Victorian-era women enjoyed making love, according to earliest sex survey

Middle-class women of the era seemed quite willing to blame their husbands when their love lives failed to meet their own expectations, according to the candid accounts that lay unread for decades in a university archive.

While public morality frowned upon discussion of female sexuality, the records show that in private couples took a much more open approach.

Describing her attitude to sex, one woman respondent wrote: "The highest devotion is based upon it, a very beautiful thing, and I am glad nature gave it to us."

Another described the act as "perfecting the spiritual union", while a third described how she and her husband enjoyed "intercourse for its own sake ... we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it".

The illuminating personal testimonies were obtained from what is believed to be the first ever sex survey, begun 50 years before the US biologist Alfred Kinsey conducted the interviews that led to his acclaimed reports on sexual behaviour.

The research was a personal project of Dr Clelia Duel Mosher, a hygiene academic and early feminist who persuaded 45 women to fill out intimate questionnaires on their experiences of sex, marriage and contraception.

Between 1892 and 1920 the survey was completed by 45 women – mostly middle-class college and university graduates – providing modern historians with a unique insight into the secret romantic appetites of a generation raised with Victorian values.

The results show that most women knew little about sex before marriage, with some admitting that they only picked up the facts of life by observing the habits of farm animals.

But once married, most women said that their sex lives were active and enjoyable. Of the sample, 35 said that they desired intercourse and 24 said that mutual pleasure was a reason for making love. Three-quarters of the women said they made love once a week.

Another of the anonymous women, whose questionnaire gives her birth year as 1867, professed the very modern view that a fulfilling sex life was the key to a long and secure marriage.

She wrote: "In my experience the habitual bodily expression of love has a deep psychological effect in making possible complete mental sympathy & perfecting the spiritual union that must be the lasting 'marriage' after the passion of love has passed away with the years."

Dr Mosher even noted that some complained about the performance of their husbands, annotating one questionnaire with the words: "Thinks men have not been properly trained."

The survey also revealed rudimentary experiments with contraception, and the women's fears of unplanned pregnancies. One wrote: "I most heartily wish there were no accidental conceptions. I believe the world would take a most gigantic stride toward high ethical conditions, if every child brought into the world were the product of pure love and conscious choice."

Not all the women managed to shed the values of their upbringing. One disclosed that she slept in a separate bed from her husband "to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse."

Dr Mosher, who worked at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University in California, never published the results of her survey of American women. She died in 1940, her questionnaires forgotten in an unmarked file in the Stanford archives.

They attracted the attention of a small number of academics after being discovered by chance by a historian in 1973, and have now been brought to wider public attention through an article in the Stanford Magazine.


/Telegraph.co.uk/