THE DE-EROTICIZATION OF WOMEN'S LIBERATION: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys Margaret Hunt

The British and North American women's movements are split by controversies over pornography, over sexual minorities within the movement and over a range of other issues. At the heart of these debates are larger questions about alliances, strategy and ideology. Should the movement focus on building connections primarily or solely with women who identify gender oppression as the main oppression, or should it be seeking alliances with antiracist, anti-imperialist and pro-workingclass forces as well? What role does the particular theory of oppression we adopt play in determining what our strategies will be? And what should the response of feminists be to the increasingly conservative climate of national and international politics? My own views on these questions have been shaped by my political work over the years, and, more recently, by the study of European and American social history, particularly the history of women and the family. Social history as it tends to be written and taught these days shares a number of basic assumptions with feminist political practice at the grass-roots level. One key similarity is in the sense of the political (or historical) actor. Neither the 'new' social history nor feminism shrink from hard-hitting accounts of the manipulation and victimization of large groups of people in the past and the present, whether the European and American working classes, African Americans, colonialized groups, or women. At the same time, however, both social history and feminism are deeply suspicious of any philosophy which paints the oppressed as merely the passive victims of forces or groups which are beyond their control. While the social history of the last twenty years has been concerned to uncover evidence of slave revolts, of peasant resistance, of women who have defied patriarchal forces, feminism has relied upon and sought to encourage the strength and Feminist Review No 34, Spring 1990

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militance of rape victims, lesbians, battered women, women on the dole, indeed any woman bowed down under the weight of male oppression. That, at any rate, is the theory. In practice, as I found from many years of working in women's shelters and programmes for low-income women, it is difficult for feminists (perhaps for anyone) to offer help to people who have been victimized without also infantilizing them. And it is profoundly disempowering to have to accept assistance from people who define you as too passive, ignorant or politically benighted to act on your own behalf. The tendency to confuse processes of victimization which women can and do resist, and women as victims, people so fundamentally victimized that they can only benefit from outside intervention, from the 'protection' of others, is widespread. And it is often intimately intertwined with racism, class-prejudice and disdain for women who do not define themselves as part of the movement. As feminists, then, our relationship to the rhetoric of victimization is a complicated one. Speaking out, confronting our own and others' victimization is an essential part of coming to terms individually and collectively with male violence, whether psychic or physical. It forms a crucial basis from which to critique the moral and normative basis of marriage, heterosexuality and male supremacy. But it must be embarked upon with care, because it can be, and is routinely, used to argue that most women are so psychologically brutalized that they cannot know their own interests and must have them defined for them by others. I approach present-day feminist controversies, therefore, with the issue of the historical actor and her empowerment very much in mind. Other questions also guide my thinking, such as, how can the women's movement answer to the concerns of as many women, and as diverse a group of women as possible? And how can our theory and our political strategies avoid simplifying or reducing the complexity of oppression? And finally, will the strategies we pursue actually free women or do they seem likely to lead to new ways oflimiting or confining them in body and spirit? It seems to me that revolutionary feminism (or radical feminism as we tend to call it in the USA) does not stand up well under this kind of critical scrutiny. It displays a strong tendency to define the vast majority of women in the world as helpless victims who need to be saved. It is very susceptible to criticism on grounds of reductionist and exclusionary thinking. And it shows a disturbing willingness to support repressive measures around the control of sexuality. My scepticism about revolutionary feminism has been increased by a recent book by revolutionary feminist Sheila Jeffreys which attempts to 'reclaim' the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British social purity movement as a model for today's feminist movement. In The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 18801930 (Pandora Press, 1985) Jeffreys departs radically from earlier women's historians who had stressed the moral repressiveness and lack of regard for the civil liberties of the poor characteristic of most of these

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activists. By contrast Jeffreys praises these middle-class women activists of the social purity movement for their heavy emphasis upon the sexual victimization of women by men. In Jeffreys' hands the story of social purity becomes an inspirational tale of an earlier generation of women who got their analysis right and then went on to launch a frontal attack upon what she sees as the main underpinning of female subordination - male heterosexual lust. Her more or less implicit message is that feminists today should enter whole-heartedly into comparable efforts to influence sexual practice, using vehicles like antipornography campaigns, opposition to lesbian sado-masochism, opposition to prostitution and opposition to heterosexual intercourse the programme, in short, of revolutionary feminism. Jeffrey's way of doing history tells us a great deal about her feminism. Moreover, while Jeffreys does not represent all revolutionary feminists, she is none the less an especially influential propagandist for that wing of the movement, so examining her approach to history in more detail sheds light on the revolutionary programme as a whole. My central disagreement with Jeffreys turns on her interpretation of social purity movements, so what I propose to do initially is to look briefly at British social purity over the last three centuries. My purpose here is three-fold: to define what a social purity movement is, to show the importance of sexual victimization arguments within social purity rhetoric, and to demonstrate the centrality of imperialist, patriarchal and heterosexist concerns to these movements. Having established the historical background I go on to examine in detail Sheila Jeffreys' attempt to turn social purity activists of the late nineteenth century into feminist moral exemplars, looking especially closely at the risks associated with linking feminism to social purity. The second half of the paper looks at the situation today. It examines the ways social purity thought is being revived by conservatives in both the UK and USA in response to fears of national decline, and shows the way that social purity continues to be linked to a profoundly reactionary programme. It looks at the turn revolutionary feminism (and, in the USA, radical feminism) has taken toward 'social purity' arguments and suggests some of the problems this raises in terms both of general issues of personal freedom and the treatment of sexual minorities within the movement. Finally it lays out some of the outlines of an alternative course for feminism, while suggesting some of the reasons why revolutionary feminists are unlikely to take up this path. Social purity movements in Britain, 1690 to the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts

In simple terms social purity philosophy holds that sex and sexuality are deeply problematic drives, which unless tightly controlled will spill out into society and cause untold harm. Pre-nineteenth-century social purity movements were often scripturally inspired, which meant that

