With the impact of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male still very much felt five years after its appearance, Alfred Kinsey’s second volume in his planned series of books about sex in America was published. Like the first volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female would shock Americans through its unflinching examination of an aspect of society typically relegated to the margins. Kinsey interviewed about 6,000 (again, all white) women to write his much-anticipated follow-up to his 1948 study about men, which was co-authored by Pomeroy, Martin, and anthropologist Paul H. Gebhard. Women talked about sex significantly less than men, nearly everyone agreed, making interest in the second Kinsey Report that much greater. Some writers referred to the publication date of the book as “K-Day,” and some newspapers made its release their lead story on their front pages (beating out such others as the verification of a Soviet hydrogen bomb blast and the return of Adlai Stevenson from a global peacekeeping mission.) Newsweek declared it “the hottest news story of the year,” a bold claim given that events like the announcement of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, the coronation of Elizabeth II, and the execution of the Rosenbergs had already occurred. More than a hundred reporters accepted an invitation to read advance galleys of the book on-site at the University of Indiana, all of them required to sign a three-page contract that they would not spill the beans before the official publication date. (Three years earlier, Redbook had somehow been able to publish an unauthorized “first preview” of the book.) The book’s findings were expected to be “so explosive as to make the [nuclear bomb] tests on the Nevada flats look like the fireworks display of a county,” wrote George Milburn in The Nation, quite a build-up for the release of a scientific book written by a zoologist teaching at a Midwestern university. Women’s magazines like Women’s Home Companion and Collier’s, bastions of traditional domestic life, offered complete reports on Kinsey’s latest findings in their September 1953 issues, allowing housewives to know whether or not they were keeping up with the Joneses, sexually speaking.
The findings of the new book (nicknamed “All About Eve”) were, it turned out, both expected and surprising. “The range of variation [of sexual behavior] in the female far exceeds the range of variation in the male,” Kinsey and his colleagues wrote, that women developed earlier sexually and had more erogenous zones than men one of the more interesting bits of news. The data (collected by 200,000 IBM punch cards) revealed that married women in their late teens had sex with their husbands 2.8 times per week, while those thirty years old had it 2.2 times and those forty 1.5 times. Some women at all age levels reported having sex four or more times a day every day of the week, rather remarkably. About half of the married women in the study were not virgins when they wed, this one of the bigger surprises in the book. Class, religion, and education level made little difference in whether women chose to have sex while single, although there was a generational difference. Younger women- those born during or after the Roaring Twenties- were more than twice as likely as those middle-aged (those born before) to have slept with a man before they got hitched. (Women born before 1900 referred to petting as “courting,” “bundling,” “spooning,” “smooching,” “larking,” and “sparking.”) Married women were about twice as faithful as married men, Kinsey reported in his new book, with about a quarter of wives admitting they had strayed (versus half of husbands). In general, men were considerably more interested in sex than women, Kinsey concluded, so much so that he found it almost a miracle that “married couples are ever able to work out a satisfactory sexual relationship.” Age alone was a cruel trick of nature when it came to gender differences in sexuality, he also observed, the male peaking a decade or two earlier than the female.
If the second Kinsey Report was as well received as the first for its intriguing insights, it was similarly attacked for its suspect methodology. Sampling and statistical problems plagued Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, making the findings in the book less than fully reliable (some would say totally unreliable). As in Kinsey’s first volume on men, younger, better educated, and urban subjects were over-recruited (some defended the book by saying, “women were women”). Class differences, which were notable among men (lower class men viewed higher class men’s devotion to foreplay as “perverted,” for example), were indeed significantly less apparent among women. And even with its flaws, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was a rare peek into the sex lives of American women, this alone for many worth the considerable retail price of $8. “The statistics, if not perfect, are at least the only statistics in town,” Life noted, “and the first good strong ray of light into an area of vast dark ignorance.” Readers found the fact that 99 out of every 100 women had engaged in some sort of sexuality by age 35 intriguing, for example, and that a full third of married women had previously “petted” with more than ten men (some more than one hundred). Still, a primary motivating factor for men to get married was for sexual purposes, something that did not generally hold true for women. Many women could take or leave sex, readers learned, while most men made it one of life’s priorities, and spent much of their day thinking about it. Marilyn Monroe’s breathy passion was apparently a big act, men might have concluded from reading Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, real women not nearly as sex-obsessed as the movies made them out to be. Kinsey himself was admittedly amazed by the variation in women’s capacity for sexual pleasure which he thought was actually far greater than men’s.
As or more important than Kinsey’s findings about women’s sex lives, however, were his views on the role of sexuality in American society. No institution was doing a good job in teaching women about sex, he surmised, only experience itself helping them learn about it in a positive way. “It is petting rather than the home, classroom or religious instruction, lectures or books, classes in biology, sociology or philosophy, or actual coitus,” Kinsey wrote, “that provides most females with their first real understanding of a heterosexual experience.” Not only were parents, educators, and ministers of little or no use in teaching young women about sex but they were hindering the process, he believed. “The church, the home and the school are the chief sources of the sexual inhibitions, the distaste for all aspects of sex, the fears of the physical difficulties that may be involved in a sexual relationship, and the feelings of guilt which many females carry with them into their marriage,” he stated, all institutions doing more harm than good in this arena. (Kinsey’s observations were spot-on but it should be kept in mind that married women knew enough about sex to create the baby boom.) Like Freud and social critics such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Bertrand Russell, Kinsey was a strong advocate for sexual liberty and sharply criticized moral conventions of the day, his second book an ideal platform to voice his informed views.