While, however, these two opposing currents of opinion are of very ancient origin, it is only within quite recent times, and only in two or three countries, that they have led to any marked difference of opinion regarding the sexual aptitude of women. In ancient times men blamed women for concupiscence or praised them for chastity, but it seems to have been reserved for the nineteenth century to state that women are apt to be congenitally incapable of experiencing complete sexual satisfaction, and peculiarly liable to sexual anesthesia. This idea appears to have been almost unknown to the eighteenth century. During the last century, however, and more especially in England, Germany, and Italy, this opinion has been frequently set down, sometimes even as a matter of course, with a tincture of contempt or pity for any woman afflicted with sexual emotions.
In the treatise On Generation (chapter v), which until recent times was commonly ascribed to Hippocrates, it is stated that men have greater pleasure in coitus than women, though the pleasure of women lasts longer, and this opinion, though not usually accepted, was treated with great respect by medical authors down to the end of the seventeenth century. Thus A. Laurentius (Du Laurens), after a long discussion, decides that men have stronger sexual desire and greater pleasure in coitus than women. (Historia Anatomica Humani Corporis, 1599, lib. viii, quest, ii and vii.)
About half a century ago a book entitled Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, by W. Acton, a surgeon, passed through many editions and was popularly regarded as a standard authority on the subjects with which it deals. This extraordinary book is almost solely concerned with men; the author evidently regards the function of reproduction as almost exclusively appertaining to men. Women, if "well brought up," are, and should be, he states, in England, absolutely ignorant of all matters concerning it. "I should say," this author again remarks, "that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind." The supposition that women do possess sexual feelings he considers "a vile aspersion."
In the article "Generation," contained in another medical work belonging to the middle of the nineteenth century,—Rees's Cyclopedia,—we find the following statement: "That a mucous fluid is sometimes found in coition from the internal organs and vagina is undoubted; but this only happens in lascivious women, or such as live luxuriously."
Gall had stated decisively that the sexual desires of men are stronger and more imperious than those of women. (Fonctions du Cerveau, 1825, vol. iii, pp. 241-271.)
Raciborski declared that three-fourths of women merely endure the approaches of men. (De la Puberté chez la Femme, 1844, p. 486.)
"When the question is carefully inquired into and without prejudice," said Lawson Tait, "it is found that women have their sexual appetites far less developed than men." (Lawson Tait, "Remote Effects of Removal of the Uterine Appendages," Provincial Medical Journal, May, 1891.) "The sexual instinct is very powerful in man and comparatively weak in women," he stated elsewhere (Diseases of Women, 1889, p. 60).
Hammond stated that, leaving prostitutes out of consideration, it is doubtful if in one-tenth of the instances of intercourse they [women] experience the slightest pleasurable sensation from first to last (Hammond, Sexual Impotence, p. 300), and he considered (p. 281) that this condition was sometimes congenital.
Lombroso and Ferrero consider that sexual sensibility, as well as all other forms of sensibility, is less pronounced in women, and they bring forward various facts and opinions which seem to them to point in the same direction. "Woman is naturally and organically frigid." At the same time they consider that, while erethism is less, sexuality is greater than in men. (Lombroso and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente, la Prostituta, e la Donna Normale, 1893, pp. 54-58.)
"It is an altogether false idea," Fehling declared, in his rectorial address at the University of Basel in 1891, "that a young woman has just as strong an impulse to the opposite sex as a young man.... The appearance of the sexual side in the love of a young girl is pathological." (H. Fehling, Die Bestimmung der Frau, 1892, p. 18.) In his Lehrbuch der Frauenkrankheiten the same gynecological authority states his belief that half of all women are not sexually excitable.