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their adherents feared direct punishment from God for sexual infractions (this kind offundamentalism has re-emerged in some present-day social purity thinking in the USA). In the post-Enlightenment era, the more prevalent tendency has been to see uncontrolled sex as socially harmful. Among the typical arguments made are the following: uncontrolled sex leads to overpopulation and social unrest among the poor (the Malthusian argument); it contributes to the breaking down of class or racial barriers; it threatens the integrity of marriage, widely viewed as an essential structural support of civilized society; and it makes it hard to sustain the official male monopoly over sexual decision-making. Sexual victimization arguments have always played a prominent role in social purity rhetoric. It has by no means always been women who have been typed as the victims of men however. In fact the more prevalent tendency in social purity thinking, in line with traditional Judaeo-Christian teachings, has been to do the reverse: to focus on men as the victims of sexually predatory women. A highly illustrative social purity movement is the Movement for the Reformation of Manners, which began in London in the 1690s and lasted into the 1 730s. The Movement for the Reformation of Manners (the contemporary meaning of the term 'manners' being close to our modern term 'morals') coincided historically with a surge of concern about national security occasioned in part by the expansionist military ambitions of Louis XN. Like most social purity movements, however, its central concern was the 'problem' of uncontrolled and/or deviant sexuality, particularly among the young. The movement's supporters associated unrestrained sexuality closely with the spectre of social dissolution. Destruction could, they thought, come at the hands of God, just as it had for the corrupt Old Testament cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Or it could result from a weakening of the social fabric of the country through venereal disease, addiction to illicit sex, or the blurring of social distinctions thought to stem therefrom (Bahlman, 1957; Bristow, 1977; Isaacs, 1979; Craig, 1980). Like later social purity movements, this movement dwelt heavily on sexual victimization. However it paid only the most cursory attention to the victimization of women. Rather, what it was obsessively preoccupied with was the danger posed to men, either by unchecked female sexuality, or, in some cases, unchecked male sexuality in the form of 'mollies', the contemporary term for male homosexuals. Men, followed closely by 'the family' and 'the nation' were the greatest victims of unbridled lust as far as these reformers were concerned (Craig, 1980; Bray, 1982: 81-114; Gilbert, 1976). The theme of the alleged danger women posed to men went along, as it always does, with a pronounced misogyny. The rhetoric of the Movement for the Reformation of Manners was full of ill-concealed hostility to women, especially women who had escaped the confines of the patriarchal household. 'The mouth of a strange woman is a deep pit; those that are abhorred of the Lord shall fall into it' a prominent champion of reform intoned; 'her house inclineth unto death; none that

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- - - - -.... go unto her return again'. He had lifted those particular lines from THE the book of Proverbs (this type of thinking has a long history) but they are the kind of sentiments that WITH HER one can find over and over again in CHARACTER literature written by reformers AND (Woodward, 1704: 11, 14-15). Shocking revelations about young men being victimized by sexDifcovering the ually assertive women and hoVarious and Subtile mosexuals fueled a deep sense of national sexual emergency. Vigilante groups formed to comb the streets for prostitutes. Constables 0 F and self-appointed guardians of morals evolved schemes to entrap Lewd Women. 'mollies' (the populace showed their Ttu Foui!.TH EniTION. support by stoning at least one of the latter to death) (Craig, 1980: LONDON, Printed for Jolln.G111ilim, 103-29). Groups of young men near S••-T•rtl, in Bijbopfi•t•ftrttt, formed themselves into all-male re17 u. Price u. ligious societies so as to escape the baneful influence of women and Combining prurience, encourage one another in sexual censoriousness and misogyny, this restraint. Well-placed Anglican popular pamphlet is typical of the clergymen turned out hundreds of kind of literature spawned by the sermons and tracts on male sexual late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century concern for the continence and made attempts to reformation of manners. control the diffusion of sexually explicit books and even graffiti, because they implied other purposes for sex beyond that of reproduction contained within the patriarchal family (Bristow, 1977: 27--8, 31, 34-5; Foxon, 1965: ix). The characteristic features of the Movement for the Reformation of Manners, like all later social purity movements, were as follows: first the movement defined as dangerous and repugnant any and all sex and sexual fantasies that did not conform to the traditional model of heterosexual intercourse within marriage with the man on top. Second, it identified uncontrolled sexuality closely with lower class and unrespectable women and homosexuals, and despite occasional rhetorical flourishes about the need for general moral reform, in practice it focused its repressive activities on these groups. Third, it displayed strongly misogynist tendencies. In particular its calls for sexual continence for men developed out offear and hatred of women coupled with the desire to contain their sexuality, not out of some sort of chivalrous or protective concern for them. And finally the movement used the clear and present danger supposedly represented by out-of-control sexuality, as well as

London-Bawd:

LIFE.

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the putative inability of the victims to act on their own behalf, to justify very repressive measures. The Movement for the Reformation of Manners was followed by other social purity movements, often springing up in periods of perceived national crisis or military vulnerability. Similar campaigns to encourage male sexual continence and suppress prostitution, obscenity and homosexuality were waged in England from the 1780s and in both England and America beginning in the 1860s (Bristow, 1977; Walkowitz, 1980). Beginning around the mid-nineteenth century, however, social purity in both the USA and the UK became increasingly linked with the burgeoning women's rights movements. Since then many, though by no means all, feminists have incorporated social purity themes into their writings and political strategies. These women have responded to the theme of women's sexual victimization, minor though it has tended to be in the mainstream social purity world-view, and they have striven to make women's concerns more central within these movements. Sometimes this work has borne fruit. A good example is found in the Victorian opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts (CD Acts), a series of initiatives which had been passed in 1864, 1866 and 1869 in an effort to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among enlisted men. As was the case in some later sexually transmitted disease scares, including the AIDS panic, the CD Acts focused a disproportionate share of the blame on prostitutes. The Acts provided for a special plain-clothes police force to identify prostitutes in garrison towns and ports, mandatory fortnightly vaginal examinations on the women so identified, and forcible confinement in locked hospitals for up to nine months for those diagnosed with a venereal disease (Walkowitz, 1980: 1-2). Critics of the CD Acts were outraged by the fact that they seemed to sanction prostitutes and hence male vice. But some feminist groups went further to look at and publicize issues such as women's sexual exploitation, the double-standard implicit in the Acts (males with the disease were not hampered from spreading it to women, nor were they locked up) and the harassment of working-class women and workingclass communities at the hands of doctors and the police. What distinguished the work of the most progressive of these groups, the Ladies' National Association (LNA) led by Josephine Butler, from that of more conservative reformers, was the LNA's commitment (not always consistent, to be sure) to poor women's right to some measure of sexual self-determination over against the coercive power of the state as well as individual men and its willingness to work with working-class organizations in formulating strategies and aims. Most of the time the LNA was able to draw on social purity thinking without becoming simply another attempt to control the sexual lives of workingclass women under the guise of protecting them from male lust. Unfortunately neither the interest in sexual self-determination for poor women, nor the cross-class coalition-building that the LNA pioneered was carried over into the more pruriently minded, class-bound and

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morally repressive social purity activity that emerged in the 1880s following the repeal of the Acts (Walkowitz, 1980: 2-3, 146-7, 246-52). It is however this latter movement, stretching from the period immediately post-repeal into the early twentieth century that Sheila Jeffreys would have feminists take as their model. Social purity from the 1880s: a critique of Sheila Jeffreys

