The Spinster and Her Enemies

Sheila Jeffreys examines the activities of feminist campaigners around such issues as child abuse and prostitution and how these campaigns shaped social purity in the 1880s and 1890s. She demonstrates how the thriving and militant feminism of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was undermined, and asserts that the decline of this feminism was due largely to the promotion of a sexual ideology which was hostile to women’s independence. The circumstances about which she writes are frighteningly familiar in the present political climate.