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. Seeing one’s own responsibility in a situation is often difficult. However, in this problem of frigidity, not to take the blame is even more difficult. It means--and has meant for millions--that one almost literally commits sexual suicide, embraces emotional isolationism as the proper condition for womankind. Chapter 6 WHY WOMEN CAN BECOME FRIGID Some time ago a young husband sat in my office. His wife had come to me for help for a frigidity problem, and after the first session he had asked her if he might see me. I take that to be a good omen for a relationship, generally, and I was not disappointed when I met him. He told me very quickly that he did not care how long it might take for his wife to get over her difficulty. “I’d stay with her even if she didn’t,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t love her problem, but I love her and I want you to know that I didn’t marry her for better only but for worse as well.”