This is an edited html version of http://www.guthrietheater.org/sites/default/files/sexhabits.pdf.
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The Sex Habits of American Women - A Play by Julie Marie Myatt - Directed by Michael Bigelow Dixon
This production is sponsored by American Express.
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CULTURAL CONTEXT
Some Big (and little) Moments in American Sex (and sexual politics):
A Timeline
1886
•German neuropsychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing publishes Psychopathica Sexualis, 237
classic case histories of lustmurder, necrophilia, pederasty, bestiality, transvestism, rape,
mutilation, sado-masochism, exhibitionism and other psychosexual proclivities. His study is
regarded as one of the primary texts on sexual aberrations well into the twentieth century. The
next century continues to make cultural references to the tome: among them a campy
mockumentary of the same title.
1873
•U.S. Congress passes the Comstock Act, an “Act of the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation
of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” This criminalizes the distribution of
information about abortion and contraception through the U.S. Postal Service.
1897
•British physician Havelock Ellis publishes the first volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
an investigation of human sexual practices. At first it is considered pornographic, and released
only to physicians.
1900
•Men suffering from impotence are urged in the Sears Roebuck catalog to buy the Giant Power
Heidelberg Electric Belt, which administers a jolt of current to the affected parts.
1914
•Margaret Sanger publishes The Woman Rebel, which sparks the birth control movement and
urges women to view conception as a choice rather than an obligation.
1920
•The U.S. ratifies the 19th Amendment to Constitution, granting the vote to women after a
struggle of over 70 years.
•Sigmund Freud publishes Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
1923
•Margaret Sanger establishes America’s first legal birth control clinic, which serves as a
contraceptive dispensary and research facility under the auspices of the American Birth Control
League, one of the organizations that later would become Planned Parenthood.
•In the wake of women’s suffrage, the Equal Rights Amendment is introduced to Congress.
•Freud publishes The Ego and the Id.
1927
•Mae West is locked up in New York’s Welfare Island after an obscenity conviction for her stage
show, Sex. She is accused of “corrupting the morals of youth.” “I take it out in the open and
laugh at it,” she says of her subject matter.
1930
•The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) creates the Hays Code,
which imposes morality standards to regulate the depiction of various types of “sin” in films,
including all manner of suggestive displays of sex or passion, miscegenation, and anything that
might tarnish the sanctity of marriage.
1938
•Thousands of copies of Life magazine are seized from newsstands when the periodical publishes
photos of a child being born.
1941-1945
•During World War II, many women (think "Rosie the Riveter") join the workforce on the
American home front.
1942
•Several “parent organizations” become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
1944
•Seventeen magazine debuts, telling girls what to wear, how to look, what to think, and whom to
admire. By 1950, it is selling a million copies a month.
1945
•The war ends, and the Baby Boom begins. Between 1945 and 1965, 81.6 million children are
born in America.
1946
•At the end of the World War II, many women who have gone to work during the conflict are laid
off from their jobs, despite the desire of many to continue working.
•Dr. Benjamin Spock publishes his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, the definitive
child-rearing manual for millions of American parents in the postwar Baby Boom.
1947
•Alfred C. Kinsey founds the University of Indiana's Institute for Sex Research. It is dedicated to
the scientific study of a broad range of human sexual behavior and attempts to establish an
authoritative library of sexual behavior, beginning in the early 1950s to gather films, art objects,
diaries, personal histories, and other literary and graphic material relating to eroticism and sexual
behavior.
•Vice Versa, widely regarded to be the first lesbian magazine, is published under the pseudonym
“Lisa Ben.”
•Pop psychologists Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham publish their widely-cited Modern
Woman: The Lost Sex, which asserts that unless a woman totally embraces her life’s work as a
mother she is doomed to a frigid, unfulfilled existence.
1948
•Alfred Kinsey and his collaborators publish Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, an analysis of
extensive interviews with thousands of American men about their sexual practices which brings
sex out of the bedroom and into public discourse. Kinsey becomes a household name,
challenging many myths about sexuality.
1949
•In his book Of Love and Lust, U.S. psychologist Theordor Reik writes, “In no case can love be
only selfish, or as selfish as sex. Then it would not be love. It is always concerned with the
welfare or happiness of the other person, regrets the other’s absence, wants to be together with
the object, feels lonely with it, fears calamity or danger for it. There is nothing of this kind in
crude sex. If the individual is not aroused by sexual wishes the presence of the sex object is not
desired and its absence not regretted.”
1950
•The International Journal of Sexology publishes Ernst Gräfenberg’s groundbreaking article on
the phenomenon of female ejaculation, calling attention to a female erogenous zone in
connection with the paraurethral glands—the Gräfenberg spot (G-spot).
