personal examination and take place with the approval of the individual conscience.'49In the decade or so before the outbreak of war, reformers across Europe successfully challenged the notion of the passionless woman by writing and talking about sex, by educating women about their bodies, and by demanding that women be permitted to own their sexuality and create their own sexual identity.
In practical terms this meant sex education, campaigns centred on reproductive rights, demands for reform of the laws on illegitimacy, and advice and help to unmarried mothers. The diverse proponents of this ‘new morality' broke with the earlier feminist concern with undesired sex and concerned themselves with women's freedom to have and enjoy sex, although their horizons were limited to heterosexual relationships.50For much of the twentieth century the issue of reproductive rights has been seen as central to feminist concerns. Access to contraception and the right to abortion and thus the freedom of a woman to choose her reproductive destiny have acted as touchstones for the advancement of women. This should not be surprising in view of the lamentable situation which had prevailed in Europe in the previous century. Whilst it would be misleading to suggest that birth control was an invention of modernisation, since clearly couples had always used a variety of unreliable contraceptive measures, the more general and informed use of birth control with the potential to have a tremendous impact of women's lives, was an early twentieth century development.
It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the relationship between sex and pregnancy began to disengage in popular understanding, with the widespread production and advertisement of contraceptive devices such as diaphragms, condoms and pessaries. Feminists were initially mistrustful and sometimes downright opposed to contraception. Even the advocacy of information about birth control was controversial. In Britain the tone was set by the 1877 trial on the grounds of obscenity of Annie Besant (1847—1933) and Charles Bradlaugh for distributing a birth control tract. Feminists were no more likely than any other group to support contraceptive advice which they regarded as likely to encourage promiscuity, brutalise the sex act and reinforce women's subservience to men. As late as 1912, contributors to The Freewoman journal maintained this stance: ‘Common Malthusian practices', as contraception was termed, ‘are a gross outrage on the aesthetic sensibilities of women, and the final mark of their sexual degradation.'51 In Germany, similar arguments were presented by conservative feminists who supported the state's attempt to increase the birth rate in the service of the strength and vitality of the nation.52 In Catholic Europe, the taboo against speaking about birth control on account of the church's teachings that contraception was sinful, silenced not only women's groups but also those willing to break free of the church such as anarchists.
In Spain, it took outspoken individuals such as Hildegart Rodriguez, secretary of the Spanish League for Scientifically Based Sex Reform, to defend family limitation, not only on eugenic grounds but on the grounds of women's freedom to practice ‘conscious maternity’.53 In Russia where birth control, unlike abortion, was not illegal, there were nevertheless few supporters of deliberate family limitation. One of the few was Sofiya Zarechnaya, a socialist feminist who equated birth control with women’s freedom and emancipation. Writing in the Russian feminist journal Zhenskoe delo in 1910, Zarechnaya argued that women should have the right to make choices about their own bodies and that birth control information would free both unmarried and married women from unwanted pregnancies.54Feminists began to abandon their moralistic stance and proceeded to advocate sex education in order to help women to gain control within their marriages. ‘I can conceive of nothing more profoundly “immoral” than the marriage of a young woman who is absolutely ignorant of the most elementary laws of physiology’, exclaimed the French birth control campaigner Nelly Roussel (1878—1922) in 1904.55 Women who married with no knowledge of their own bodies or the sex act placed themselves in a weak position according to Roussel and others of like mind, giving encouragement to men who consider her merely ‘an object of pleasure’. For British feminist campaigner Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy (1833—1913) the notion of conjugal rights which gave a husband the right to demand sexual relations with his wife even if she declined, constituted legalised rape. The next step was to give women control of their fertility.
Those who advocated what was known as the neo-Malthusian position on birth control began to stake women’s claim to the terrain of knowledge concerned with fertility. Notably in Britain and Germany, feminist advocates of birth control focused their attention on the working classes amongst whom, it was believed, the effects of large families, poverty, poor housing and sanitation might be alleviated by family planning.
