Marie Nyswander Robinson

“ Her tacit conclusions seem to be that woman’s historic role of wife and mother are degrading to our sex, have kept woman from her true destiny. As she describes what that true destiny is, however, her clarity departs, and the role and function of this woman of the future become more than merely vague. Their foggy contours remind me of the glamorous-sounding but totally evanescent and mist-enshrouded goals that many of the frigid and lonely women I treat have when they first come for help.
There is no vagueness about the goals, functions, and needs of the normal woman. ”

“ Romantic feelings are aroused in a woman when she feels that her husband’s entire emotion is fixed on her tenderly and lovingly. She feels romantic when all the other goals and needs and duties of life are for the time being relinquished. In such a situation she dares to relax, to loaf and invite her soul, to concentrate on her deep belief that love is centrally important, the thing that gives life its meaning and its beauty. Every woman, at the heart’s deep core, wishes to give all for love. ”

“ Scorn for true femininity was what she found and, tragically, she took this attitude for her own.
If woman is to find true happiness once again, she must return to her real and joyful self. She must relearn that surrender to her biological destiny is not a trap, not a condition of slavery to her uterus, of exploitation by man and nature, but rather a wonderful and privileged condition. ”

“ I will go even further and say that the facts about frigidity that I present here—its origins, its causes, and its cures—must be known by every woman with a sexual problem if she wishes to be cured.
Frigidity is always rooted in incomplete knowledge gained in childhood and adolescence. We are not, as I have pointed out, far from the Victorian age. Any woman of thirty or more had, in all probability, parents who were reared in the traditions of Victorianism, which denied the sexuality of woman, connived with every available force to deny it, repress it, stop it at its source. ”

“ Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (à la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is.
Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man. ”

“ But they are passing thoughts; a woman does not give them much credence; they are not her direct responsibility; certainly she does not worry about them for long.
But such thoughts, conscious or unconscious, are her husband’s daily fare. He knows, and he takes the carking thought to work with him each morning (and every morning) and to bed with him at night, that upon the success or failure of his efforts rest the happiness, health, indeed the very lives of his wife and children. In the ultimate sense he alone must take the full responsibility for them. ”

“ The husband of a wife who has achieved such tranquillity returns from his work to his home as to an oasis, redoubles his loving efforts to make her ever more secure.
Because she can trust no man, the frigid woman’s approach to the tasks of life has a difficult, painful, frenetic quality. She feels responsible for everything; guiltily responsible. Details and trivia overwhelm her. She has no unity and has to fight herself, her resentment, her self-rejection to get the simplest things done—her household work, planning the dinner, carrying and fetching the children. ”

“ Memories and thoughts of this kind can make him angry, the way a man can get angry, healthfully and aggressively; not at his wife, who now wants to make up for all that has been lost, but at himself for his passive acceptance and easy adjustment to a defeated life, a life that has become a resigned and pointless existence. Such anger is good because it can clear his inner atmosphere; it can start him back with renewed resolution on the road to his real desires. For no man who feels worthy of his manhood ever really accepts a half existence in love of the kind I have just depicted. ”

“ In other words, to the improperly prepared child, facing the reality of being a woman is in itself traumatic. Such was the case with Toni. She was convinced that real love, full of giving and willing sacrifice, represented death. It is no wonder then that two years before she saw me, when she had come to the verge of experiencing something like true sexual pleasure with her husband, she turned against it in a panic, barred it from her consciousness, attempted to render unlovable the man who had dared to rouse such dangerous feelings in her. ”

“ We saw how well womankind functioned before the Industrial Revolution as an equal partner with her husband in the family home. Her experiences were fully satisfying to her body and mind because her role was recognized at its true value; she was needed, rewarded, depended upon, universally admired. When she lost her role and, in agony, mistakenly turned to feminism to find a new definition of self, or to Victorianism, she found only ashes, a depreciation of all those things that made her a woman ”

“ The relationship between husband and wife which results in the unsolvable mystery of birth goes far beyond human understanding. To participate in this mystery really requires a consecration by both. Any lesser attitude toward it is like the laughter of mockery in a holy place.
With this kind of acceptance of her central role, changes now come rapidly to a woman. As she feels the unity of need and goal between her husband and herself, any remaining contentiousness leaves her. In the marriage, consensus now becomes her aim. ”

“ However, on a deeper level there is little doubt that Toni treasured the possibility of such a metamorphosis. As time wore on, of course, reality and her own good intelligence modified and disguised her wish. She repressed the desire to be a boy in a physically external way, by growing a literal penis. And she substituted for this concrete idea fantasies of achievement in, to her, the male sense. In high school and college she threw herself into a world of intellectual and extracurricular activity and made an astonishing, almost legendary, record for herself. ”

