The Spinster And Her Enemies by Sheila Jeffreys

The Spinster and Her Enemies is an important book on a watershed period in the history of sexuality.' ... splendidly documented, provocative and never dull'--Times Literary Supplement'Sheila Jeffreys is an excellent historian'--Sunday TimesThe much-anticipated re-release of this classic feminist text includes a revised and updated introduction. 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 the 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