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CHAPTER FIVE

respondence only but by direct personal confidences, on which I have cross-examined them, I have noticed these women, however, are of the type which I should call "ascetic" or intellectual, with the sex activity rather below than above the normal, although their emotional and affectional activity is strong and romantically felt.

In giving evidence before the Birth Rate Commission I[1] said something about these types, for it seemed to me that to discuss such physiological points without recognizing that different types of women exist, was futile. The point appears to me particularly important and interesting in connection with the idea that there is a natural reduction in fertility (see pp. 59 and 88).

In my opinion what truth there is in the idea of our natural tendency toward reduction of fertility is not explicable on the basis of mere environmental conditions, but depends on the existence of this physiological type of woman, and the correspondingly undersexed type of man.

In this connection I feel that we have in this type of woman who has, and is able to verify in her own life that she has, a really

  1. ↑ M. C. Stopes (1920): In the Second Report of the National Birth Rate Commission, "Problems of Population and Parenthood," see pp. 241-255. London, 1920.

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