The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [185]
And the most “emancipated” women, women educated beyond college for professional careers, showed a far greater capacity for complete sexual enjoyment, full orgasm, than the rest. Contrary to the feminine mystique, the Kinsey figures showed that the more educated the woman, the more likely she was to enjoy full sexual orgasm more often, and the less likely to be frigid. The greater sexual enjoyment of women who had completed college, compared to those who had not gone beyond grade school or high school, and the even greater sexual enjoyment of women who had gone beyond college into higher professional training showed up from the first year of marriage, and continued to show up in the fifth, tenth, and fifteenth years of marriage. While Kinsey found only one American woman in ten who had never experienced sexual orgasm, the majority of women he interviewed did not experience it completely, all or almost all of the time—except for those women who were educated beyond college. The Kinsey figures also showed that women who married before twenty were least likely to experience sexual orgasm, and were likely to enjoy it less frequently in or out of marriage, though they started sexual intercourse five or six years earlier than women who finished college or graduate school.
While the Kinsey data showed that over the years “a distinctly higher proportion of the better educated females, in contrast to the grade school and high school females, had actually reached orgasm in a higher percentage of their marital coitus,” the increased enjoyment of sex did not, for the most part, mean an increased incidence of it, in the woman’s life. On the whole, there was a slight trend in the opposite direction. And that increase in extramarital sex was less marked with professionally trained women.27
Perhaps something about the supposedly “unfeminine” strength, or self-realization achieved by women educated for professional careers enabled them to enjoy greater sexual fulfillment in their marriages than other women—as measured by the orgasm—and thus less likely to seek it outside of marriage. Or perhaps they simply had less need to seek status, achievement, or identity in sex. The relationship between woman’s sexual fulfillment and self-realization indicated by Kinsey’s findings is underlined by the fact that, as many critics have pointed out, Kinsey’s sample was over-representative of professional women, college graduates, women with unusually high “dominance” or strength of self. Kinsey’s sample underrepresented the “typical” American housewife who devotes her life to husband, home and children; it underrepresented women with little education; because of its use of volunteers, it underrepresented the kind of passive, submissive, conformist women whom Maslow found to be incapable of sexual enjoyment.28 The increase in sexual fulfillment and decrease in frigidity which Kinsey found during the decades after women’s emancipation may not have been felt by the “average” American housewife as much as by this minority of women who directly experienced emancipation through education and participation in the professions. Nevertheless, the decrease in frigidity was so dramatic in that large, if unrepresentative, sample of nearly 6,000 women, that even Kinsey’s critics found it significant.
It was hardly an accident that this increase in woman’s sexual fulfillment accompanied her progress to equal participation in the rights, education, work, and decisions of American society. The coincidental sexual emancipation of American men—the lifting of the veil of contempt and degradation from sexual intercourse—was surely related to the American male’s new regard for the American