"[T]here were reasons for the acceptance of vaginal orgasm by female manual authors. The strong resistance to masturbatory activities reveals that such women were not internalizing a new prohibition in rejecting clitoral stimulation but extending an existing one. Manuals by women (and the evidence on behavior) also suggest that English women were generally less comfortable with varied sexual practices that were men. For many married women of this generation their sexual aspirations lay in a different direction. Although the theme had been present in the manuals throughout the inter-war period, the 1950s saw the peak of the insistence on vaginal orgasm for women and the peak of the glorification of sexual intercourse as a transcendent, shared emotional experience for the couple. Authors used phrases such as “their spirits as well as their bodies seem to rise together to a flame of ecstasy which is quite indescribable’ or ‘total emotional surrender’. Definitions of marital sexual pleasure incorporated emotion. In ‘’The Golden Notebook’’ (1962) the Rhodesian-born novelist Doris Lessing (b. 1919) made a frequently quoted, classic statement of support for the vaginal orgasm. She wrote that a ‘vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensation that are indistinguishable from emotion’. In her 1995 autobiography she also commented that ‘when I masturbated in my adolescence it was the vagina and its amazing possibilities I learned about. The clitoris was only part of the whole ensemble.’ In the 1950s, there were many articulate middle-class women who agreed with Doris Lessing and her perception of female sexual experience. They experienced coitus and vaginal orgasm as an emotional experience and they wanted men to participate emotionally also. Men had to alter their attitude to marital sexuality if they were to accommodate this demand, as a shared emotional experience was incompatible with the exercise of conjugal rights. Thus, in a context where male initiation and management of physical sexual activity was still the norm, the vaginal orgasm involved a further step toward the destruction of the double standard."