Victorian Shocker: Ladies Liked Sex!

From the archive: 2010

Here's another knock for the myth that the Victorians were a bunch of prudes: a little-known survey that shows ladies of the era actually enjoyed sex.

In fact, one woman said she chose to sleep apart from her husband 'to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.'

Dr. Clelia Mosher began interviewing American women about their sex lives starting in 1892.

By 1920, she'd compiled 45 profiles.

Her results—which predated Kinsey's studies by a half century—showed that although most women entered marriage ignorant of sex (some admitted that they'd learned by 'watching farm animals'), most of them came to love it.

'Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; (and) 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse,' according to an excellent article in the Stanford Alumni magazine.

As one respondent, born in 1860, put it: 'My husband and I… believe in intercourse for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness.'

MY KINDA GAL 

In The History of Sex (But Not As We Know It), I note one of the ironies of the Sexual Revolution: we may very well be having less sex than our ancestors.

I also argue that we should learn from the early campaigners for gender equality and ignore the sex-obsessed celebrity feminists of the Sixties.

Compared to them, Mosher looks like an unsung heroine who spent her career trying to prove that women weren't inferior to men.

Dr. Mosher in her Red Cross uniform

In her day, people thought that women breathed from their chests rather than their diaphragms, but Mosher showed that this supposed biological difference was probably the result of tight corsets.

She also developed abdominal exercises—'moshers'—to counter menstrual pain, arguing that debilitating periods were partly due to a lack of exercise and the common practice of confining women to their beds during 'that time of the month.'

'Equal pay for women means equal work; unnecessary menstrual absences mean less than full work,' she wrote.

Mosher apparently lived quite a lonely life – again, the Stanford article is well worth reading – but she envisaged a day when life would be different for intelligent women like her.

'Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman's real capacities are,' she wrote in 1923. 'She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?'

Fortunately, Dr. Mosher didn't live to see 'Girls Gone Wild.'