Social purity in fin-de-siecle England was a significantly more conservative movement than the opposition to the CD Acts had been. One wing of the movement consisted of organizations for boys and young men and their sponsors, men like Robert Baden-Powell of the Boy Scouts. The men's organizations, usually linked to church or chapel, were essentially men's purity leagues. Their membership vowed to remain continent and especially to avoid prostitutes, swore to suppress unclean language, and worked to instil protective attitudes towards 'pure' women in each other and in the wider community. Baden-Powell and his Boy Scouts were deeply concerned about young men's vulnerability to prostitutes and masturbation ('self-abuse') and convinced of the sacredness of the patriarchal nuclear family and the imperial mission (Rosenthal, 1986; Hillcourt, 1964). Another wing of social purity shared the concern about sex, and often the middle-class and imperialist bias of the first wing, but it

PROMI6f: D'V Tiff:" HI';LP

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.2.- 70 11r:det1vor to pvt down tJ/1 tndecenr ltM7tNJj'e t:~nd CDI!IrDejur~ . .3 ·To m
This is typical of turn-of-the-century social purity pledges. It is an appeal to men to protect women from degradation, to 'put down' indecent language, and to embrace sexual continence. From John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freeman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, after p. 274.

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focused its attention primarily on the victimization of young girls. W. T. Stead, whose bestselling The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon (1885) details how he set out to 'buy' a child virgin, could be classed here. In Stead's strikingly voyeuristic stories of child prostitution the theme of sexual victimization looms large (Walkowitz, 1989: 26-7). The moral outrage inspired by The Maiden Tribute led to the passage of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act which raised the age of consent for girls, gave law enforcement officials broader powers to arrest and prosecute prostitutes and brothel-keepers, and criminalized homosexual acts between consenting adult men. This act contributed in subsequent years to a fourteenfold increase in prosecutions of brothels and vastly increased efforts to suppress streetwalking in towns and cities all over England and Wales. Overwhelmingly the group punished under the law was working-class women (Walkowitz, 1980: 250-2). The feminist or woman's element in social purity, women like J. Ellice Hopkins, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Frances Swiney and a number of others, shared the men's focus on helpless victims, and at least some of them shared their appetite for state intervention into the sexual mores and childrearing practices of the poor. However, they laid greater stress than did most of the men on laws and standards which protected women and girls from male sexual demands, and at least some of them made attempts to place social purity concerns within a larger feminist framework. Unfortunately, while placing much of the blame for the sexual victimization of women on men, they tended to retain the fear of sexually assertive women common to the rest of the social purity movement, and indeed to Victorian middle-class culture generally. This explains why social purity feminists, despite their appeals for an end to the double standard in the enforcement of anti-vice laws, ultimately supported police sweeps of brothels and red-light districts, measures which primarily affected working-class women. Out of the confusion of social purity discourse some women do emerge who clearly identified women (or at least girls) as the victims and men as the victimizers, though often their other social views are quite suspect. It is these women whom Sheila Jeffreys celebrates in her book. Let us then look more closely at one of her heroines, a prominent social purity reformer named J. Ellice Hopkins. Jeffreys claims revolutionary significance for Hopkins's attempts to get men to embrace sexual continence, a concern which, as we have seen, she shared with much more conservative male social purity activists. In Jeffreys' view women like Hopkins were engaged in what she terms a 'massive campaign ... to transform male sexual behaviour and protect women from the effects of the exercise of a form of male sexuality damaging to their interests' (Jeffreys, 1985: 1, 15). If true, how does this fit in with the rest of Ellice Hopkins's thought? Both Hopkins's personal papers and her public writings give one pause for thought, for they contain numerous appeals to men to protect women, appeals which mix an obvious desire to maintain male supremacy with vague claims for female moral superiority: 'the man is

Social Purity

the head of the woman, and is thereTHE fore the servant of the woman' is a typical remark in this vein (Jeffreys, GREAT SC0 URGE AND 1985: 13). It is clear that one of Hopkins's main aims in stressing HOW TO END IT victimization is precisely to awaken men to their traditional patriarchal responsibility to defend women's virtue and even Jeffreys has to admit that '[Hopkins's] general attitude to CHRISTABEL PANKHURST, LL.B. the relationship between the sexes owes more to the principles of chivalry than to those of feminism .. .' However in her view Hopkins's ultimate aims can be ignored or passed over because of her concern with women's victimization (Jeffreys, 1985: 13-15). LONDON Jeffreys displays a still more E. PANKHURST serious tendency to obscure the imLINCOLN"S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY, W.C. plications of social purity thinking in her treatment of (or, more accurately, her refusal to discuss) Hop- This social purity tract by the kins's and others complicity with, well·known feminist and and sometimes enthusiastic ap- suffragist Christabel Pankhurst proval for, coercive actions directed featured sensationalist claims against poor women. Like many about the incidence of venereal social purity activists Hopkins was disease and called for male It was one of several far more concerned about sexual self- continence. attempts in this period to link determination among middle-class feminist and social purity aims. women than among the poor of either sex. Thus in 1880 she strongly advocated the passage of the Industrial Schools Amendment Act, which authorized the forcible removal of children from working-class homes suspected of harbouring prostitutes and their placement in so-called industrial schools (actually closer to borstals). The aim of the Industrial Schools Act was to keep the young from being corrupted by proximity to prostitution. But the result was to break up families, to interfere with the keeping of boarders (a traditional means of survival in working-class neighbourhoods), to make it difficult for single women, whether or not they were prostitutes, to find places to live, and to stigmatize prostitutes within their own communities. As with other repressive measures in the past and the present, this measure was justified in terms of what it would do to combat victimization, in this case the alleged victimization of children. 1 Meanwhile Ellice Hopkins's private letters make it clear that one reason she opposed prostitution was that it made working-class girls want something better than jobs as servants, and true to her class she was genuinely concerned about ensuring an abundant supply of

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obedient and cheap domestic help. 2 Hopkins was interested in freeing women from sexual coercion, but she was singularly unconcerned about other sorts of coercion, especially when the women involved were not middle class. Lower class women were permitted limited freedom from coercive measures only if they made the politically correct, morally pure choice - not to be prostitutes. This point is made chillingly clear in a statement from Hopkins's social purity tract, The Ride of Death which Jeffreys actually quotes in The Spinster and her Enemies, apparently without noticing its meaning. 'Ay I know that it is often the woman who tempts;' Ellice Hopkins writes, these poor creatures [i.e. prostitutes] must tempt or starve. But that does not touch the broad issue, that it is men who endow the degradation of women; it is men who, making the demand, create the supply. Stop the money of men and the whole thing would be starved out in three months time (Jeffreys, 1985: 14).

