“Women were required to enjoy sexual intercourse, not just take part in it. Sexual pleasure in intercourse was not expected to be positive or strengthening for women. The sexologists of the 1920s predicted with assurance that women could not gain pleasure in sexual intercourse unless they subjected themselves to the will of their husbands. This assumption had also underlain the work of other sexologists before the First World War, such as Ellis, Bloch, and Forel. The writers of the 1920s put much more emphasis upon the idea of the necessity of women's subjection in sexual intercourse, and expected it to fulfil a grandiose social and political function. Through the orchestration of women's sexual response, based upon submission, writers like Steel and Van de Velde believed that all the problems which most alarmed them such as feminism, manhating and female resistance to male domination in general, could be overcome. A radical new significance was given to sexual intercourse. It became both a metaphor for the subjection of women and a method of effecting that subjection. The eagerness of the sexologists to help women with their 'frigidity' becomes easier to understand as we see how closely they associated women's sexual pleasure with their submission.”
-Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies




















