“Miss C. A teacher.  She is emotional and easily becomes hysterical.  Her life has been one of self-sacrifice and her rearing most Puritanical.  She told me she thought women did not crave sexual satisfaction unless it had been aroused in them.  I consider her one who physically is injured by not having it.

“Mrs. D. After being married a few years this person told me she thought intercourse ‘horrid.’  Some years after this, however, she fell in love with a man not her husband, which caused their separation.  She always fancied men in love with her, and she told me that she and her husband tried to live without intercourse, fearing more children, but they could not do it; she also told of trying to refrain, for the same purpose, until safe parts of the menstrual month, but that ’was just the time she cared least for it.’  These remarks made me doubt the sincerity of the first.

“Mrs. E. said she enjoyed intercourse as well as her husband, and she ‘didn’t see why she should not say so.’  This same woman, whether using a current phrase or not, afterward said her husband ‘did not bother her very often.’

    “Mrs. F., the mother of several children, was married to a man
    she neither loved nor respected, but she said that when a strange
    man touched her it made her tremble all over.

“Mrs. G., the mother of many children, divorced on account of the dissipation, drinking and otherwise, of her husband.  She is of the creole type, but large and almost repulsive.  She is a brilliant talker and she supports herself by writing.  She has fallen in love with a number of young men, ’wildly, madly, passionately,’ as one of them told me, and I am sure she suffers greatly from the lack of satisfaction.  She would no doubt procure it if it were possible.

“I believe,” the writer concludes, “women are as passionate as men, but the enforced restraint of years possibly smothers it.  The fear of having children and the methods to prevent conception are, I am sure, potent factors in the injury to the emotions of married women.  Perhaps the lack of intercourse acts less disastrously upon a woman because of the renewed feeling which comes after each menstrual period.”

    As bearing on the causes which have led to the disguise and
    misinterpretation of the sexual impulse in women I may quote the
    following communication from another lady:—­

“I do think the coldness of women has been greatly exaggerated.  Men’s theoretically ideal woman (though they don’t care so much about it in practice) is passionless, and women are afraid to admit that they have any desire for sexual pleasure.  Rousseau, who was not very straight-laced, excuses the conduct of Madame de Warens on the ground that it was not the result of passion:  an aggravation rather than a palliation of the offense, if society viewed