The choice is between purity or starvation. Though women are depicted here as the passive 'supply' in a 'demand'-led sexual economy, as the degraded victims of male lust, Hopkins is strangely without compunctions about subjecting 'these poor creatures' to economic coercion to make them submit to social purity aims. The very terms Jeffreys uses to describe the social purity programme seem designed to conceal its supporters' complicity in repression. Social purity feminists were, she writes, committed to giving women 'real choices around sexuality', to ensuring for them the 'right to bodily integrity' (Jeffreys, 1985: 4-5). These sound at the outset like standard feminist tenets: indeed, who could disagree with them? But a closer look reveals that, like the social purity activists of whom she writes, Jeffreys' concept of 'real choice' is a surprisingly constraining one. Women who 'choose' heterosexuality, for example, are by definition not making a 'real choice'. Indeed it is not apparent that any genital sexuality constitutes a 'real choice'. The women whom Jeffreys cites approvingly, women like Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Lucy Re-Bartlett or Frances Swiney, favoured a sexuality which was almost entirely confined to the spiritual plane. As they argued repeatedly, genital sexuality was animal, while 'psychic' or 'spiritual' sexuality represented women's (and men's) higher destiny (Jeffreys, 1985: 32, 36-45). A 'League oflsis' founded by Francis Swiney had as one of its rules '[keeping] as far as possible by individual effort, the Temple of the Body pure and undefiled; raising sex relations from the physical to the spiritual plane, and dedicating the creative life in the body to the highest uses .. .' (Jeffreys, 1985: 38). Lucy Re-Bartlett developed a stage theory of human evolution which moved from a phase characterized by the 'uncritical simplicity of the instinct' (a phase she dubbed 'spiritual childhood') to the higher plane of entirely spiritual love. In her view 'Sex union in the human being should be limited strictly to the actual needs of creation' (Jeffreys, 1985: 41).

Social Purity

In the social purity world-view genital sexuality is acceptable largely (and in the view of some, solely) for purposes of reproduction. As one advances through Jeffreys' lengthy celebration of psychic love, the suspicion grows that this view still has at least one modern-day adherent among revolutionary feminists, and not just when the genital sexuality being referred to is heterosexual. Despite Jeffreys' stated commitment to 'a world where many more women would choose to be lesbian' (Jeffreys, 1985: 196) there are no more body-positive lesbians in this book than there are undeluded sex-positive heterosexuals. Jeffreys is utterly uncritical towards the remarkable revival of mind/body dualism enshrined in the concept of 'psychic love', one which would gladden the hearts of men like the Apostle Paul, St Augustine, or Rene Descartes. Indeed she goes out of her way to disparage Dora Russell's attempt to reconcile the mind/body split (Russell: 'To me the important task of modern feminism is to accept and proclaim sex; to bury ... the lie that the body is a hindrance to the mind ... To understand sex- to bring it to dignity and beauty and knowledge born of science .. .'), dismissing her with the dishonest charge, 'She [Russell] was not concerned with women's right not to engage in sex with men' (Jeffreys, 1985: 158). Jeffreys' most astounding departure from a feminist understanding of'real choices around sexuality' is in her thinly veiled hostility to early twentieth-century birth-control activists and by extension the entire birth-control project in the past and present. In her view birth-control reformers like Stella Browne or Dora Russell, though they had some sympathy for women's needs, were finally the dupes of the labour movement and of male sexologists, especially sexologists like Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, against whom Jeffreys nurses a particular animus and whom she sees as a kind of male homosexual cabal. Birth control itself is simply 'first aid' (read 'retrograde') or worse, part of a wider conspiracy to force women to have sexual intercourse by taking away their main excuse for avoiding it- fear of pregnancy. Jeffreys, like her social purity activists, sees 'the avoidance of sexual intercourse as a more effective and palatable form of contraception than . . . artificial methods.' The choice is between purity and pregnancy. Once more it is the 'victims' who end up having to pay (Jeffreys, 1985: 157-61). Many of the women whom Jeffreys wants us to claim as our spiritual foremothers had a genuine desire to end the sexual victimization of women, but this was mingled with some considerably less palatable views. Feminists will not argue with the principle that no woman should be coerced into submitting to sexual intercourse. The problem with these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social purity women was that they had difficulty conceiving of, indeed were repelled by any woman actively desiring sexual intercourse at all. They were, in fact, far more comfortable with the idea of woman as total victim, since in that role she could be represented as being devoid of any unclean desires at all. The 'right to bodily integrity' was the purely negative right not to be physically penetrated by a man. It was not the positive right to choose with whom one would be physically intimate, to

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determine the acts in which one would engage, or to have sex without fear of pregnancy. 'Bodily integrity' was, in short, an obligation, not a 'right' in the sense that most of us understand that term. The social purity feminists feared and loathed independent female sexuality as much as Baden-Powell or the evangelical men's purity leagues did, and they were every bit as willing to use coercion to stamp it out. Social purity feminists ultimately failed to achieve their larger objectives, and it is revealing to see Jeffreys try to account for this. One might have expected her to place part of the blame for the demise of social purity feminism on reactionary elements within social purity generally. After all, the ultimate aim of the reactionaries (to strengthen Empire, the patriarchal family, and the class system) and those of feminists (to work for a better position for women) were somewhat divergent. However, because she is fully aware that the working programme of the more reactionary social purity activists and the social purity feminists was almost identical, even if their ends sometimes differed, she cannot bring herself to formulate a serious indictment of the conservatives. Instead she blames two other groups, socialists and sex reformers. For Jeffreys, socialism and feminism, as she defines it, are simply not compatible, either in the past or the present. Socialist feminists of the early twentieth century, constrained by having to work with men and the Labour Party, were diverted away from 'real' feminist issues, like the attack on male sexuality, into 'welfarism' and organizing around working women. Sex reformers, particularly male homosexuals, played an even more central role in the decline of social purity feminism. Sex reformers not only made the error of arguing that genital sexuality was not inherently bad, but they advocated sexual fulfilment for women in marriage, thus pulling the rug out from under the social purity critique of sexuality in general. Jeffreys believes that sex reform represented a new form of mind control, a way to bind women even more closely to marriage and male sexual abuse than they had been before. Though the heterosexist bias of much, though by no means all, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sex reform is undeniable, Jeffreys' argument is undercut at this point by what she conveniently neglects to tell her readers, namely that conservative social purity forces, those same people she is so reluctant to criticize in her book, supported an even more overtly male supremacist model of marriage than the sex reformers did. But no matter. For Jeffreys the conservatives clearly make better bedfellows, even, or especially, if the love is only spiritual (Jeffreys, 1985: 84-5, 128~4). Social purity in the 1980s

