The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
with joy if he only laid his hand on her, to the icy white
woman, who regarded his erotic transports with contempt
and did not even shrink from showing him that she only just
bore with him because it was supposed to be part of her
wifely duties. And to make things worse, she wronged her
husband in this by a feeling that precisely by doing so she
showed herself a ‘higher being’ than he, though, of course,
the truth is that she is a defective individual, a poor invalid,
a presumptuous ignoramus in matters of love. 44
Weith Knudsen’s assumption that non-European, non-western
women would be uncritically thrilled by any male sexual
approach is a common feature of racist sexual stereotyping by
white western authors. This form of sexual stereotyping was
used to describe working-class European women as well. One
of the favourite myths to be propagated by the sex reformers
was that ‘frigidity’ was a problem of the middle-class woman
and that the working-class woman was somehow more primitive,
spontaneous and sensual. Stekel asserted that it was women of
the ‘higher cultural levels’, by which he presumably meant
middle-class, who were most likely to suffer from frigidity. 45 In
fact sources such as the letters of the Cooperative Women’s
Guild, letters written to Marie Stopes after the publication of
Married Love, and the reports on the work of marriage advice
centres and birth control campaigners given at the 1929 Sex
Reform Congress, all indicate that women’s ‘resistance’ or
‘frigidity’ was a cross-class phenomenon at this time. Letters
from members of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, received in
reply to questions about maternity in 1915, mostly describe the
physical agonies and economic difficulties caused to the women
through constant childbearing. They also include comments
which would have earned some of the writers the appellation
‘frigid’ from the sex reformers. One woman wrote:
During the time of pregnancy, the male beast keeps entirely
from the female: not so with the woman: she is at the prey of
a man just the same as though she was not pregnant.
Practically within a few days after the birth, and as soon as
the birth is over, she is tortured again. If a woman does not
feel well she must not say so, as a man has such a lot of
ways of punishing a woman if she does not give in to him. 46
Such sentiments are very similar to those of Francis Swiney.
The letter writers had striking feminist analyses of the plight of
wives in respect of their husbands’ sexual demands. The
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