An AIDS-Era reassessment of Christabel Pankhurst's The great scourge and how to end it

Abstract

Christabel Pankhurst's The Great Scourge and How to End It analysed how continuing male insistence on the physical imperative of their sexual urges threatened women by creating an excluded subclass of prostitutes, and by establishing within the institution of marriage a social mechanism which favoured the infection of unsuspecting women with sexually transmitted disease. Historians, however, have been harsh in their readings of her text, finding in it a manifesto against sexual freedom, and have used it to ‘illustrate’ what they have considered to be the suffragette movement's fundamentally puritan, retrograde nature, thus discounting the legitimate health risks to Edwardian women