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By Root 2003 0

by a dog becomes dog, and hamburger eaten by a human becomes human. The facts of the GI’s neurosis became, in the 1940’s, “proof” that American women had been seduced from feminine fulfillment by an education geared to career, independence, equality with men, “self-realization at any cost”—even though most of these frustrated women were simply housewives. By some fascinating paradox, the massive evidence of psychological damage done to boys and girls by frustrated mothers who devoted all their days to filling children’s needs was twisted by the feminine mystique to a summons to the new generation of girls to go back home and devote their days to filling children’s needs.

Nothing made that hamburger more palatable than the early Kinsey figures which showed that sexual frustration in women was related to their education. Chewed and rechewed was the horrendous fact that between 50 and 85 per cent of the college women polled had never experienced sexual orgasm, while less than one-fifth of high-school educated women reported the same problem. As Modern Woman: The Lost Sex interpreted these early Kinsey returns:

Among women with a grade school education or less, complete failure to achieve orgasm diminished toward the vanishing point. Dr. Kinsey and his colleagues reported that practically 100% full orgastic reaction had been found among uneducated Negro women…. The psychosexual rule that begins to take form, then, is this: the more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe…6

Nearly a decade went by before publication of the full Kinsey report on women, which completely contradicted those earlier findings. How many women realize, even now, that Kinsey’s 5,940 case histories of American women showed that the number of females reaching orgasm in marriage, and the number of females reaching orgasm nearly 100 per cent of the time, was related to education, but the more educated the woman, the greater chance of sexual fulfillment. The woman with only a grade-school education was more likely never to experience orgasm, while the woman who finished college, and who went on to graduate or professional school, was far more likely to achieve full orgasm nearly 100 per cent of the time. In Kinsey’s words:

We found that the number of females reaching orgasm within any five-year period was rather distinctly higher among those with upper educational backgrounds…. In every period of marriage, from the first until at least the fifteenth year, a larger number of the females in the sample who had more limited educational backgrounds had completely failed to respond to orgasm in their marital coitus, and a small number of the better educated females had so completely failed….

These data are not in accord with a preliminary, unpublished calculation which we made some years ago. On the basis of a smaller sample, and on the basis of a less adequate method of calculation, we seemed to find a larger number of the females of the lower educational levels responding to orgasm in the marital coitus. These data now need correction…7

But the mystique nourished by the early incorrect figures was not so easily corrected.

And then there were the frightening figures and case histories of children abandoned and rejected because their mothers worked. How many women realize, even now, that the babies in those publicized cases, who withered away from lack of maternal affection, were not the children of educated, middle-class mothers who left them in others’ care certain hours of the day to practice a profession or write a poem, or fight a political battle—but truly abandoned children: foundlings often deserted at birth by unwed mothers and drunken fathers, children who never had a home or tender loving care. Headlines were made by any study which implied that working mothers were responsible for juvenile delinquency, school difficulties or emotional disturbance in their children. Recently a psychologist, Dr. Lois Meek Stolz, of Stanford University, analyzed all the evidence from such studies.