Born: 16 December 1863, United States
Died: 22 December 1940
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Alfred Kinsey is widely considered the world’s first sexologist, publishing his groundbreaking and controversial Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. But Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher was doing her own research in the subject more than fifty years earlier. Her Mosher Report remains the only known existing survey of Victorian women’s sexual habits, begun in 1892 and continued for nearly thirty years. Yet it was never published during her lifetime, and was only made public decades after her death, when historian Carl Degler found it among her unpublished papers in the Stanford University Archives. Although it is unknown why she chose not to publish, the survey was controversial at the time for its acknowledgement of social taboos—respondents were, unacceptably for Victorian women, candid about topics like contraception and orgasms, and were largely sex-positive. That candour was likely because the person asking was another woman. Mosher clearly believed in the importance of her work, which also included studies of menstruation and how to alleviate associated symptoms—another taboo of the time. Her Master’s thesis disproved the belief that women were inherently weaker because biology restricted their breathing—rather than, say, corsets. It is reasonable to assume that the survey, which she compiled throughout her professional life, was simply too scandalous to risk the likely impact on her career. She did note in an introduction that the survey had provided her with “a priceless knowledge for the practicing physician and teacher; a background sufficiently broad to avoid prejudice in her work with women.”