“ It has been handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line for so many years now that, to millions of women, hostility toward the opposite sex seems almost a natural law. Though many a modern woman may pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact, to supplant him, to exchange roles with him. ”

“ The espousal of this view of the male, the accurate one, can be another great forward step toward femininity. Seeing her man’s aggression in its true light, aimed first and foremost at procuring her safety, happiness, and security, she can now dare to take down, one by one, the precarious defenses she has maintained against him from the beginning of their relationship. She sees that her husband’s wonderful aggression actually defines her true role, makes it ever clearer and more desirable to her. ”

“ For the majority of men, when they come of age and marry, take on an enormous burden which they may not lay down with any conscience this side of the grave. Quietly and without histrionics they put aside, in the name of love, most of their vaunted freedom and contract to take upon their shoulders full social and economic responsibility for their wives and children.
As a woman, consider for a moment how you would feel if your child should be deprived of the good things of life: proper housing, clothing, education. ”

“ Thus all things that help the other, cause him to be joyful, secure, freely and completely himself, become a chief concern of the other. This fact is why real love never leads to domination or to a struggle for power between two people. Through the mersion of love the uniqueness and individuality of the other person becomes precious, and hence all effort is made to guard the special qualities of the beloved. In love we never encounter a man trampling on his wife’s rights and needs or a woman competing with her husband. ”

“ To woo a woman successfully, a man must believe in her dream of love and become a passionate sharer in it.
Certain things that remove a couple for a while from the highly goal-centered activities of daily life help to create this romantic mood. A housewife will respond to a luxurious evening out; putting on an evening gown can separate her from her housekeeping, penny-pinching view of herself, and the sight of her husband in a tuxedo can fill her romantic cup to the brim. ”

“ And it is also true that the quality of aggression in the male makes him the wooer and the woman the wooed. I have yet to hear a woman suffering from a frigidity problem who did not deeply resent both of these facts.
But now, looking at the end to which male aggression is directed when it matures, can any woman honestly hold onto such resentment? When she realizes that society instinctively grants him more and earlier freedom so that he may develop the great self-reliance necessary to take on the responsibilities of a family, she cannot validly hold this view any longer. ”

“ It is the most basic and profound urge we have, and its power for good is illimitable.
In love we make the good of our partner (whether he is our child, our neighbor, or our sweetheart) as important to us as our own good. In the union of love we are able to experience the essential oneness of man and nature, to know that the universe is indeed our home and all men within it members of our family. In this way man learns through love that he is not alone, not condemned to the pain and anxiety he experiences when he has nobody with whom he can share his mind, his heart, his body. ”

“ Far from seeking to enslave our sex, to exploit us through his strength and his aggression, man has put these two great and basic attributes entirely at our service. It is (and always has been) this fact that makes it safe for us to be women, to bear his children with a sense of security, to rear them, knowing that he is there, always and forever, earning our 207 bread, watching over us ceaselessly, keeping his terrible anxieties about us and our safety to himself so that we will not worry as he does. ”

“ Deep inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can’t imagine what it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her husband makes the world safe for her. ”

“ The sensuous feelings engendered by sun-bathing, of the press of the earth under one when lying down in a field or under a tree, the soft beauty of the moon on a hazy night, the warmth and coziness of a fireplace as the rain beats upon the roof—if she will allow her body and mind to enjoy these kinds of things, they can help to awaken her dormant sensuality, can help her to move back from her dusty sensationless condition toward a reappreciation of the glory of the senses. ”

“ The daydreamer has, over a long period of time, learned to handle reality in terms of her drug—her deep-seated daydream. Without realizing it she has come to feel that, without this psychological narcotic, life would be impossible. She must, in a very real sense, wean herself from it, gradually realize that life without it is not nearly so dreary, so difficult, as she had imagined it would be. ”

“ As the woman who has suffered from frigidity explodes her groundless fears one by one and explores a new attitude toward men, toward love, toward motherhood, feels a new esteem for her husband—as all these things happen, her lifelong restlessness begins to depart. ”

“ The fact that a man has stayed with a woman despite her frigidity and the problems it causes is a testament to the abiding love he has for her. If he will forget his old despair now that his wife has taken responsibility in the relationship, call on his real manhood to reassert itself in helping her to her goal, his rewards can be as bounteous as femininity can bestow. ”

“ I have shown how giving women can be in their love, how supportive, how filled with deep warmth and understanding. And I have tried to show how, in sex itself, there is no responsiveness that can compare even remotely with that of a loved and emotionally secure woman. If at this critical point in his marriage a man can clarify what he really wants and then develop the patience to wait for it, he will be most thoroughly rewarded. ”