Today, fears about national decline and military weakness are widespread in both Britain and the USA, though they take different forms in the two countries. There is a growing temptation, not confined to the

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right-wing fringe, to attribute the ills of both nations to some combination of feminism, the sexual revolution, the ready availability of pornography, and the rise of a gay and lesbian movement. Meanwhile the AIDS epidemic has not only encouraged the tendency to see uncontrolled sexuality as one of the major causes of social disorder but inspired a whole host of repressive actions by governments worldwide, actions aimed especially at sexual minorities, racial minorities and prostitutes. All the elements of a classic sexual panic have moved into position. The social purity programmes which have arisen in response to this perceived crisis are both depressingly traditional and, in their way, quite modem. In eighteenth-century England moral reformers declared war on sodomites and prostitutes; today the British government is on a quest to eliminate 'pretend families', AIDS patients are shunned or poorly treated, and right-wing publications call for HIV-positive people to be placed in concentration camps. Eighteenth-century churchmen tried to censor obscene books and graffiti; in the modem day moral vigilante groups have gone after album covers, rock n' roll lyrics, and gay poetry. Present-day social purity forces, like those of the past, rely heavily upon the rhetoric of sexual victimization and they often exploit it for antifeminist purposes. A striking American example of this is the recent Meese Commission on Pornography. The Meese Commission was a US Attorney General's commission (somewhat akin to a Royal commission) convened at the special request of President Reagan in 1985 to 'determine the nature, extent, and impact on society of pornography in the United States, and to make specific recommendations to the Attorney General concerning more effective ways in which the spread of pornography could be contained, consistent with constitutional guarantees' (Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission, 1986: 3). The Commission came in direct response to New Right agitation for greater controls on sexual expression. It forms part of a larger New Right and, increasingly, a mainstream Republican attack upon the gains made in the last twenty-five years by people of colour, women, and lesbians and gays in the USA. This challenge had included the official condoning of antiblack and antigay violence, across-the-board cuts in social welfare programmes, presidential support of tax credits for all-white private schools and, most recently, in a Supreme Court heavy with Reagan appointees, successful attacks on women's right to abortion and on the enforcement of civil rights. How do arguments about sexual victimization fit into the Meese Commission's deliberations, and how, if at all, do they intersect with feminist, as opposed to New Right principles? The Commission transcripts contain quite a few testimonials about the victimization and degradation of women by men, among them statements by leading antipornography feminist, Andrea Dworkin. They contain almost as many testifying to the alleged victimization of men by women: 'The Woman whose House is Death' still lurks in the fantasies ofthe Meese

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Commissioners even as it did among their eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury predecessors. And what some of the Commissioners mean by degradation bears little resemblance to feminist understandings of that term. Degradation follows from any sexual act not sanctified by marriage and not tied to reproduction (shades of Lucy He-Bartlett). Women and men are degraded and victimized by engaging in, reading about, or viewing on film teenage or premarital sex, lesbian or gay sex, or sex with a vibrator (one of the proposed recommendations of the Commission, though not one that was finally approved by the full group, was to ban vibrators) (Vance, 1986: 65, 77-9). Many of the people responsible for gathering the Commission together, including some of the Commission members, also see as degrading any and all nudity, oral sex, masturbation, sex in which any of the parties uses birth control, sex which leads to abortion, and sex in any position but the missionary position (Vance, 1986: 79). The people behind the Commission are some ofthe same people who are demanding the closure of shelters for battered women (because they encourage women to abandon marriage), stringent crackdowns on lesbian and gay publications, social institutions, and civil liberties, ending teenagers' access to birth-control devices and information, and banning all abortions under any circumstances whatsoever. What radical feminists who have allowed their work to be used by groups like these seem to be anticipating is either that this social purity movement is going to be converted to feminism, or that it will manage ta institute some measures, like the banning of pornography, which will, in their view, benefit women regardless of who administers the laws. The first of these is highly unlikely; the second deeply problematic. The lesson of past social purity movements is that conservatives end up co-opting feminists, not the other way around. The fact that conservatives use the rhetoric of woman as victim to buttress their reactionary message means little. This brand of rhetoric has always been used more readily to confine and 'protect' women within patriarchal institutions and justify repressive measures against them than to ensure their safety or their personal autonomy. And it indicates incredible naivety for lesbians, in particular, to think that it makes no real difference who controls the definition of obscenity or, for that matter, the definition of what constitutes degradation and victimization. And lastly, the question needs to be asked, just what would we get in the unlikely event that feminists (and one presumes it would be very specific radical or revolutionary feminists) did get a place on the boards of censorship, the vice squads or the other repressive institutions modern conservatives both in the USA and Britain are champing at the bit to establish? Revolutionary feminism as a modern-day social purity movement

Sheila Jeffreys is right. There are striking parallels between late

Social Purity

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social purity feminists and revolutionary feminism today. The key similarity lies in revolutionary feminism's (and, in the US, radical feminism's) view of sex. In recent years this wing of the movement has decisively abandoned broader, more complex analyses of oppression and exploitation for the argument that the specifically sexual victimization of women constitutes the basis upon which the entire system of male supremacy (and by extension all other oppression) is constructed. According to this view, expressed analytically in terms like American radical feminist Julia Penelope's 'heteropatriarchy' (Penelope, 1986), most sex acts that occur in the world are irrevocably corrupted or corrupting. In particular, heterosexual sex, which is indistinguishable from rape, supplies the paradigm for all other forms of oppression, and in an endlessly worked out dialectic, perpetuates and reflects the oppressive structures we see all around us. Revolutionary feminists tend to conceive of all of reality as a sort of gigantic pornographic movie in which the main scene revolves around rape. In the words of American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, one of revolutionary feminism's major influences, speaking here about pornography: Male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; ... sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history' (Dworkin, 1979: 69).

