The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
offering was so unattractive that spinsterhood would not have
appeared a positive alternative to women. Haldane wrote: ‘The
sub-normal is a type chiefly prevalent among celibate women.
They tend, for instance, to enjoy a less rich and varied diet
than married women.’ 50 Most writers about sex in the 1920s
fought shy of mentioning the possibility that women might have
sex with each other. They avoided using the words ‘lesbian’
and ‘homosexual’. None the less it is clear from the descriptions
they gave of the group of spinsters that worried them most, that
they had lesbians in mind. Haldane’s ‘intersex’ group has a list
of supposedly masculine attributes precisely similar to Ellis’s
description of the female homosexual in Chapter 6. 51
Women were required to enjoy sexual intercourse, not just
take part in it. Sexual pleasure in intercourse was not expected
to be positive or strengthening for women. The sexologists of
the 1920s predicted with assurance that women could not gain
pleasure in sexual intercourse unless they subjected themselves
to the will of their husbands. This assumption had also underlain
the work of other sexologists before the First World War, such
as Ellis, Bloch, and Forel. The writers of the 1920s put much
more emphasis upon the idea of the necessity of women’s
subjection in sexual intercourse, and expected it to fulfil a
grandiose social and political function. Through the
orchestration of women’s sexual response, based upon
submission, writers like Stekel and Van de Velde believed that
all the problems which most alarmed them such as feminism,
manhating and female resistance to male domination in general,
could be overcome. A radical new significance was given to
sexual intercourse. It became both a metaphor for the subjection
of women and a method of effecting that subjection. The
eagerness of the sexologists to help women with their ‘frigidity’
becomes easier to understand as we see how closely they
associated women’s sexual pleasure with their submission.
Many writers before Stekel had mentioned the connections
between feminism, manhating and frigidity. The main theme
of Stekel’s work was his unequivocal proposition that female
frigidity was a form of resistance to male domination, a weapon
to be used against men in the battle of the sexes:
We shall never understand the problem of the frigid woman
unless we take into consideration the fact that the two sexes
are engaged in a lasting conflict…. The social aspect of the
problem, too, unveils itself before our eyes. We recognise
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