The first data go back to 1892. In her brief introduction to the survey, Mosher explained that she designed the questionnaire when, as a junior at the University of Wisconsin, she was asked to discuss the “marital relation” before the Mothers Club. Her lecture was based on forms returned by the club members, who were mostly faculty wives. (That these women agreed to fill out such a revealing questionnaire is intriguing, but no more so than the puzzle of why they asked an unmarried college girl, even one of twenty-eight, to address them about marriage in the first place.) Mosher continued the survey sporadically for nearly thirty years after leaving Wisconsin, adding the responses of women from her private practice and from Stanford.

She sought the information so that she could better advise young women who came to her for help. Unmarried herself, but justifiably suspicious of material in marriage manuals written mostly by men, she was certain that married women themselves would be the best source of accurate information. In the brief introduction she says the survey gave “the investigator a priceless knowledge for the practicing physician and teacher; a background sufficiently broad to avoid prejudice in her work with woman.”

The material gives no clues as to who these women were or how she chose them. Undoubtedly some simply refused to answer such personal questions, so in this sense Mosher’s subjects, like Kinsey’s and Bite’s, were self-selected. Not all of them answered the questionnaires at the same time. Of the thirty-six which are dated, seventeen were completed prior to 1900, fourteen between 1913 and 1917, and five in 1920. Only one respondent was born after 1890. Thirty-three were, like Mosher, born before 1870, and of these seventeen were born before the Civil War. These, then, were largely women who grew up, married, and raised children in the nineteenth century.

Fortunately Mosher asked her subjects enough questions about place of birth and education to permit speculation about their social origins. Geographically, the women were fairly representative of late-nineteenth-century America. Educationally, they decidedly were not. Eighty-one per cent of those whose education is given had attended college or normal school, and the remainder had attended at least secondary school—this at a time when most people, male or female, did not even attend secondary school. Their alma maters

When asked about their work experience before marriage (Mosher assumed none worked after), thirty of the thirty-eight women who responded had worked. Not surprisingly, in view of the limited job opportunities open to women at that time, twenty-seven had been teachers. (The other three were a librarian, an accountant, and a bookbinder. ) These women were principally daughters of the upper-middle class.

The nine-page questionnaire that confronted Mosher’s subjects contained twenty-five multi-part questions, many of which sought genealogical and medical information, such as whether the respondent’s husband smoked, whether her mother found menopause difficult, and whether her grandparents were native-born. The second half of the survey, however, turned to matters of sex. Many questions required only a simple yes or no, but many women were moved to add comments providing detailed glimpses into their intimate lives—and what emerges is a study of the Victorian “marriage relation. ” Mosher was no doubt correct in claiming that such detail could only have been elicited by another woman.

The first of the sex questions asked, “What knowledge of sexual physiology had you before marriage? How did you obtain it?” Eleven women claimed they knew a great deal about sex before marriage. They had learned it, they wrote, from books, courses, friends, and relatives. One woman learned the facts of life from “medical texts, watching farm animals, and also from very frank talks with my mother.” Thirteen said they had some knowledge of sex. Declining to give her sources, one woman added defensively, “learned everything I knew from good sources and in a pure and sacred way. ” The majority, however, said that they had known little or nothing: “Not one thing,” said one woman emphatically. Another admitted, “I was so innocent of the matter that until I was 18,1 did not know the origin of babies.”

How did these naive Victorians fare in marriage? Mosher began her probe by asking them whether they “habitually” shared a bed with their husbands. About two-thirds of these women, some married as long as twenty-eight years, did sleep with their spouses. Some did so enthusiastically: “The first year I had separate beds, believing that was the right thing. I abandoned it entirely before the end of the year.” One wife did so “because I like to be near him,” and, she added, for “economic reasons.” Some did so reluctantly: “Personally, I prefer to sleep alone always. ” The remainder slept alone. One woman listed three reasons why she preferred that arrangement: “1. more comfortable, 2. more wholesome, 3. to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.”

Temptation? The stereotype of the Victorian woman leaves no room for sexual desire. Yet thirty-five of the forty-four women who answered the question said they felt desire for sexual intercourse. Asked at what time of month she most desired intercourse, one woman chided: “It has

Even more surprising is these women’s testimony to orgasmic experience. Mosher did not ask whether they ever had an orgasm but “Do you always have a venereal orgasm?”—thus assuming that orgasm was to be expected. While a few women did not answer and five wrote only “no,” leaving open the possibility that they occasionally experienced orgasm, thirty-four women indicated that they did experience it.