•Republican National Committee Chairman Guy Gabrielson, involved in the beginnings of the
McCarthy Era witch-hunts for communist conspirators, links “sexual depravity” (by which he
means homosexuality) with communism, warning, “Perhaps as dangerous as the actual
Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government in recent years…”
1951
•The Sex Habits of American Women by Fritz Wittels, M.D. is published posthumously (just a
year after the author's death).
•The first hormonal contraceptive is developed.
1952
•Margaret Sanger urges the development of an oral contraceptive.
1953
•Alfred Kinsey and his collaborators Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin publish Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female.
•French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s influential essay The Second Sex appears
in English translation. It argues that womanhood as we know it is a social construct of man’s
making, and that the subordination of female to male is not a natural state, but rather the result of
social forces. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” she writes.
•On that note, Christine Jorgensen, formerly ex-G.I. George Jorgenson, checks out of a
Copenhagen hospital following two years of sex-change operations. She is greeted by hordes of
reporters upon returning to the U.S. “Nature made a mistake, which I have corrected,” she wrote
to her parents, while posing for the cameras in a chic bathing suit and heels.
•Physician Harry Benjamin introduces the term “transsexuals,” distinguishing them for the first
time from transvestites.
•Hugh Hefner begins publication of Playboy, a mainstream lifestyle periodical that celebrates sex.
•President Eisenhower issues an executive order banning gay men and lesbians from federal
employment.
1954
•In his Book-of-the-Month club selection, Seduction of the Innocent, Fredric Wertham writes of
comic book heroes Batman and Robin: “They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers
in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. It is
like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”
1955
•American psychologist John Money introduces the distinction between “sex” and “gender,”
bringing gender issues into the language of the social sciences and sexology.
•According to a study, only 10 percent of people interviewed believe that an unmarried person
can be happy.
•Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the tale of Humbert Humbert’s lust for a 12-year-old nymphet, is
published; it is only available in the U.S. at this point as a contraband French edition.
•Allen Ginsberg publishes “Howl,” the epic poem attacking American values of the 1950s.
•In an article titled “Changing Roles in Modern Marriage” in Life magazine, Robert Coughlan
blames American marriage troubles on women’s pursuit of careers and independence. He writes,
“Spottily and sporadically, but increasingly, the sexes in this country are losing their identities.
The emerging American woman tends to be assertive and exploitive. The emerging American
man tends to be passive and irresponsible. As a result neither sex can give or derive from
marriage the satisfactions necessary to each. They are suffering from what the psychiatrists call
sexual ambiguity.”
1957
•Kate Constance’s How to Get and Keep a Husband: A Christian Businesswoman’s Answer to
One of the Most Perplexing Problems of Our Time asserts that employment outside the home
constitutes a threat to the very essence of womanhood.
1959
•Grove Press publishes an unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
and the U.S. Post Office confiscates copies sent through the mail.
•Barbie makes her debut.
•Hoaxer Alan Abel creates SINA, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Hundreds of
unwitting people send money in response to the slogan “A nude horse is a rude horse,” before
it’s revealed that the whole thing is a prank.
1960
•*The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves birth control pills.
1961
•Grove Press publishes a version of Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer, which has
explicit sexual passages. After publication, lawsuits are brought against numerous booksellers
for carrying it.
•llinois is first state to repeal its sodomy laws.
1962
•In Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown (soon to be editor of Cosmopolitan) writes,
“Theoretically a ‘nice’ single woman has no sex life. What nonsense! She has a better sex life
than most of her married friends.”
1963
•A virtually unknown writer named Betty Friedan publishes her first book, The Feminine
Mystique, which is often credited with setting the second wave of American feminism in motion.
In Feminism in Our Time, Miriam Schneir describes Friedan’s groundbreaking work as detecting
“a concerted campaign waged since the end of World War II to convince American women they
could achieve happiness in life only through marriage and motherhood—an ideology she labeled
‘the feminine mystique.’ She identified women’s magazines, educators, and advertising experts
as the chief perpetrators of this sophisticated brainwashing; the intellectual underpinnings were
provided by Freudian psychology and the popular writings about ‘natural’ women in ‘primitive’
societies by anthropologist Margaret Mead.”
1964
•The Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination in employment on the basis of sex, race, color,
religion, or national origin.
1965
•The Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council concludes with the bishops ordering a
large-scale liberalization and modernization of practices in the Church.
•Helen Gurley Brown revives the faltering Cosmopolitan magazine by directing it toward single
young career women.
•Bob Guccione founds Penthouse in the U.K.
•In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court strikes down state laws prohibiting the use of
contraceptives by married couples.
