Spinster World War prevented many within a generation of women from experiencing romance and marriage, or having children. The image of the old spinster with a fading photo of her dead World War I soldier boyfriend on her fireplace mantel was common in films of the 1950s and 1960s. Likewise, in the American classic novel "Gone with the Wind" (1936) about the Civil War, numerous references are made to grieving fiancées, women who were "wanted, if not wed", and to the shortage of single, able-bodied (and thus "marriageable") men at war's end. In modern peacetime societies with wide opportunities for romance,
The Spinster and Her Enemies feminism hostile to sexual freedom. Jeffreys discusses the change in sexual attitudes that occurred in Britain between 1880 and 1930 from a feminist perspective, criticizing the idea that "the sexual puritanism of Victorian England gave way to the first sexual revolution of the twentieth century." She examines feminist involvement in the social purity movement in the 1880s and 1890s. She also discusses the physician Havelock Ellis, the poet Edward Carpenter, the psychiatrist Iwan Bloch, and the neuroanatomist Auguste Forel. "The Spinster and Her Enemies" was first published in 1985 by Pandora Press. "The Spinster and Her Enemies" received a positive