In Britain, Alice Vickery (1844—1929), the first British woman pharmacist and one of the first female medical graduates, evangelised about the health benefits to workingclass women of ‘preventives’, as contraceptive devices were called, and also campaigned to achieve reform of the illegitimacy laws, anticipating the later advocacy of this position by German radical feminists.56 The issue of reproductive rights was first discussed on a public platform in Germany where one of the most outspoken and radical organisations to espouse the ‘new morality’, the Bund fur Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Motherhood), placed itself at the centre of the sexuality debate. Central to the League’s agenda was the belief that women were as entitled to sexual fulfilment as men, that women had a right to contraception and abortion, and that unmarried mothers should be treated equally with their married counterparts. The League was interested not just in the lifestyle choices of the middle classes, but with the problems facing working-class women, especially single mothers. Hitherto, the reproductive rights agenda had been championed by campaigning individuals but not by feminist organisations. The League's agenda was undeniably radical, not only because it spoke out about sexuality, but also because its spokeswomen were prepared to defy the state which had been attempting to slow down the decline in the population growth rate by encouraging women to become mothers and by enforcing the abortion law more strictly. German feminists were blamed for encouraging women to make informed choices about their lives and turning their backs on motherhood for the sake of careers.57But neither the League in Germany nor outspoken individual campaigners for birth control in Britain succeeded in persuading the mainstream women's movement to take up the issue of reproductive rights. Alice Vickery's enthusiasm for birth control had a limited impact upon British feminists who remained ambivalent about family limitation, despite her bona fide feminist credentials — she was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union and active suffrage campaigner.
In Germany the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (General German Women's Association) voted to reject a proposal to support abolition of the abortion statute, although they did support less stringent penalties on those, mainly working-class, women found guilty of aborting a foetus.58 Interestingly, the abortion debate did not broaden out to encompass fertility control in general, and in 1913 the government of Prussia attempted to introduce legislation to restrict access to contraception and abortifacients, banning the advertising, manufacture and sale of such products. It was this blatant attempt by the government to restrict women's choice under the guise of population policy that stung one group of women into action — members of the socialist women's section of the German Social Democrats — who supported a proposed birth strike advocated by two socialist doctors active amongst the Berlin working class. When leading socialists Clara Zetkin (1857—1933) and Luise Zietz (1865—1922) sought to oppose the birth strike — on the grounds that birth control was ‘imitation of the moral decadence of the bourgeoisie' — they immediately received the wrath of the working class for whom fertility control was a key aspect of self-improvement and better living conditions.59 Similarly, in France, birth control and sexual liberation were taken up by a small group of radicals such as Roussel and Pelletier whilst the more conservative mainstream feminists focused their energies on the state recognition of motherhood, symbolised by the words of Hubertine Auclert: ‘Maternity will cease to terrify French women when, instead of dishonouring or reducing them to dependency, it [France] honours them by payments for indispensable service to the state.'60 Feminists did not make reproductive rights a priority issue until after the First World War.Europe's first birth control clinic was opened by Aletta Jacobs (1851— 1929) in the Netherlands in 1882. Elsewhere, women had to wait until after the war for access to inexpensive or free contraception and fertility advice.
By 1914, Margaret Sanger (1883—1966) was advising working women in the United States to know their bodies and to practise family limitation: ‘Learn the facts of pregnancy. The inevitable fact is that, unless you prevent the male sperm from entering the womb you are liable to become pregnant,' she exhorted in Family Limitation published in 1914.61 But her solutions were still fairly crude if the suppository consisting of cocoa butter mixed with quinine, recommended as a ‘simple recipe which anybody can easily make', is a typical example. A more holistic and romantic approach was taken by Marie Stopes (1880—1958), the most famous birth control advocate. In her books Married Love and Wise Parenthood, both published in 1918, Stopes acted as marriage counsellor and sex educator.62 Her critique of male sexuality and her understanding of the female reproductive cycle were brought together in Married Love, a book which combined sex education with a commitment to female sexual autonomy. At its heart was her understanding of the rhythms of female desire. Once women and men understood that women did not always desire sex, men could adjust themselves to women's sexual rhythms. Wise Parenthood, as the title implies, was concerned more explicitly with birth control, and shortly after its publication she set up Britain's first birth control clinic in London in 1921.The work of Marie Stopes marks the culmination of three decades of campaigning on sexuality. Today, Stopes is something of an ambiguous figure, hailed for her work on birth control and sex education, but at the same time pilloried for her apparent embrace of eugenics and her inability to form close personal relationships. Nevertheless, she does stand as an icon of progress for women. The daughter of a feminist, she was a beneficiary of feminist campaigns to open up the education system to women, attending the North London Collegiate School and afterwards University College London where she studied sciences. Her writings on marriage and sex were facilitated by the more open discussion of sexuality at the end of the century amongst feminists and sexologists. The result was a contradictory critique of sexuality which accepted the biological explanations for male dominance and female passivity advanced by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis, and advanced the argument for female sexual autonomy. At the same time her writings met a widespread desire, even desperation, for help and advice about the sex act and birth control. Her work was of its time, demonstrated by the thousands of letters she received from women and men thanking her for helping them and asking for advice.63
The birth control debate in a sense acted as a catalyst for a gradual shift away from the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the dangers of sex for women, and towards an acknowledgement of the pleasurable aspects. This shift had implications not only for women in heterosexual relationships but also those in what were euphemistically termed ‘romantic friendships’.