By: Kiara Bell
Clelia
Mosher was a Stanford professor who surveyed women throughout the late
eighteenth century on their sexual behavior.[1]
Mosher was born in Albany, New York in 1863 and died in 1940. Unfortunately,
when she had passed away, her work and discoveries had yet to be published.
Mosher was the daughter of a doctor who introduced her to the world of physiology. Her father brought her along during on his rounds and she began to fall in love with the medical world. After discovering this new profound love for physiology, her dream took a few steps back when her father forbade her from going to college. He was a supporter of the Spencerian notion, which stated the body was a closed energy system and if women were to go to school and get an education, it would mislead a necessary amount of energy from the uterus to the brain and would inhibit the ability for a woman to reproduce.[2] So, instead of allowing her to take charge and follow her dreams, he set her up in a florist shop. I find that incredibly sexist, as most things were back then, and degrading.
On the bright side, when Clelia Mosher was 25, she saved
enough money to enroll at Wellesley College. Later, she transferred to the
University of Wisconsin her junior year and finally to Stanford University for
her senior year in college.[3] In
which she later returned to become a part of the Stanford faculty as an
associate professor. While she was a student at the University of Wisconsin,
she created a survey and began collecting data based on the sexual attitudes
and habits of women. She took this survey over a twenty-year span and had about
45 profiles in all. There were various responses to the survey, some of them
women interviewed admitted they enjoyed and desired having sex while others
disagreed. Of the 45 profiles, 35 of the women reported said they desired sex;
34 reported having had orgasms; 24 of them admitted that having sex for
pleasure was the main reason they participated in it; and about three-fourths of the
women said they engaged in sex at least once a week.[4] Mosher’s
research disproved many assumptions of women’s sexuality during the Victorian
Era.
After finding out that the majority of Mosher’s research in college was focused on women’s health issues such as: female physiology, hygiene, and sexual attitudes, I was surprised to see that Mosher was socially awkward and had no male suitors or even friends.[5] Clelia Mosher only had imaginary friends to whom she would write letters to, she was a brilliant yet odd scientist who yearned for intimacy and relationships.
Although Mosher passed
away before she got the chance to publish her findings, a Stanford historian
named, Carl Degler, discovered her statistics on menstruation, letters, and all
of her surveys and made them public in 1974. She provided historians all around
with the truth of how women viewed sex during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
[1] Platoni, Kara. "The Sex
Scholar." Stanford Alumni, March 2010.
https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29954
(accessed February 25, 2014).
[2] James. ABC News, "Victorian
Women Liked Sex, Says Early Survey." Last modified April 12, 2010.
Accessed February 27, 2014.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/victorian-women-sex-americas-dr-ruth/story?id=10334865&page=2.
[3] The
Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions,
"Clelia Duel Mosher Collection." Accessed February 27, 2014.
http://www.medicalarchives.jhmi.edu/papers/mosher.html.
[4] James.
ABC News, "Victorian Women Liked Sex, Says Early Survey." Last
modified April 12, 2010. Accessed February 27, 2014.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/victorian-women-sex-americas-dr-ruth/story?id=10334865&page=2.
[5] James.
ABC News, "Victorian Women Liked Sex, Says Early Survey." Last
modified April 12, 2010. Accessed February 27, 2014. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/victorian-women-sex-americas-dr-ruth/story?id=10334865&page=2.
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