Sexual Attitudes of Victorian and Post-Victorian Women: Another Look at the Mosher Survey

Abstract

Between 1892 and 1920 Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher surveyed 45 married women on varied aspects of their intimate life, including sexual attitudes and behavior. Besides requesting demographic information about the occupation, health, or education of the respondent and her parents, Mosher questioned women about their knowledge of sex, frequency of sexual intercourse, whether sex is necessary, agreeable, or pleasurable, the purpose of sex, birth control, preferred or ideal sex habits, and much more. survey, entitled Statistical Study of the Marriage of Forty-Seven Women, was never completed or published by Dr. Mosher. It was deposited among her unpublished papers at the Stanford University archives. Thanks to the fine editorial work of James Mahood and Kristine Wenburg, we have available, in a highly readable form, perhaps the only sex survey of women in the nineteenth century.1 Since its initial discovery by Carl Degler in 1973 and its publication in 1980, the Mosher survey has become a crucial document in the on-going debate over Victorian sexuality. In particular, it has been appealed to by revisionist historians in their effort to alter our conception of Victorian sexuality. editors of the Mosher survey, for example, claim that it contradicts the popular stereotype of the passionless, prudish Victorian female. The Victorian women interviewed by Mosher relished sex, claimed higher rates of orgasm than women reported in a survey conducted in 1972. There is little evidence here of Victorian prudery.2 editors conclude that this pioneering document... helps dispel persistent myths of Victorian women's sexuality. 3 Carl Degler and Peter Gay have seized upon the Mosher survey further to press for their particular revisionist interpretations. Although Degler acknowledges that these women were not entirely typical in that they were highly educated, white, largely from the North and all married, they are, he suggests, more or less, representatives of middle-class or upper-middle-class white Victorian women. Moreover, the fact that 70 per cent of these women were born before 1870 ? and therefore were formed under the full impact of Victorian culture ? makes this document crucial in the debate over middle-class women's sexuality in the nineteenth century. Degler finds in the Mosher survey unequivocal support for his contention that, despite the ideology of female passionlessness promoted by the popular medical advice literature, the reality was that women acknowledged