How a survey of over 2,000 women in the 1920s changed the way Americans thought about female sexuality

In the 1920s, many women became more comfortable in their skin. But the facts of life remained in short supply. George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress by Anya Jabour, University of Montana American women still have fewer orgasms than men, according to new research that suggests that decades after the sexual revolution, the “orgasm gap” is still very much in effect. One of the study’s lead authors at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction told The New York Times that the gap persists because many Americans continue to “prioritize men’s pleasure and undervalue women’s sexual pleasure.” As my research shows, these attitudes toward sexual pleasure have a long history. But so do efforts to push back against them. Almost a century ago, a pioneering American sex researcher named Katharine Bement Davis challenged the prevailing view that respectable women did not – and should not – experience sexual desire or have sex, except to please men or to have children. Davis’s 1929 book, “Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women,” completely upended this thinking. By surveying everyday American women, she was able to show that it was completely normal for American women to have sex...