As she grows older and her family grows up and the children learn to stand on their own feet and use their own wings, she may return to work. However, even then, interest in her now-grown children and their children will be far greater than any she can summon up for her job.
As you might expect, our paragon ages very gracefully. Those sure instincts which led her to successful love in marriage and to success in rearing her children stand her in good stead now. She still loves to give, and she perceives the right time to give her children up, to let them stand on their own, learn the difficult uses of freedom. Admittedly this is a great sacrifice for a mother, but she is deeply pleased to make it. And in doing so without fuss or feathers, she wins her children’s regard and love forever.
I am very pleased to say that the menopause brings no diminution in her ability to enjoy her husband sexually. Contrary to what many people still think, her orgasm does not decrease in intensity or in kind. Increasing age and the absence of children in the home now bring her and her husband closer together again and, great companions, they develop a whole series of shared pleasures consistent with their years.
As she goes down into the other side of her middle years, she is not troubled with regrets for things left undone. She has a deep sense of fulfillment, of life lived rightly. And, whether she has become consciously religious or not, she is still, basically, a believer in immortality, for she has served it with her whole being. She looks on death totally unafraid, wondering perhaps what the Creator who has made her life such a marvel is like on an even closer view.
This, then, is the idealized picture of the truly feminine woman. While granting that the plane of maturity she has achieved is rather too exalted for most women to attain, I have given her to you for some very concrete reasons.
With merely this ideal to follow, I have seen many women reap immediate rewards some time before they were able to come to grips with their frigidity per se. The characteristics and neurotic goals that accompany frigidity often cause obvious domestic frictions that can be greatly reduced when the woman begins to see new horizons for herself—that she need not be blaming others. Her grateful husband will reward her at once for her change, with renewed affection and tenderness, a new solicitude, a new caring.
Our idealized portrait can help you, too, to grasp more thoroughly the rest of this book. We have found, in psychiatry, that when a goal has been clearly defined half the battle has been won. As we come now to the chapters on frigidity, its history, its whys and wherefores, kinds and causes and cures, you will have before you a picture of what the potentialities of women are, a landmark to show you how far our sex can stray from real femininity, a guide to keep you from confusion, from ever subscribing again to false and destructive ideas of what it is that constitutes real womanhood.