I have given much thought to this question and have had many consultations with my psychiatric colleagues about it. We have come to the positive conclusion that a book on this subject can be of direct benefit to all women suffering from sexual frigidity.

I will go even further and say that the facts about frigidity that I present here--its origins, its causes, and its cures--must be known by every woman with a sexual problem if she wishes to be cured.

Frigidity is always rooted in incomplete knowledge gained in childhood and adolescence. We are not, as I have pointed out, far from the Victorian age. Any woman of thirty or more had, in all probability, parents who were reared in the traditions of Victorianism, which denied the sexuality of woman, connived with every available force to deny it, repress it, stop it at its source. These efforts were extraordinarily successful. And, too, any woman now in her twenties probably had parents who were deeply affected by the equally mindless and vicious protest against Victorianism which characterized this country from, roughly, 1920 to 1930--the period we now call the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age.

This era, too, was full of destructive misinformation about sex and love. A program of sexual promiscuity for women was openly advocated and found far too many adherents in the younger generation after World War I. The moral climate created in the Jazz Age was alien to the very nature of truly feminine love. It led to serious sexual conflicts in millions of individuals, and these conflicts were duly visited on their offspring.

This book then, I firmly believe, can help the individual to undo the early harm caused by improper upbringing. I have tried to design it in such a manner that a woman who reads it completely may achieve a deep understanding of frigidity, an understanding that can lead to a profound inner change, a complete reversal of those attitudes that are always at the root of frigidity.

I have designed it, too, to be read by the husband of the woman who suffers from frigidity. It goes without saying that the success of his marriage is dependent on the resolution of her problem. He can help greatly to ensure this resolution by fully informing himself of the nature of the problem and by discovering the most helpful role he can play during her recovery.

But the problem of frigidity does not concern only the married. Thus I have also aimed this book at those young people who are about to enter their first love experience. We have found that this first experience can be of vast importance for the further emotional growth of the individual and of the relationship upon which she has embarked. Young women who find they have problems in the sexual sphere may be spared years of misery if they are given a real understanding of the matter in the beginning. Many of my patients, had they been given an insight into the nature of their difficulties at the start, might have avoided the inevitable and innumerable poor choices and often disastrous decisions which are so characteristic of the woman suffering from a sexual problem.

Since I have designed this book to answer the needs of a specific audience I should like to ask you to read it through and not skip around trying to find the material that seems to apply directly to you or to someone close to you. For, if you follow me as I go, you will see that frigidity is not a single, simple, local symptom. It is a complicated and profound problem involving many factors and having profound consequences. One can grasp the nature of this problem, understand it, and cure it. To do so, however, you must have very specific and complete knowledge of it in all its complexity. It may take all your powers to master this complexity. To do so, however, will be more than merely worth while. It can be the first great step toward real love, upon whose threshold you have tarried already far too long.

Before we advance into the subject itself, I should like to dispose of a few widely held and thoroughly incorrect notions about frigidity. I do this to clear away some of the underbrush which can impede those of you who are seriously seeking a resolution of the problem.

In the first place, let us look at this problem of a woman’s sexual “responsibility,” as it has been recently called. Much has been written about it and much of what I have read is pure nonsense, based on a sort of mechanical conception of what love is and of what the act of love means. I fear that such books encourage women who have deeply rooted sexual difficulties to approach the problem from the wrong direction and before they properly understand the real nature of their difficulties. Such an approach leads them to attempt abortive “solutions” which can only further discourage and disillusion them. The basic error here is in trying to make the individual woman “responsible” without giving her any real information about her condition.

The fact is that no woman who suffers from frigidity consciously desires to. Nor can she be, for a single second, held accountable for the fact that the problem developed. The word “blame” cannot by any stretch of the imagination be used in connection with her problem. I strongly urge you to let that point sink deeply into your heart and mind.

How could it possibly be that you had any responsibility in the matter? This problem always develops in childhood or even infancy. It is partly a product of early family and historical influences over which you had not the slightest control, and it is partly a matter of the biological heritage of all women everywhere. And you certainly can’t be held responsible for that.

Here is the attitude I have found most helpful to take toward this matter of sexual responsibility: You are not responsible for having developed a difficulty; you are not responsible for the existence of your frigidity any more than the stutterer is responsible for his stutter. However, once you realize it is a problem, that it is having repercussions on you and those dear to you, you are responsible for finding out everything you can about the problem and then, on the basis of this information, taking whatever action is necessary.

I have already mentioned another important misconception about frigidity and should like to go into it a bit further now. I have said that it is highly unlikely that the husband of a frigid woman is responsible for her frigidity problem. I can’t emphasize that enough. Of course if he is impotent, was when his wife married him and has continued to be, she might have a case. But true sexual impotency in the male is quite rare. Even, however, if he were truly impotent, the fact remains that this particular woman did marry him--we have found that when a woman marries an inadequate man she has done so because she, all unknown to herself, was deeply afraid of true male virility.

In saying the husband is rarely if ever to blame for a frigidity problem I am running counter to a vast body of information that has been published; in the 1930’s in particular, book after book appeared, each showing conclusively that a happily married sexual life depended on the male’s skill in arousing the woman. In such books the husband was instructed to manipulate or caress her for X minutes in Y number of erotic zones. By then, presumably, she would have reached such a state of excitement that true sexual satisfaction could not possibly fail her. Any failure of a woman to respond adequately in the marital bed was always supposed to be due to faulty technique on the husband’s part.

This is simply not true. Caressing or manipulating the genitalia or secondary erotic zones of certain types of frigid women would only result in exacerbated nerves or in a condition of inwardly screaming protest. In other types, caressing might give temporary satisfaction but in the long run could really be harmful from the psychological standpoint, deepen or encourage immature methods of gratification.

In short, while a husband, through tenderness and understanding, may help a woman face the true nature of her problem, he is never responsible for the existence of her frigidity and cannot, through any mechanical means, get her over it.

I might add that neither can any man other than her husband.

Another misconception about frigidity: Women who suffer from a greater or lesser degree of frigidity often come to believe that there is something wrong with them glandularly. Through a misunderstanding of something they’ve read or heard, they get the idea that somewhere, somehow, there is a drug that will cure them. A gynecologist I know tells me that he has at least three women a week ask him to give them hormones to step up their sexual responses. On the basis of his statement I have checked with several other gynecologists and also with five obstetricians. They all tell me that the request for hormonal injections from women is a daily constant.

Let me say here that frigidity is rarely a problem of glandular malfunction. Much work has now been done in this area and, unless your case is relatively unusual, you may rest assured that your problem is basically a personal and psychological one.