From these answers, Mosher concluded that one source of sexual maladjustment in marriage might occur at first intercourse. Coming to marriage so innocent of sexual matters, misunderstandings were bound to occur. One problem, she believed, might be “physical terror though mental consent.” Indeed, one woman reported that the sudden introduction to sex was such a shock that she “ran away after one month of marriage. [Was] sent back by parents and told to behave.” Apparently as an afterthought, Mosher asked twelve women how many days after their wedding ceremony had first intercourse taken place. Six women said that first intercourse took place within the first three days; one said “immediately.” Six said from ten days to one year after the ceremony.

Mosher also recognized that women’s slower sexual reaction time could lead to maladjustment if not understood. Some of her subjects recognized it, too. One woman reported that for years sex had been distasteful to her because of her “slow reaction,” but “orgasm [occurs] if time is taken.” Another, referring to differences in reaction time, complained, “Men have not been properly trained.” For some, failure to reach orgasm was devastating. The woman cognizant of her “slow reaction” reported, “When no orgasm, takes days to recover.” Another described the absence of orgasm as “bad, even disastrous, nervewracking,—unbalancing, if such conditions continued for any length of time.” One woman said its absence was “depressing and revolting,” and described orgasm, which she almost always reached, as a “sense of absolute physical harmony.” Others spoke of the “quiet” and “calmness” which followed. One woman described it as a “general sense of well being, contentment, and regard for husband.” “This is true, Doctor,” she added earnestly.

The most detailed and personal responses were elicited by a series of questions on the “true purpose of intercourse.” Mosher asked whether intercourse was a necessity, or whether its purpose was pleasure, reproduction, or “other.” (Under “other,” one woman claimed, “I have taken it as a sedative.”) Of those who responded, nine believed that intercourse was a necessity for men; thirteen claimed it was a necessity for both sexes; and the remaining fifteen believed it was a necessity to neither. Though a few women felt that reproduction was the only acceptable reason for intercourse, and thirty marked reproduction as the primary purpose, twenty-four women believed firmly that the pleasure exchanged was a worthy

Since so many women believed that pleasure alone was a legitimate reason for intercourse, Mosher suspected that they must use some sort of contraceptive and she included a question on this subject. At least thirty women used some method of birth control. Even a mother who declared that marriage without desire for children amounted to legalized prostitution practiced withdrawal. Still, she probably would have disapproved strongly of the young wife, married one year, who had no children and, by using “clear water in a syringe,” obviously hoped to remain childless, at least for a while. Withdrawal and “timing” ranked high as methods of birth control, but most women preferred douching. Hot water, ice water, tepid water, alcohol, sulphate of zinc, and carbonated water had their adherents. Several women’s husbands used a “male sheath.” Two women used a “rubber cap over the uterus,” and one woman used cocoa butter—for what, she didn’t say.

While most of the women Mosher surveyed found sexual expression to be normal and natural, sometimes even a joy, not all were free of guilt. One woman, who admitted she desired intercourse and experienced orgasm, noted that sexual relations were “apparently a necessity for the average person”; and “superior individuals,” with whom she felt she could not be classed, could be “independent of sex relations with no evident ill results.” Even more revealing was the young woman, married only a year, who wrote, “As I personally see it, I think a habit of intercourse once a month if both desire would be as much of an ideal as I now have.” She crossed this out, however, and wrote beneath it, “Since writing the above, I have become convinced that the ideal would be to have no intercourse except for reproduction, but it is often hard to live up to such an ideal.”

Mosher’s own views on the matter of guilt are suggested in her brief conclusions. She was convinced that women had every right to experience and expect pleasure from sex, and she had little patience with marital guides that advised them otherwise. Blaming such misinformation for some women’s failure to adjust to marriage, she charged that “too often

The final question which faced each subject asked, “What, to you, would be the ideal habit?” Mosher had asked earlier about their actual habits of intercourse, so any discrepancies are visible. One woman’s ideal was “once a month, when both are well . and in the day light.” In reality, this woman reported having intercourse three or four times a week and found it “delightful.” One forty-seven-year-old woman said that her ideal was: “Now, at my time of life, never. In the prime of life, for a man twice a week, for a woman twice a month.” How a husband and wife were to resolve this discrepancy wasn’t stated. Another older woman also said that her ideal was no intercourse at all, and claimed that even as a young woman she tried to avoid it. She was, perhaps understandably, hostile to intercourse: early in her marriage, her doctor husband had become addicted to morphine and, when under its influence, had forced her to have intercourse at least once a night.