It goes without saying that explanations for oppression that invoke economics, or ones that use analytic categories like class or race, or ones that see male power in a more complicated way than simply the ethos of abusive heterosexual sex writ large, play little or no part in this world-view. With a cosmology like the one just mentioned one might think this wing of the women's movement would be antisex, and it has sometimes been accused of being so. But this is not quite true. Like past social purity theorists revolutionary feminists consider some kinds of sex to be acceptable. In fact they are convinced that by pushing a purified sexual practice they can break out of the rape dialectic which has the world in its grip. Pure sex is politically correct sex. It is a kind of sex which radically rejects anything which by word or deed, by image, or by suggestion might seem to perpetuate victimization. But since victimization is so very broadly conceived in this system, containing within its compass the vast majority of the sex acts and sexual representations that occur in the world, and most, perhaps all male/female interactions, this is no easy task. Pure sex includes sexual asceticism or continence for both women

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and men. It also includes intense friendships for one or several other women, not involving genital contact (Raymond, 1986: 73-114), a sort of updated version of psychic love. And it apparently includes a purified form oflesbianism, though revolutionary feminists are better at saying what lesbian physicality is not than what it is. Pure lesbian sexuality is not lesbianism infected with phallocentric fantasies or phallic objects (e.g., dildoes). It is not role-playing (butch/fern). And it is emphatically not anything suggesting dominance and submission (an ever-proliferating hit-list of sexual acts, styles of dress, and erotic reading preferences). The status of many acts still remains unclear. Some consider vibrators acceptable as long as they are not the elongated type which you can insert. Many people are unsure as to how much leather you have to be wearing in what style and colour to be one of those 'women in fascist regalia' not welcome at a growing number of feminist events. And there is the perennial problem of distinguishing a butch from someone who simply looks androgynous. Politically correct sex demands constant vigilance over oneself and over others. The less confident among us might well conclude that an entirely spiritual love represented the safest course. The more sceptical might wonder what, if anything, all this had to do with social change. Revolutionary feminism has a programme of action which any late nineteenth-century social purity activist would recognize: first, protecting women from male lust, and second, purifying sexual relations in the movement itself(tomorrow the world!). With respect to male lust these new social purity feminists have now taken the fairly traditional lesbian/feminist suspicion of heterosexuality to new lengths. Some revolutionary feminists are now arguing that there are almost no circumstances under which heterosexuality is an acceptable sexual choice. Sheila Jeffreys herself has suggested that one feminist aim should be to try to discourage women from having orgasms with men because this represent in her words the 'eroticization of their own oppression' (Jeffreys, 1986). She and other revolutionary feminists want to get away from the earlier feminist stress on birth control because they see it as a crutch to keep women in sexual thraldom to men. The other front on the war against male lust is of course the antipornography movement, also that area where some feminists have been willing to co-operate with neo-conservative groups. Most of us- some of us to our great personal distress- are familiar with the attempts revolutionary and radical feminists have made to purify sexual practices within the British and North American women's movements. These have included hostility to butch/fern relationships, the systematic defaming of lesbians who do sado-masochism coupled with efforts to excommunicate them from the movement, attempts to hinder political alliances between lesbians and gay men, and a pointedly suspicious attitude toward feminists who sleep with men. The resemblance to past social purity practice is, once more, striking. It can be seen most readily in the revolutionary feminist insistence that only a very few kinds of sexuality are acceptable, and that even a suggestion of

Social Purity

other kinds whether via the printed word or by other sorts of representations including the clothes one wears, poses a clear and present danger to women. Revolutionary feminism is similar also to older moral purity movements in its tendency to attribute tremendous power to sex, and especially to 'deviant' sex, to define the entirety of the rest of the practitioner's life. This is true whether one is talking about heterosexuality, the new 'deviant sexuality' for revolutionary feminists, or sado-masochism, an old 'deviant sexuality' they've hit upon because it suits their current purpose. It used to be said, and not so very long ago either, that homosexuality went along with an uncontrollable desire to molest small children, suicidal and homicidal tendencies, and an inability to think of anything except sex. These assertions were buttressed by very complex, symbolically rich analogies between sexual acts that people were alleged to engage in, and the rest of their lives. Using equally absurd logic revolutionary feminists claim that lesbians who practice SM have no problems with rape, wife battering, or the sexual abuse of children, and suggest repeatedly that were the Nazis to reappear tomorrow, people who practice SM would be the first to sign up for duty in the camps. 3 The persistent and thoroughly erroneous attempts to link lesbian SM to Britain's fascist National Front fit in with this pattern. It has apparently still not occurred to revolutionary feminists to wonder why any lesbian would be drawn to a movement that would like to wipe out all lesbians and gays, quite apart from the National Front's other racist, anti-Semitic, antiwoman and antiworking-class aims. But quite apart from revolutionary feminists' cavalier attitude to the facts, claims like these raise some serious ethical questions. Revolutionary feminists are perfectly aware that lesbians who do SM, like other women, experience a multitude of forms of oppression based on their gender, race, class and sexual preference. They know that lesbians who practice SM are just as likely as any other women to have been victims of rape, incest and physical abuse. And finally they know that lesbians who practice SM, like other women, have come to the movement out of their experiences as women, and that they have contributed to and continue to be involved in every part of the women's movement. Yet revolutionary feminists repeatedly accuse them of condoning, or worse, encouraging crimes against women. They try to transform them into nonwomen, nonlesbians, nonfeminists and nonhuman beings. Why, after all, did the Nazi analogy arise at all? When people reach for such extreme rhetoric one instinctively looks for what is churning around underneath. The fear revolutionary feminists feel has to do with the question of who SM lesbians really are. Sheila Jeffreys et. al., would like to make us think that there is a clearly definable group oflesbians who spend every waking minute devising weirdly oppressive scenes with whips and handcuffs, buying out leather shops and plotting to put one another in the hospital. If this clearly identifiable group can be purged the movement will be 'pure,' or at least 'purer'.

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Reality is, as usual, rather different. Some people are certainly attracted to leather, handcuffs, spanking, etc., though not unremarkably these same people spend most of their waking minutes doing the same thing everyone else does: going to their jobs, paying their rent, dealing with their families, lovers, friends, doing politics, and trying to make their way. They certainly do not plot to put people in the hospital. Safe sex has always played a central part in SM culture, and people who are a part of that culture are much more knowledgeable about and likely to practice safe sex of all kinds than the average lesbian or straight woman (gay and lesbian AIDS activists have repeatedly turned to the SM community for models of how to develop clear sexual information and ethical norms around sexuality and safety that people will actually use to change their behaviour). But even more troubling to the revolutionary feminist, because more inchoate and hard to identify, are all the other lesbians, most of whom have never seen a whip or handcuffs and who may have no interest in leather, but who engage in acts that are difficult or impossible to distinguish from SM. (By the way, people into leather are not necessarily into SM, and vice versa.) A lot of us have, at one time or another, gotten off on giving someone else pleasure while holding back on our own, or played at wrestling, or wanted to take the initiative, or looked forward to giving it up entirely. SM involves creating (or taking advantage of) temporary power differentials in order to heighten sexual arousal. These differentials can be, usually are, very subtle. They can also, through role-playing and the use of various props, be made to seem quite extreme. The line between SM and 'vanilla', despite what some individuals from both sides of the debate have claimed, is very indistinct. Large numbers of women occasionally engage in acts which by some peoples' definition would be SM. They just don't talk about them, either because they don't want to call down criticism upon themselves, or because they don't think of them as SM. Others engage in SM with one lover but not with another. Still others like to read about some kinds of SM but have no interest in acting out what they read. None of these people have turned into Nazis overnight as a result of what they like to do or fantasize about. The constructing of lesbians who do SM as a group separate from and less human than everyone else, a group totally unworthy of consideration, a colony of sexual lepers, is essentially a move to intimidate 'all the rest of us' into letting someone else define what is acceptable sexual practice. It is precisely to make us wonder exactly what 'fascist regalia' is (that fake-leather vest my aunt gave me? maybe I can get away with that because it's partly crocheted - no, better not chance it). It is to get us worrying about whether what we like to do, or might like to try in bed is politically correct (I'd better not suggest that, she'll think I'm sick). It is to keep us tied to the most cautious, conformist, guilt-ridden and rigid of personal, ideological and sexual styles by making a painful example of people who don't fit the mould. Who, after all, wants to be treated like a sexual leper?

