Medicine: 5,940 Women

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Probably the Gibson Girl never heard of "petting" either, but if she was a late model (born in the 1890s and therefore included in Kinsey's sample), the chances are four out of five that she indulged in it under another name. Says Kinsey: "Many consider petting an invention of modern American youth—the byproduct of an effete and morally degenerate . . . culture. It is taken by some to reflect the sort of moral bankruptcy which must lead to the collapse of any civilization. Older generations did, however, engage in flirting, flirtage, courting, bundling, spooning, mugging, smooching, larking, sparking . . ." But the late Gibson Girls rarely went further. If their testimony to Kinsey held back nothing, only one out of seven unmarried women born in the '905 had sexual intercourse by age 25, though the proportion jumped to two out of five by age 40.

Once married, there was a four-to-one chance that the girl who had been raised under Queen Victoria's long shadow would remain faithful to her husband, no matter how often he might be unfaithful to her. The double standard was still secure.

Then came the big change.

It happened, according to Kinsey's figures. around the end of World War I. The causes were various. Kinsey cites the writings of Havelock Ellis, one of the first scientists to combine psychology and biology, and Sigmund Freud, who put the spotlight on sex as a cause of human behavior. Of more immediate effect on the U.S. was the draft Army, which threw together men from all walks of life and exposed 2,000,000 of them, overseas, to standards more sophisticated than their own. When they came home, they found U.S. women largely emancipated and close to winning the vote. There were other causes to which Kinsey pays little or no heed. One was Prohibition, which helped destroy respect for law and. indirectly, for all authority (and which also taught women to drink). Another was the widespread breakdown of formal religion. Perhaps at the root of all the causes was the inevitable reaction against the prim Victorian era, which itself was not nearly so safe & sound as it appeared. For beneath its placid surface, a social and intellectual revolution had long been rumbling, which enshrined science and progress as twin gods and established a view of man as a creature governed more by "environment" than by preordained morality.

By the mid-1920s. the new century seemed to be talking (and worrying) more about sex than previous ages. "Frankness" became a respectable pose for cocktail parties, parent-teachers' meetings and literature. The novelists—Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, and later Erskine Caldwell and Faulkner—were blatantly detailed, and behind them stood the anthropologists and psychoanalysts with their case histories. But the generation still had no Kinsey. It was left to him to clothe the subject in the sober, convincing, guaranteed-to-be-scientific garb of statistics.

Frigidity. When the Gibson Girls' daughters arrived on the scene, cloche-hatted flappers, short-skirted and prattling about repressions, this is what happened to the sex lives of U.S. women, according to Kinsey: