The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

THE INVENTION OF THE FRIGID WOMAN
abandonment and self-effacement under the man’s will—one
of the most important requirements for the woman’s attaining
maximum erotic gratification with all that follows
therefrom—should of itself be calculated to increase the
already large number of white women who are erotically
impotent from other causes of a more physical nature. 61
Many different solutions were offered for the problem of the
woman who was not participating in sexual intercourse. For
spinsters the favoured solution was concubinage or polygamy.
Ludovici recommended it and was able to support his plan
with a congratulatory letter in the introduction to Lysistrata
from Norman Haire, liberal British sexologist, founder of the
Walworth Marriage Advice Centre in 1921. Haire asserted that
the normal woman could not be happy ‘unmated’ and agreed
that concubinage was the right solution. 62 Solutions offered for
the married woman included sending her to a psychoanalyst or
gynaecologist, better sex education and more firmness and
resolve from the husband on the wedding night. The most
effective solution is likely to have been the sex advice literature
itself, not because of the factual information if offered, but
because of the fear and feelings of inadequacy which would be
instilled into resisting women. To be ‘normal’, women had to
do sexual intercourse willingly. They were also pressured by
threats. Wives were told that they would lose their husbands to
the divorce courts or to prostitutes if they failed to do sexual
intercourse willingly. 63
The picture which the historians have painted of the 1920s
as a period of dawning sexual freedom does not look nearly so
rosy on closer examination. The sexologist offered the ‘freedom’
only to marry and engage willingly in sexual intercourse.
Spinsterhood, lesbianism, celibacy and heterosexual practices
apart from sexual intercourse were condemned. The concept of
the ‘frigid woman’ was invented to explain why women were
resisting this change in men’s sexual expectations and was used
as a weapon to worry women into compliance. The sexologists
did not suddenly take a humanitarian interest in maximising
women’s sexual response. Rather they took an interest in quelling
feminism and women’s critique of men’s sexual behaviour by
eliciting from women a sexual response the sexologists believed
to be intrinsically linked with total surrender to men’s power
and dominance.
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