1966
•Physician William Masters and psychologist Virginia Johnson publish their book Human Sexual
Response, revolutionizing the way that sexuality is studied and taught in the U.S. It is often
considered to be the first comprehensive laboratory study of the physiology and anatomy of
human sexual activity.
•Betty Friedan co-founds the National Organization for Women (NOW), a civil-rights group
dedicated to achieving equality of opportunity for women.
1967
•The special "The Homosexual," reported by Mike Wallace, airs on CBS.
•Hair, the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, is produced on Broadway, featuring nudity as
well as the song “Sodomy”—with lyrics that also linger on certain other sexual terms.
1968
•Feminists stage a “zap action” at the Miss America beauty pageant: A group of women picket the
event with signs proclaiming "Let's Judge Ourselves as People,” crown a live sheep, and dump
girdles, cosmetics, high-heeled shoes, and bras into a "freedom trash can.”
•Sex-segregated Help Wanted ads in newspapers become illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by
the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open
only to men.
1969
•The author calling herself “J” publishes The Way to Become the Sensuous Woman, filled with
such things as exercises for improving the dexterity of the tongue.
•David Reuben, M.D.’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to
Ask) is published.
•The Stonewall Riots begin June 27, the day of Judy Garland’s funeral.
•California becomes the first state to adopt a "no fault" divorce law, which allows couples to
divorce by mutual consent. By 1985 every state has adopted a similar law. Laws are also passed
regarding the equal division of common property.
1970
•Masters and Johnson publish Human Sexual Inadequacy, a study of sexual dysfunctions.
1972
•The U.S. Senate ratifies the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which is designed mainly to
invalidate many state and federal laws that discriminate against women. (Prominent conservative
spokeswoman Phyllis Schlafly organizes Eagle Forum and Stop ERA in opposition to the
amendment.) A decade later, the ERA is not ratified by the necessary majority of 38 states,
failing to become the 27th Amendment to the Constitution.
•Gloria Steinem and others launch Ms. Magazine, the first nationally circulated women's
magazine to bring feminism and the issues of the women's movement into the mainstream. The
inaugural issue prints a list of 50 well-known women who acknowledge having had abortions.
•Taking sex out of the bedroom and putting it on the coffee table, with un-self-conscious text and
illustrations, Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking becomes a best-
seller.
•Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, is released in mainstream movie theaters. Deep Throat
grosses $600 million, and runs for ten years at the Pussycat Theater in Los Angeles.
•In Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, Kinsey Report collaborator Wardell B.
Pomeroy writes that “it is now apparent to virtually everyone, as Kinsey well understood, that
sex behavior does not lend itself to research.”
•Woody Allen’s film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to
Ask), purportedly based on Reuben’s book, is released.
1973
•*The U.S. Supreme Court legalizes abortion in Roe v. Wade.
•In Miller v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court defines obscenity by what is now called the
Miller test: (1) the proscribed material must depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently
offensive way, (2) the conduct must be specifically described in the law, and (3) the work must,
taken as a whole, lack serious value and must appeal to a prurient interest in sex. What is
patently offensive is to be determined by applying community values.
•*In deleting homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders, the American Psychiatric
Association decides that it is not a psychiatric illness.
•Playgirl, a sensual source of entertainment for modern women, begins publication.
•The Rocky Horror Picture Show is released on film.
1976
•Feminist Shere Hite publishes The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which
becomes an instant best-seller. Hite’s book is based on questionnaires filled out by 3,000 women
ranging in age from 14 to 78, and its frank discussions reveal that women are, contrary to
popular belief, far from satisfied sexually.
•The first marital rape law is enacted in Nebraska, making it illegal for a husband to rape his wife.
1977
•In England, Charlotte Wolff publishes Bisexuality: A Study.
1978
•The adult film Debbie Does Dallas is released in movie theaters with the tagline: “Everyone on
the team scores when her pom-poms fly!”
•Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, is born under the watch of British medical
researchers.
•The Pregnancy Discrimination Act bans employment discrimination against pregnant women.
Under the Act, a woman cannot be fired or denied a job or a promotion because she is or may
become pregnant, nor can she be forced to take a pregnancy leave if she is willing and able to
work.
1979
•Chippendale’s, a chain of strip clubs for women, opens—and the bikini-shorted Chippendale’s
dancer becomes a cultural icon.
1981
•In Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, the first cases of AIDS are identified.
1982
•The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) fails as the deadline for state ratification passes.
1984
•In September, the most notorious issue of Penthouse magazine is released – featuring Vanessa
Williams, the current (and first black) Miss America. Williams gives up her crown, but goes on
to have a successful singing career.
•Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” goes to #1 on the charts.
1987
•A condom commercial, the first to air on a major-market TV station, is seen in San Francisco.
•The controversial Hite Report on Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress reveals
that 98 percent of American women find their love lives lacking.
