of a woman who held one of them. Her hostility to her husband and all the misery such hatred implies, we take for granted. But it was the effect on the children that was decisive.
I have treated, as I have told you, several women who had been raised by Victorian or feminist mothers. The attitudes inculcated into these patients in their childhood would make one's hair stand on end. Or it should. This is what they learned at their mother's knee: Shame about their bodies; shame about menstruation, and disgust with it, hatred of it, for it is a hallmark of womanhood; fear of pregnancy and childbirth; punishment for early and natural sexual feelings and experimentation; destruction and depreciation of the father as an ideal image for the child to love or to emulate. In general, women learned early and well to loathe their womanhood in all of its important manifestations.
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 free-
