A Sex Poll (1892-1920)

Sex surveys, it turns out, are nothing new. Between 1892 and 1920, 47 middle-class American women answered an explicit questionnaire passed around by a Stanford researcher, physician and biologist, Clelia Duel Mosher. This spring Stanford Historian Carl Degler, while doing research on women's history, unearthed the surprisingly unrestrained 650-page document in the Stanford library.

"The frankness of the answers is remarkable," Degler said last week, "when we note that 70% of the women who filled out the questionnaire were born before 1870 and 25% before the Civil War." Indeed, the women responded without a blush to questions such as "Do you habitually sleep with your husband?

What is your habit of intercourse? Do you always have a venereal orgasm?"

To the question about orgasm, 13 of the women said "Always," 13 said "Sometimes" and 11 said "Never." Of course such a small sampling, though interesting, does not constitute the last scientific word on Victorian sexuality. The study's certain value lies in its uniqueness and extensive quotations from Victorian women openly discussing their intimate lives and cravings.

One typically torn woman, a wife for seven years by 1892, considered the ideal sexual routine to be "total abstinence with intercourse for reproduction only"--although she usually had an orgasm when she slept with her husband, and the next day felt "exceedingly well."

It seemed to her, however, that abstinence "would not be healthful for all people." At least, she added, "until human nature is different from what it is now."

Complete Harmony. Another woman who insisted that sex as often as once a week was too frequent for her health, nevertheless thought that "physical union possibly is necessary to complete harmony between two people."

Was intercourse necessary to a man?

"Depends on early training in self-control," answered one wife who limited her own intercourse to six to eight times a year.

A graduate of Ripon College reported that she and her husband "sleep together in the winter and apart in summer." A Radcliffe graduate, one year married, although she "cared for" sex, felt it was "more wholesome to sleep alone and avoid the temptation of too frequent intercourse."

By no means did all the women in the Mosher study suffer over sex. A normal school graduate had orgasms, after which she felt "very sleepy and comfy, with none of the disgust as I have heard it described." Her ideal, however, was "once a month when both feel well. And in the daylight." A Stanford woman admitted that she enjoyed sex weekly, bul commented that it served "a higher purpose than physical enjoyment. Simply sweeps you out of everything that is commonplace and everyday. A strength to go on."

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