Several postmenopausal women still enjoyed and desired intercourse. The only respondent who was divorced and remarried testified in 1913, at age fifty-three, four years after menopause, that “although my passionate feeling has declined somewhat and the orgasm does not always occur, intercourse is still agreeable to me. ” Remarried at age forty-six to an “unusually considerate man,” this very happy, childless woman advocated an ideal habit of “perhaps twice a month.”

Clelia Mosher demonstrated in her small, pioneering survey that despite the conflicting warnings of the marriage manuals of the Victorian age, most of the women she studied engaged in sex with neither reluctance nor distaste. Indeed, many of them frankly acknowledged their desire for intercourse and orgasm. In the face of their disregard of the repressive sexual code of their era, as Degler noted, these women offer encouraging proof of humankind’s essential common sense.

For her own part Clelia Mosher paid a price for her advanced views. That price was intense loneliness, particularly after her mother died. The personal papers that exist from her years of middle age reveal an introspective and pathetically lonely woman. She was caught between the practical nature of her work and an extreme romanticism that she carefully concealed. The same woman who marched resolutely across the Stanford campus, with perfect posture and sensible clothing, had sentimental dreams and fears that she poured out into a notebook. She wrote longingly of the friendships which sustained other women. There was a type of platonic friendship, she believed, that “supplies the working woman and compensates her for what she has missed in not marrying but cannot make up for her lost motherhood. ” Perhaps because of the intensity of her late-blooming career, Mosher had no such friend, and as she grew older she felt this lack more keenly.

At age fifty-two she wrote poignantly: “I am

Her yearning becomes increasingly forlorn: “I think sometimes of some particular friend and I feel she understands as no one else does what is in my mind … then some day comes when I realize that what this friend is, does, feels is utterly foreign. I have imbued her with thoughts that have been in my mind, not hers, sympathies which have grown out of my desire for understanding … and with deep depression I realize she is the outward semblance of a creature of my imagination.”

A series of increasingly intimate letters suggests that Mosher finally discovered the friend she longed for. The painful truth, however, slowly dawns—these letters were written to no one. All doubts disappear in March, 1919, when Mosher begins to address them “To you, my friend who does not exist.”

Over the next few years, this invented companion became the only ear for Mosher’s troubles. The letters are filled with her quotidian difficulties, as well as her meditations and imaginative—and sensual—descriptions of nature. The letters make it clear that Mosher knew what she was doing. She even admitted to feeling self-conscious about the “correspondence,” but stated frankly, “I get a sense of companionship and you are spared the boredom of reading them. ”

On April 16,1926, she wrote her “friend”: “I have given up ever finding you. I have tried out all my friends and they have not measured up to my dreams. They still are friends, and their friendships give joy and richness to my life but I cannot share my dreamland with them. I wander alone there and show the world my prose, my common sense. But I keep normal and wholesome by going ever alone in this land of dreams. It would not take long to be as drab as most of my contemporaries were it not for this land of dreams.”

By 1926 Mosher seems to have resolved many of her problems. As retirement approached, she threw herself into the project of her dream house, which was a “thrill and joy” for her. She had hopes that its peace and beauty, and her happiness there, would inspire young women who needed help in holding on to their intellectual aspirations.

In October of 1926, contemplating moving in, she looked forward with hope: “Can one go on being a balanced, sane person with only the casual companionship of one’s acquaintances, or is a certain give and take of daily companionship necessary to keep one at one’s best: Who knows? Anyway, I am going to try it.… I look forward joyously to my solitary future, rich in the beauty of my

On the whole, Mosher seems to have resolved her problems. Her papers from 1932 include the beginning of an autobiography to be called The Autobiography of a Happy Old Woman . In that year, too, she wrote a joyful and lyrical description of the special beauty of that California spring.

The wide gulf between Clelia Mosher’s inner self and the face she presented to the world is striking. The lonely romantic of these letters is the same efficient, dedicated woman who, as doctor and researcher, pioneered the destruction of sexual myths, celebrated the emotional and physical strength of women, and left us with a remarkable survey of Victorian sexuality.