Social Purity

For revolutionary feminists victimization is so pervasive that conditional consent to, negotiation around or localized resistance to any part of what they define as the system of oppression is impossible. To think one can do any of these things is simply a form of false consciousness. Like many contemporary socialists, socialist feminists, and poststructuralists, revolutionary feminists lay a heavy emphasis upon the pervasiveness of power, the complexity of the ideological systems that reinforce it, and the way these infect our most intimate thoughts. However, unlike the former groups, who typically see power relations as being in a constant state of flux and historical renegotiation, revolutionary feminists see power relations as static, ahistorical, not susceptible to alteration by the people who are victimized by them. There can be neither resistance nor autonomous decision-making from within the system. All change must come from outside, and it must be on their terms. This presumption of total powerlessness gives rise to the final, and most disturbing parallel between revolutionary feminism and social purity activism, their shared willingness to resort to coercion, not only against the victimizer, but against his or her victim. This victim, it is said, is so caught up in her victimization she cannot know what she is doing, and must be saved, if necessary against what she thinks is her will. 4 The history of social purity shows clearly that people who focus upon sexual victimization as the root of the problem (rather than as part or symptom of a larger problem) tend to be unusually willing to infringe on other people's freedoms, whether a woman's freedom to control her own sexuality and reproductive capacities or freedom of the press. Revolutionary feminists have indeed turned decisively away from the early radical feminist principle of sexual freedom, as is indicated both by their hostility to heterosexuality as a personal choice and their growing antipathy to birth control, not to mention their loathing for any kind of sex they consider 'incorrect'. As Sheila Jeffreys herself remarked at a recent conference in the States, 'personal freedom is not the sort of thing that fits into my idea of what we can do around sexuality'. 5 A recent example offeminists in the UK abandoning freedom of the press is the brand new Campaign Against Pornography, heavily influenced by revolutionary feminist thought. CAP argues that porn plays a causal role in job discrimination, violence against women and the conditioning of women to be subordinate. In response to the argument that porn cannot be banned because it cannot be strictly defined, a recent CAP position paper pushed for the adoption of a definition of porn taken almost verbatim from Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon's notorious 1983 Minneapolis ordinance, a type of law which was subsequently struck down in US federal court on the grounds that it constituted an infringement offreedom of the press. 6 Then, claiming that they are 'totally against censorship in every form' the authors go on to argue that what censorship 'really' is is porn itself, since it limits women's freedom, including their freedom of expression. Therefore porn, like murder and rape, must be eliminated

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They'll keep peddling porn ••• Until you tell them to stop.

CAMPAIGN AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY I

This is a flyer from the Campaign Against Pornography urging action. Very much for public consumption, it recommends a broad-based system ofeconomic boycotts but declines to mention the organization's support for the statutory abolition ofobscenity. (1989)

by direct legislation. Through this imaginative redefining of terms one can be 'totally against censorship' yet be in favour of banning pornography. It is worth noting that what is being suggested here is even more sweeping than the local ordinances proposed in the USA (Campaign Against Pornography, 1988: 272). It would involve the direct legislative elimination of porn, with all the vast law enforcement apparatus that would require, as opposed to simply permitting individuals, offended by a piece of pornography to bring suit in civil court against its makers, sellers, or distributors. This approach is not only misguided, it is diversionary. Degrading representations of women are all over the place. Why focus simply on the sexually explicit ones? One reason, surely, is that revolutionary feminists think sexually explicit material will be easier to eradicate than, say, TV commercials which, however, far more people actually see. So, to eliminate a tiny proportion of the degrading images, revolutionary feminists like Sheila Jeffreys, American radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, and groups like CAP are willing to put themselves at the mercy of conservative ideologues who possess a very different conception of degradation than do most feminists. Feminists should be casting their nets both more carefully and more widely. It is madness to put new repressive tools into the hands of the state at a time when conservatism is riding high (perhaps at any time). A better strategy, which some feminists in both England and North America are already pursuing, is to infiltrate the TV and radio networks, develop alternative media, formulate subtler and better

Social Purity

analyses of the intersections of power and representation, break straight white male monopolies on all kinds of image production, not just pornography, and make coalitions with other groups traditionally excluded from the making of images. These new social purity feminists are reluctant to embark on this larger course however, and it is time to ask ourselves why.

A new course? First, a change of course would require that revolutionary feminists confront differences of opinion. For example, some women like and feel empowered by pornography. They like reading or watching it, and they like producing it. No one disagrees that a lot of porn is male-centred, woman-hating and racist, it would be strange, in a male-centred, woman-hating, racist world if this were not true; the same after all, could be said about mainstream television, or religion, or western literature. Plenty of people, including many feminists, doubt that porn is inherently that way, simply because it is sexually explicit, and increasing numbers of them are actively involved in producing porn which is woman-centred, woman-loving, and antiracist. Most revolutionary feminists refuse to get involved in discussions with these people because they don't want to give up their right to dictate what other women's preferences should be. Taking a different course would mean having to listen respectfully to women whose life experiences differ profoundly from theirs and who have a different take on life, sex, sexuality, oppression, and men than they do. Encountering diversity of opinion, really listening to what a wide range of women- and even some men- have to say, might mean revolutionary feminists would have to reassess their own position as to what constitutes oppression. They might have to begin to take seriously victimization based on race, class, nationality and immigrant status, and recognize the fact that for many women these and other factors play at least as powerful a role in their lives as gender does. In the face of more complex, multivalent experiences and analyses, even with a greater familiarity with competing theories of gender oppression, revolutionary feminists might have to face squarely the unbelievably reductionist character of the stress on sexuality alone. Having been forced to abandon the idea that there is a 'universal women's experience' with which they alone are in touch, revolutionary feminists might actually have to consider making alliances. They might have to spend some time on issues which primarily affect working-class women, or black women, or women in Third World countries, or even gay men or men of colour. They might have to compromise themselves by spending a little time on an issue which doesn't touch them directly or speak plainly to their own personal experience of victimization. They might even have to spend some time fighting forms of oppression which affect both men and women. They would have to embrace a theory of

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social change which relies on rich analyses and diverse coalitions, instead of on simple solutions which require straight, rich, white, conservative men to carry them out. In the final analysis what we need to do as feminists is not to protect women (or get others to do it for us on their terms) but to empower them, erotically as well as politically, economically and spiritually. But in doing this we need to be aware that to empower people is to let them develop their own course, it is not simply to breed up clones to a single political perspective. To embrace one's own and others' empowerment is to embrace diversity (including sexual diversity), theoretical complexity, and strategies based on coalitions, not on a self-styled revolutionary vanguard that considers itself purer and more politically correct than everyone else. The course I'm suggesting is not an easy one, but it holds out a far better chance of liberating women - all women than the one social purity feminists of the past or of the present would have us choose.

