The Sexes: A Sex Poll (1892-1920)

Sex surveys, it turns out, are nothing new. Between 1892 and 1920, 47 middle-class American women answered an explicit questionnaire passed around by a Stanford researcher, physician and biologist, Clelia Duel Mosher. This spring Stanford Historian Carl Degler, while doing research on women's history, unearthed the surprisingly unrestrained 650-page document in the Stanford library.

"The frankness of the answers is remarkable," Degler said last week, "when we note that 70% of the women who filled out the questionnaire were born before 1870 and 25% before the Civil War." Indeed, the women responded without...

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