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Today, there is a far worse crime than promiscuity: it is chastity. On all sides the unmarried woman today is surrounded by doubts cast not only upon her attractiveness or her common sense, but upon her decency, her normality, even her sanity. (Winifred Holtby, 1935)[1] ABSTRACT Early twentieth-century sexology and psychology lent new weight to popular representations of the spinster as unfulfilled and sexually repressed and, it has been suggested, silenced a feminist politics of spinsterhood. In this article I argue against this interpretation and discuss the writings of individual feminists who were actively engaged in both rejecting and reworking this view of the spinster. Feminist doctors, in a group of books about the single woman, used psychological theories of sublimation in a feminist appropriation of psycho-sexual ideas to assert that spinsters could lead a complete and happy life through work and female friendships. The feminist preacher, Maude Royden, offered an incorporation of this counter-psychology within a religious discourse in her sermons and publications. Thirdly, the writer Winifred Holtby rejected psychological and sexological definitions of single womens fate in her fiction and political writing and identified its roots in anti-feminism and a reaction against rational thought. These arguments and ideas were complemented by continued feminist campaigning and organising on a variety of issues concerning single women in the inter-war years. This paper engages with a debate concerning the positioning of the spinster within feminist politics in the inter-war period. Several writers have shown how the ideas of late nineteenth-century sex psychology gave a new edge to THE SPINSTER IN INTER-WAR FEMINIST DISCOURSES

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Using the metaphor of ghosting, this article examines the ways in which lesbian, gay, queer (and other) visitors have looked for sexual dissidence in historic houses and their former inhabitants by exploring the complicated processes through which visitors both identify with those queer past lives, and experience a sense of otherness or historical distance from them. It focuses in particular on two sites: Plas Newydd, home of the Ladies of Llangollen; and Sissinghurst, the garden created by writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson. The article questions the distinction (and often implicit hierarchy) made by academic historians between identification and queering, between similarity and otherness, in public history. Identifying historical figures as having had same-sex relationships is important in constructing a sense of selfhood for many queer women and men. Visiting a significant historic site can therefore be seen as an act of pilgrimage. Yet ghostly hints of the otherness (or alterity) of the past are inherent in the complexity of the historic house. This dissonance is provoked by contrary interpretations of the household's past found in biographies or published diaries of former residents, guidebooks and exhibition displays about their lives, and the interpretation strategies of curators. The materiality and spatial qualities of the old building create further narrative complexity, inevitably reflecting both distinct layers of time, and domestic layouts which support or challenge an assumed story of interior family life. These complex possible readings overlap to disrupt heteronormative presumptions about the historic house and instead reveal elements of queer domesticity.