Notes Margaret Hunt has worked for the last fifteen years as a fundraiser, counsellor and collective member in shelters and other women's projects throughout the United States. Her work has focused on violence against women, welfare advocacy, lesbian and gay issues, adult literacy, racism, and the concerns of low-income women. She has published articles on battered women, on grassroots fundraising, on feminist theory, on lesbian and gay issues and on women's history, and is the co-author of a book entitled Life Skills for Women in Transition (1982). She currently lives in Amherst, Massachusetts where she teaches history and women's studies. I would like to thank the following people for their comments and criticisms at different stages of the writing of this paper: Cindy Patton, Sue O'Sullivan, Sigrid Nielsen, Jill Lewis, Catherine Hall, Richard Wilson and Judith Walkowitz. The opinions expressed in it are, of course, my own. 1 Jeffreys is noncommittal about Hopkins's willingness to, in Jeffreys' words, 'endorse some actions which infringed upon the civil liberties of[ prostitutes],' possibly because ofher (Jeffreys') own sense that issues of personal liberty are largely irrelevant to the liberation of women (see below). For a more thorough discussion of the impact of the Industrial Schools Amendment Act and of Hopkins's enthusiasm for authoritarian tactics see Walkowitz, 1980: 211, 238-44. 2 Here, for example, is the way that Hopkins expresses concern about the sensationalism of some moral purity propaganda: 'those dear friends of ours are adding to the love of excitement that makes our little girls find the only respectable life open to them [i.e., domestic service] simply intolerable, and that loathsome "five pounds" [for an act of prostitution] irresistible' (Walkowitz, 1987). I am grateful to Judith Walkowitz for allowing me to consult some of her unpublished work and for her sympathetic guidance on the subject of Hopkins's life and ideas.

Social Purity 3 For a typical example of the identification oflesbian SM with Nazism and violence against women see Jeffreys, 1986. This theme is, however, ubiquitous in radical feminist writing about SM. I am grateful to Gayle Rubin for bringing the Jeffreys article to my attention. 4 In the US the most striking example of this kind of activity has been the willingness of some radical feminists to assist vice squads in rounding up prostitutes. See for example The West Side Spirit for 17 June 1985 where Captain Jerome Piazzo of the Manhattan South Public Morals Division quotes statistics on call girls in Manhattan, noting that they were provided to him by Women Against Pornography. I am grateful to Joan Nestle for bringing this article to my attention. 5 Jeffreys, 'The Eroticization of Women's Subordination .. .' (quote taken verbatim from tape of speech and subsequent discussion. Feminism, Sexuality and Power conference, Mount Holyoke College, 30 October 1986. 6 I am especially indebted here to Duggan, Hunter and Vance (1985). I am very conscious of having left Canada entirely out of my discussion of social purity, and especially of pornography. Readers who would like to find out what the recent intensification of censorship (supported by many feminists) has done for Canada are directed to Burstyn (1985).

References (1957) The Moral Revolution of 1688, New Haven: Yale University Press. BRAY, Alan (1982) Homosexuality in Renaissance England, London: Gay Men's Press. BRISTOW, Edward (1977) Vice and Vigilance; Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700, Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, Rowman & Littlefield. BURSTYN, Varda (1985) editor, Women Against Censorship, Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & Mcintyre. CAMPAIGN AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY (1988) Policy Statement in CHESTER and DICKEY (1988). CAPLAN, Jane, DeGRAZIA, Victoria, FRADER, Laura and HOWELL, Martha (1989) 'Patrolling the Border: Feminist Historiography and the New Historicism', Radical History Review 43. CHESTER, Gail and DICKEY, Julienne (1988) editors Feminism and Censorship: The Current Debate, Bridport, Dorset: Prism. CRAIG, A. G. (1980) 'The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688-1715', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. DUGGAN, Lisa, HUNTER, Nan and VANCE, Carole, S. (1985) 'False Promises: Feminist Antipornography Legislation in the U.S.' in BURSTYN (1985), pp.130-51. DWORKIN, Andrea (1979) Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: Perigee Books. DAHLMAN, Dudley W.R.

FINAL REPORT TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S COMMISSION ON PORNOGRAPHY

(1986) Nashville, Tennessee: Rutledge Hill Press. (1965) Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745, New Hyde Park, NY: University Books. GILBERT, A. N. (1976) 'Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861', Journal of Social History Vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 72-98. FOXON, David

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Feminist Review with BADEN-POWELL, Lady Olave (1964) Baden-Powell: The Two Lives ofa Hero, London: Heinemann. ISAACS, Tina Beth (1979) 'Moral Crime, Moral Reform, and the State in Early Eighteenth Century England: A Study of Piety and Politics', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Rochester. JEFFREYS, Sheila (1985) The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930, London, Boston and Henley: Pandora Press. JEFFREYS, Sheila (1986) 'Sado-masochism: The Erotic Cult of Fascism', Lesbian Ethics Vol. 2, no.1, pp. 65--82. PENELOPE, Julia (1986) 'Controlling Interests and Consuming Passions: Sexual Metaphors', unpublished talk delivered at the Feminism, Sexuality and Power conference at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 27 October 1986. RAYMOND, Janice (1986) A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection, Boston: Beacon Press. ROSENTHAL, Michael (1986) The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement, New York: Pantheon Books. VANCE, Carole s. (1986) 'Porn in the U.S.A: The Meese Commission on the Road', The Nation Vol. 243, 2 August, pp. 65-79. WALKOWITZ, Judith (1980) Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. WALKOWITZ, Judith (1987) 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', unpublished paper. WALKOWITZ, Judith (1989) Untitled presentation in CAPLAN, DeGRAZIA, FRADER and HOWELL (1989) pp. 26-7. WOODWARD,Josiah, (1704)Rebuke to the Sin of Uncleanness, London. HILLCOURT, William