Can you begin to see why most psychiatrists passionately agree with Dr. Marynia Farnham when she writes: “The most precise expression of unhappiness is neurosis. The bases for most of this unhappiness … are laid in the childhood home. The principal instrument of their creation are women”.
You may perhaps have noticed that I have coupled our feminist with our Victorian woman, and you may object that they really shouldn’t be spoken of in the same breath. The feminists were, after all, for more and more sexual freedom; Victorian woman was anti-sexual. I feel that that is only superficially true. They were both, in their unconscious lives, against feminine sexuality. It is not possible for woman to be masculine sexually; to advocate that for her is exactly equal to demanding that she be frigid.
Of course feminism, as a conscious attitude toward sexuality, ultimately triumphed over Victorianism. Sexual freedom and all the other equal rights with men demanded for women by the feminists after World War I became the order of the day.
The flapper of the 1920’s represented the unintended flower of the feminist philosophy of life, its definition of what constituted womanhood. As we know, the flapper was a caricature of woman, a cheap and shoddy imitation of the opposite sex, a second-class man. Happily, she did not survive as a conscious national ideal, but the philosophy that created her did survive. The depreciation of the goals of femininity, biological and psychological, became part and parcel of the education of millions of American girls. Homemaking, childbearing and rearing, cooking, the virtues of patience, lovingness, givingness in marriage have been systematically devalued. The life of male achievement has been substituted for the life of female achievement.
The feminist-Victorian antagonism toward men has survived too. It has been handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line for so many years now that, to millions of women, hostility toward the opposite sex seems almost a natural law. Though many a modern woman may pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact, to supplant him, to exchange roles with him. She learned this attitude at her mother’s knee or imbibed it with her formula. Little that she learns elsewhere counteracts it with any great effectiveness.
Clearly, then, if this is the historical direction women have taken, the individual woman who wishes to become a real woman must change this direction. This she can do only by taking thought, long thought. For among the women around her she will not necessarily find too much support for her wish to be entirely feminine.
For one hundred fifty years now women have blamed their problems on the outside world. They have used the very real difficulties created by revolutionary social changes to avoid the task of looking within for the real problem and the real solution. They have indulged in an orgy of finger-pointing and self-pity.
If the results had been different; if this attitude had brought them happiness and fulfillment, if feminism and Victorianism had made them good mothers and joyful wives, or even pleased them with their new place in industry, the game might have been worth the candle. But it hasn’t been. The game has brought frigidity and restlessness and a soaring divorce rate, neurosis, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency—all that results when the woman in any society deserts her true function.
Last year a woman came to see me at the request of a lawyer she had consulted. She was on the verge of divorce, she told me. And then, her face distorted with rage, she said of her husband: “He will have to come crawling to me on his hands and knees before I will even think of forgiving him.”
I questioned her and soon elicited the fact that she had been totally frigid from the first time she had had intercourse with her husband. Yet consciously she felt blameless in the difficulties that had arisen, self-righteous, indignant that her husband should find her anything but eminently desirable after five years of joyless love-making. With such an attitude, of course, she could never have made the slightest headway against her underlying problem, so, as I sometimes do, I told her in detail the history I have told you in this chapter. She listened, at first with hostility and then with the growing shock of self-recognition. Just by listening she developed a genuine concern for the very first time about her whole attitude. She left that session with an avowed intent to look more deeply and more thoroughly into the whole matter and to reshape her values. There was no more talk of divorce from her; just hard work on her real problem, and success, finally, in dislodging the cause of it.