Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/49

 values, but by the time the right man came along it was too late to have children.

I was right that her tears had been tears of rage. They were directed at her mother's authoritarian but totally mistaken view of the feminine role in life and were, to my mind, justified. When she had sufficiently vented her righteous anger, but not until then, we were able to move on to more practical matters. Her marriage was a happy one, and finally she adopted two children. With some of her values revised she made a wonderful mother for them. I visited this family only recently, and it seems to be one of the happiest and healthiest, psychologically speaking, I have ever seen.

Most women who have been reared with such ideas of what is normal are not so fortunate, however. They cling to their defensive and self-destructive values to the end, which is often bitter.

And there are, still, passionately convinced and often eloquent purveyors of these ideas. After reading the brilliant best seller, The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, the French authoress, I was saddened to see such clarity and brilliance in the service of such a mistaken cause. Her tacit conclusions seem to be that woman's historic role of wife and mother are degrading to our sex, have kept woman from her true destiny. As she describes what that true destiny is, however, her clarity departs, and the role and function of this woman of the future become more than merely vague. Their foggy contours remind me of the glamorous-sounding but totally evanescent and mist-enshrouded goals that many of the frigid and lonely women I treat have when they first come for help.

There is no vagueness about the goals, functions, and needs of the normal woman. Science in recent years has thrown a bright light on her, and that is why we can be certain of many fundamental details about her. She is a ma