Dr. Katharine Bement Davis: From Sex Cop to Sexologist

100 Years Ago, Dr. Davis and 2,200 Respectable Women Shocked America

Dr. Katharine Bement Davis. You’ve probably never heard of her. Dr. Alfred Kinsey. Chances are good you’ve heard of him and possibly even seen a movie about him and his scandalous work. Yet, Kinsey’s work would have been hampered had John D. Rockefeller Jr. not asked Davis to take charge of the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH) in 1917.

As unnerving as the agency name sounds, it is accurate on both a physical and moral level. In addition to a commitment to stamp out venereal disease, it hoped to do the same with sex work, most specifically prostitution. As one of the few American women with a Ph.D. in 1901, the economics expert became a social worker, then referred to as “charities and corrections.” It was Davis’s employment as the first director of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills that had made her an ideal candidate for the BSH.

The fledgling director soon found that nearly half of her confined charges were convicted of prostitution. During her 12 years with the prisoners, she studied their behavior and heard their stories. She wasn’t impressed and concluded that most of them were “immoral women.” Because of this, she did her best to regulate their sexuality. She was the perfect choice to lead Rockefeller’s innovative new private agency.

Three years later, her experiences during encouraging WW I soldiers and everyday citizens to use prophylactics and learn about VD if they could not be chaste, led her to realize her earlier conclusions were wrong. It wasn’t that the prostitutes she’d met necessarily lacked morals. What they lacked was sexual information. She had long noticed that men were encouraged to go out and sow their wild oats while the women they sowed them with faced harsh condemnation if they were found out.

Part of the problem, she came to realize after her groundbreaking survey, was that women received nearly no education regarding sex. Not even enough to understand or prepare for menstruation and entirely ignorant about female orgasms. The topic of sex was effectively forbidden when unmarried women were concerned. To introduce the subject was vulgar and guaranteed to sully a sweet virgin’s mind and morals. Even married women, Davis came to learn, entered the legally bonded state of matrimony with only half reporting that they felt prepared for marital sex.

After including unmarried women, the numbers didn’t get better. Fewer than one-third of all women involved with the study reported that they had not been told anything about sex by their parents. According to Davis’s book Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, one respondent said that before marriage, she not only didn’t know how women got pregnant, but she also had no idea what was happening when she had her first period. “I naturally thought I was bleeding to death,” she told Davis. She was not alone in her ignorance and dangerous innocence. Likewise, her deep feelings of shame about the sin she committed by even thinking about her own sexual pleasure.

And thus, Davis unexpectedly found herself joining what would become the first sexual revolution in the United States alongside contraception activists Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. Women admitted to her that they worried that their sexual thoughts and feelings were “something to be shunned like the devil.” As she went through the questionnaires, she felt confirmed in her 1920 decision to alter her approach to the study of female sexuality. After extensive exposure to incarcerated prostitutes, she had wanted to learn about the sex lives of “normal” women.

Some scoffed at her request, viewing it as not being “of sufficient scientific value to be worthwhile.” After all, conventional wisdom at the time was clear, respectable women neither experienced sexual desire, nor should they. Indeed, their only reason for engaging in intercourse was to keep their husbands happy and produce children. Nonetheless, philanthropist Rockefeller put his support behind Davis and her research. What he did not support was her continued employment at the BSH. Instead of working to suppress prostitution, her focus had moved beyond the agency’s purpose.

Already firmly dedicated to helping bring American’s “a sane outlook on all matters pertaining to sex,” the 68-year-old set out to learn what “the sex life of normal women” was like. Unlike her previous studies and those of others, Davis’s large-scale research would not center around institutionalized women whose “pathological side” could be observed without censure. This time, she vowed to enter what she called “scientifically an unexplored country,” and learn what “the woman who is not pathological mentally or physically” did or wished she could do in her private erotic life.

Like today, the women of 100 years ago lived in a culture that was saturated with sex in ways previous generations had not. The advent of the automobile afforded young adults unheard of amounts of privacy and freedom to engage in forbidden activities. Hemlines rose, stockings rolled, long hair was cut short, and hip young women called themselves “flappers.” Film and stage were awash with sexy actresses, beauty contests included competitors in bathing suits and short skirts. The times, the manners, and the morals, they were a’changin’.