1989
•Steven Soderbergh directs the film Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
1990
•Henry and June, about the erotic lives and times of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, is the first film
to receive an NC-17 rating.
1991
•U.S. lawyer and law professor Anita Hill testifies to a Senate panel against Supreme Court
nominee Clarence Thomas, describing her experiences of sexual harassment while working for
Thomas.
•Savage Love, the infamous sex-advice column by Dan Savage, appears for the first time in the
Seattle's weekly newspaper, The Stranger.
1992
•According to Forbes, nude recreation has become a $120 million industry, with a 76 percent rate
of growth over the preceding decade. Communes and colonies reportedly thrive.
•Madonna shares her sexual fantasies in a book of erotic photographs and stories, titled Sex.
•Quoted in the Washington Post, politician/televangelist Pat Robertson says, "The feminist
agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement
that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy
capitalism and become lesbians.”
1993
•The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the female condom.
•Real Sex, the sexually explicit TV “magazine” that “explores sex ‘90s style,” premieres on HBO.
•Denying rumors about a famous “couple” on Sesame Street, The Children’s Television
Workshop issues a press release with the following statement: "Bert and Ernie, who've been on
Sesame Street for 25 years, do not portray a gay couple, and there are no plans for them to do so
in the future. They are puppets, not humans. Like all the Muppets created for Sesame Street, they
were designed to help educate preschoolers."
1997
•Pfizer officials confer with the Vatican to get the papal view on Viagra. Since the drug seems to
have the potential to improve marital relations, the Vatican reportedly gives it a thumbs-up.
•Comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her current lover, actress Anne Heche, are out and about as a
couple.
1998
•President Bill Clinton faces a presidential scandal and impeachment, and the names Gennifer
Flowers, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky are ingrained in the public consciousness.
•The FDA approves Viagra for sale as the first effective oral treatment for impotence.
•Sex and the City premieres on HBO.
2000
•Vermont grants gay and lesbian couples a parallel but separate legal option called civil unions.
The civil unions, which are not recognized by other states and confer no marriage benefits under
federal law, nonetheless entitle same-sex couples to receive tax benefits and inheritance rights
and to make medical decisions on behalf of a partner.
•The Guide to Getting it On! (The Universe’s Coolest and Most Informative Book about Sex), an
explicit how-to book, appears in its third edition; the publisher claims that it “is used as required
reading in sex ed classes at more than 30 colleges and universities, and is said to have been
responsible for cracked plaster in bedroom ceilings all across America.”
2001
•A study by the Center for Disease Control reports a “let’s not” trend among American teenagers:
over the past decade, the number of high school students who say they’ve had sexual intercourse
drops by 10 percent (from 54% sexually active to 46%).
2002
•Viagra sales make $1 billion in the United States.
2003
•An article in Time Magazine reports that nearly 1 in 5 video rentals in the U.S. is a porn flick,
and that there are 11,000 new titles each year to choose from.
2004
•Massachusetts grants marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Challenging California law, the city
of San Francisco marries thousands of same-sex couples at City Hall. Several other cities follow
suit. [Legal challenges ensue in both cases.]
•A Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage, fails to pass in the Senate.
•Laura Kipnis, a media studies professor at Northwestern University and author of Against Love:
A Polemic, writes in the New York Times that “More and more people – heterosexuals, that is –
don’t want to get or stay married these days, no matter their income level…only 56 percent of all
adults are married, compared with 75 percent 30 years ago. The proportion of traditional
married-couple-with-children American households has dropped to 26 percent of all households,
from 45 percent in the early 1970s. The demographics say Americans are voting no to marriage.
The fact is that marriage is a social institution in transition, whether conservatives like it or not.”
She also writes that “A 1999 Rutgers University study reported that a mere 38 percent of
Americans who were on their first marriages described themselves as actually happy in that
state.”
•A new sex study conducted in diverse neighborhoods in Chicago, The Sexual Organization of the
City, concludes that “there are few narratives, stories, or myths to describe the variety of modes
of sexual expression in singlehood. One approach is to characterize this change as social
pathology, to call for rebuilding the family and the marital commitment, and to tightly couple sex
and the family again. Another approach is to recognize that the pluralism of American society
also extends into sexuality. There is not one moral code to govern sexuality but many; the
various modes of sexual expression are tied to the particular norms and moral codes of different
populations.”
2005 ?
2006 ?
2007
•J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling Harry Potter fantasy series, outed the beloved character
Dumbledore as being gay. [While appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall]
2008
•A decision by the Supreme Court of California rules it legal for homosexuals to marry in the
golden state. [This was subsequently overturned by the voters in 2009]
End of Page 22 - Michael Bigelow Dixon, Director, The Sex Habits of American Women