In such an atmosphere, it is clear, a woman who wished to pursue a vigorous, uninhibited sex life could not hope for much encouragement from the developing American culture. J. Marion Sims, the 19thcentury physician who is considered to be the father of gynecology, regarded sexual intercourse as a mechanical process whose sole purpose was to conceive children. It was essential that the man accomplish penetration and orgasm, but the woman's experience was irrelevant. In considering treatment for women afflicted with vaginismus — spasmodic contracttion of the vagina so powerful as to prohibit entry by the male — Sims looked approvingly on the practice of anesthetizing the woman to make possible a successful sexual experience for her husband. And Dr. Augustus Kinsley Gardner, an admirer of both Todd and Sims, believed, according to Barker‐Benfield, that “in her deified form woman did not have feelings of sensuality and appetite and did not take pleasure In copulation: ‘Sensuality,’ Gardner said was ‘unusual in the sex.’ ... He warned that an aroused

Sexual Revolution effects on the man with whom she was copulating.”

It is easy to speculate that behind all of these attitudes lay a set of masculine fears and insecurities that were far more elemental than those generated by the American man's awareness of his new political and social tasks. The fearof asexually aroused woman as corrupting, distracting, ennervating and wasteful of a man's precious sperm seemed to be a way of coping with a simple and devasvastating fact of life: A man's capacity for orgasm is limited, while a woman's is not. It is interesting that Gardner was ready to hint at this possibility in his popular book “Conjugal Sins.” He did so by quoting a French expert, ClaudeFrancois Lallemand: “To the man there is the limitation of a physical capability which no stimulants from within or without can goad to further excess. The erethism of woman has no boundary,” “That physiological fact,” BarkerBenfield declares, “could take on a horrifying meaning to men already obsessed with female power and the limitations of their own spermatic

It is perhaps necessary to understand this in order to understand the more extreme, if not sinister, behavior of Dr. Sims and his early colleagues in gynecology. In the second half of the 19th century, they sought to promote the theory that female sexual arousal was harmful to society, and that a woman's sexual organs were the sites of many of her physical and psychological problems. by performing surgeries in the appropriate places. Clitoridectomy—removal of the clitoris — and circumcision removal of the clitoral hood—were performed to keep women from masturbating, a practice considered dangerous because it could release a woman's uncontrollable and

These masculine perceptions of women and sex, accepted by many women and endorsed, tacitly or otherwise, by the controlling forces in American culture, proved to be remarkably durable over the years. In the early 1900's they were reflected in the belief that gentlemen should prefer women who were dainty, delicate, even frigid, and that sensuous women should be viewed with contempt.

In “Ragtime,” E.L. Doctor

Sexual Revolution ow's evocative novel of America at the turn of the century, the father, a proper New York gentleman, finds himself appalled at the free sexual behavior of Eskimo women he encounters while on an expedition to the North Pole. “One day Father came upon a couple in the act of intercourse and was shocked to see the wife thrusting her hips upwards to the thrusts of her husband. . . . It stunned him that she could react this way. This filthy, toothless Esquimo woman. . . He thought of Mother's fastidiousness, her grooming and her intelligence, and found himself resenting this primitive woman's claim the

A 1930's version can be seen in the recollections of “Monette,” a Southern woman who attended Southern Louisiana University, and who is quoted in “Making Do: How Women Survived the ‘30's” by Jeanne Westin.

“Several of the boys would rent a studio and we'd go over after football games 3n double or triple dates. Now don't get the idea that this was a group sex thing.. . .