In 1921 she and some male professors and physicians created the National Research Council’s Committee for Research of the Problems of Sex. Problems began immediately, since Davis was dedicated to pursuing objective, nonjudgmental methods to study sexuality. Her male colleagues and Rockefeller did not share her enthusiasm for her methodology or her preferred subject. After a decade of trying, her male co-workers achieved their goal; to see her fired.

In some ways, University of Chicago economics doctorate turned sexologist Davis had arrived at the perfect time. This new breed of woman was already chafing at the silence that was wrapped around sexual matters, no matter how important they were. Between 1921 and 1923, Davis solicited information from “women of good standing in the community” via a comprehensive series of questions. All told, Davis queried 1,000 married and 1,200 unmarried women, mostly white, mostly monied, and mostly well-educated.

While the demographics were certainly not definitive of American women, let alone women globally, the responses allowed Davis to present female sexuality in a strikingly different way than before. With more than 10,000 pages of handwritten replies, she produced a 400-page book packed with statistics and anonymous first-person accounts in what was the first ever major study of everyday women’s sexuality.

In her 1929 book, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, Davis addressed topics that had previously been avoided due to legality and propriety. Sex education, sex practices, birth control, abortion, masturbation, and same-sex relationships, all things actively outlawed or vigorously denounced by moral authorities. Even with that going against them, an impressive number of women admitted having violated these crimes against man and God. Why? Because, contrary to all official communications, even in the early 1920s, women liked sex.

Frankly, the results were astonishing, not just to a deeply repressed America and its respectable researchers, but to the country’s women and the men that were or hoped to be involved with. Nearly half of the single ladies and one-third of the married ones disclosed that at some point they had engaged in “intense emotional relationships” with other women. About half of those relationships included sexual intimacy. At the time, homosexual acts were criminalized on the state level and condemned as deviant, which makes the number of positive admissions especially impressive.

When the married respondents weren’t having lesbian relationships, three-quarters of them used contraception. Despite the stigma against birth control, some state laws allowed doctors to prescribe diaphragms for health reasons. With only this available to prevent an untimely pregnancy, at least one out of 10 women found themselves desperate enough to risk their health and freedom by seeking an abortion. At that time, abortion was illegal in every state.

Further shattering the illusion of female asexuality was the revelation that almost 65-percent of unmarried and more than 40 percent of unmarried women admitted to masturbating. At the time, both doctors and pastors agreed that self-stimulation was dangerous and wicked. Because of this influence, Davis concluded that the actual number of sexual behaviors were probably higher than reported due to some of the participants’ concern of being judged or condemned.

Sadly, history has largely shoved Davis and her research aside. Sexism was alive and thriving in the 1920s and her two male fellow-researchers took full advantage of that. They had wanted the BSH to focus less on human sexuality and more on criminality. With Davis gone, that was accomplished. It wasn’t until 1941 that it found a sexologist it wanted to fund. That sexologist was Dr. Alfred Kinsey. In 1956, one of her male former BSH colleagues wrote a biography of Rockefeller. All the males who worked at the Bureau received high praise. Davis was not mentioned.

Davis is not the only female sex researcher whose work has been deemed of no value despite the fact it was groundbreaking and demonstrated that the sexuality of the average adult is a valid subject for honest and reality-based study. She constantly needed to announce her professional credentials and title because men either did not expect her to have them or refused to acknowledge them. Her pay was considerably lower than her less-qualified male co-workers. Rockefeller insists on calling her “Miss Davis” instead of Dr. Katharine Bement Davis.

Despite all the barriers that she encountered, Davis remained dedicated to learning what women are truly like, teaching them about their bodies, how they function, and their sexuality. She even explained what an orgasm was since so few of them had personal experience. Even 100 years later, there exists what is called an “orgasm gap” between men and women, largely due to the persistence of prioritizing male sexual pleasure over that of women.

But ignore all of that and remember, Dr. Katharine Bement Davis was a sex research pioneer. During a time when America didn’t want to believe it, she proved that “normal” women have “natural sex feelings,” that they crave sex and, when done properly, they enjoy it.