But she was not, like my actress, delighted with the new horizons the experience opened up for her. She was very consciously frightened and very consciously ashamed. All her background and training had been against it. She consciously decided never to let the experience repeat itself. She was entirely successful in her resolution, she told me. Unlike my actress, she threw off the lovely pink cloak of her feminine potentiality and never donned it again. Her husband had died after the birth of their last child, and it was not until a few years afterward, with the new information science had developed on the subject, that she realized the tragedy of her decision. It’s a poignant story, but I have not told it for that reason. I have told it because it illustrates very clearly how subject to the mind, to outside cultural and moral influences, feminine sexuality can be. If a grown woman can choose to destroy her mature and flowering sexuality at the height of its strength, just think of the fragility of this sexuality in the bud. _The Fear of Motherhood_ On the whole, women will face anything to achieve motherhood. Recently a woman of thirty-five came to my office. She had called me twice to make appointments and twice broken them at the last moment. When this happens a psychiatrist will generally assume that the patient has become frightened of her decision to face up to whatever problem is troubling her and has gone into a last-minute flight. I had assumed that about this patient and had expected, if I ever did see her, to encounter a reticent, scared, perhaps terrified person. Instead the person who sat opposite me was a very pretty woman of thirty-five, well dressed, clear-eyed, and straightforward. She came right to the point. “I’m here because I’m terrified of having children,” she told me. “I must find out what’s at the root of my fear.” “Was your fear the reason you canceled the two appointments?” I asked sympathetically. “Oh no,” she answered quickly, “the children were ill. We’ve had flu for a month. First one came down and then another.” “Children?” I asked in puzzlement. “What children?” “Mine, of course,” she said. “How many do you have?” I asked. “Four,” she said, “but John and I want six and I thought … ” She paused; then, catching my smile, she looked down at the floor for a moment and back at me, and then we both burst into laughter. She did have a fear of childbirth, however, dating from certain traumatic experiences in her childhood, and we were able to resolve it. It was a marked fear, but the important point is that even with it she had gone right on and had four children.