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By Root 2110 0

woman as an equal, a person like himself, and not just a sexual object. Evidently, the further women progressed from that state, the more sex became an act of human intercourse rather than a dirty joke to men; and the more women were able to love men, rather than submit, in passive distaste, to their sexual desire. In fact, the feminine mystique itself—with its acknowledgement of woman as subject and not just object of the sexual act, and its assumption that her active, willing participation was essential to man’s pleasure—could not have come without the emancipation of women to human equality. As the early feminists foresaw, women’s rights did indeed promote greater sexual fulfillment, for men and women.

Other studies also showed that education and independence increased the American woman’s ability to enjoy a sexual relationship with a man, and thus to affirm more fully her own sexual nature as a woman. Repeated reports, before and after Kinsey, showed college-educated women to have a much lower than average divorce rate. More specifically, a massive and famous sociological study by Ernest W. Burgess and Leonard S. Cottrell indicated that women’s chances of happiness in marriage increased as their career preparation increased—with teachers, professional nurses, women doctors, and lawyers showing fewer unhappy marriages than any other group of women. These women were more likely to enjoy happiness in marriage than women who held skilled office positions, who in turn, had happier marriages than women who had not worked before marriage, or who had no vocational ambition, or who worked at a job that was not in accordance with their own ambitions, or whose only work training or experience was domestic or unskilled. In fact, the higher the woman’s income at the time of her marriage, the more probable her married happiness. As the sociologists put it:

Apparently in the case of wives, the traits that make for success in the business world as measured by monthly income are the traits that make for success in marriage. The point, of course, may be made that income indirectly measures education since the amount of educational training influences income.29

Among 526 couples, less than 10 per cent showed “low” marital adjustment where the wife had been employed seven or more years, had completed college or professional training, and had not married before twenty-two. Where wives had been educated beyond college, less than 5 per cent of marriages scored “low” in happiness. The following table shows the relationship between the marriage and the educational achievement of the wife.

Marriage Adjustment Scores at Different Educational Levels

One might have predicted from such evidence a relatively poor chance of married happiness, or of sexual fulfillment, or even of orgasm, for the women whom the mystique encouraged to marry before twenty, to forgo higher education, careers, independence, and equality with men in favor of femininity. And, as a matter of fact, the youngest group of wives studied by Kinsey—the generation born between 1920 and 1929 who met the feminine mystique head-on in the 1940’s when the race back home began—showed, by the fifth year of marriage, a sharp reversal of that trend toward increased sexual fulfillment in marriage which had been manifest in every decade since women’s emancipation in the 1920’s.

The percentage of women enjoying orgasm in all or nearly all of their married sex life in the fifth year of marriage had risen from 37% of women in the generation born before 1900 to 42% in the generations born in the next two decades. The youngest group, whose fifth year of marriage was in the late 1940’s, enjoyed full orgasm in even less cases (36%) than women born before 1900.30

Would a new Kinsey study find the young wives who are products of the feminine mystique enjoying even less sexual fulfillment than their more emancipated, more independent, more educated, more grownup-when-married forebears? Only fourteen per cent of Kinsey’s women had married by twenty; a bare majority—fifty-three