The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
depend pre-eminently on the hyper-feministic, anaesthetic
minority among the women. For it would not be unreasonable
to assume that hyper-feminism has as its most numerous,
most ardent and most fanatical adherents among the
erotically anaesthetic, neurasthenic women. Many of its
monstrous assertions and proposals are simply only to be
explained by an inborn and incurable blindness to all erotic
phenomena. 37
Weith Knudsen was convinced that peace in the ‘open war between
the sexes’ could only be reached through the ‘natural subordination
(of women) which cannot be, and in the case of the white man, so
long as history has known him and long before that, never has
been synonymous with oppression; on the contrary’. 38 Weith
Knudsen’s alarm at women’s frigidity stemmed from its connection
with feminism and his fear of the results of feminism was profound.
He described it as an agitation ‘against Man, and the society
created by him’ and claims that everyone must be aware of the
‘reality of Feminist disasters’. Anyone who was not was
‘consciously using the Feminist movement as a wedge for the
destruction of the white man’s world’. 39
Walter Gallichan also saw the results of female frigidity in
apocalyptic terms. In his 1929 book The Poison of Prudery he
wrote:
The erotically impotent women have an enormous influence
upon the young, the conventions and regulations of society,
and even upon sex legislation. These degenerate women are a
menace to civilisation. They provoke sex misunderstanding
and antagonism; they wreck conjugal happiness, and pose as
superior moral beings when they are really victims of disease. 40
Gallichan produced many other diverse reasons why frigidity
in women was dangerous, none quite so extreme as the above
and mostly concerned with the frigidity of married women. In
Sexual Antipathy and Coldness in Women (1927), he produced
a formidable array of dangers including, as suggested in the
title, the problem of manhating. A serious danger according to
Gallichan was the effect of a mother’s frigidity upon her children.
‘The children of sexually cold mothers generally show signs of
emotional and neurotic disturbance at an early age.’ 41 Much of
the disturbance, he claimed, came from the domestic disharmony
and disappointment of the parents which stemmed from the
wife’s frigidity.
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