Katharine Bement Davis: The Forgotten Pioneer of Sex Research
100 Years Ago, One Woman and 2,200 “Respectable” Women Redefined Female Sexuality
Dr. Katharine Bement Davis might not be a household name today, but she should be. While Dr. Alfred Kinsey is widely credited with pioneering the scientific study of human sexuality, his work may never have taken off without Davis paving the way—decades earlier. In 1917, industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. appointed Davis to lead the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH), a private organization focused on controlling venereal disease and curbing prostitution—what many saw as the moral ills of the day.
Davis, one of the few American women with a Ph.D. at the turn of the 20th century, began her career in social reform. As the first director of the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, she worked directly with incarcerated women—nearly half of whom were convicted of prostitution. At the time, Davis viewed these women as “immoral,” a conclusion that shaped her early efforts to regulate and reform female sexuality. In other words, she started as something of a “sex cop.”
But that mindset began to change during World War I. Davis helped educate American soldiers about venereal disease and contraception, and what she learned during this campaign was game-changing: it wasn’t that women lacked morals—they lacked information. Girls were raised in silence around sex, often reaching adulthood without knowing how their own bodies worked. One participant in her later research even confessed she thought she was dying during her first period because no one had explained menstruation to her.
By 1920, Davis had radically shifted her perspective. Rather than pathologizing sexuality, she wanted to understand it—especially among so-called “normal” women. Up to that point, most sex research focused on institutionalized or “deviant” populations. But Davis wanted to know: What were the desires, anxieties, and private behaviors of everyday women?
With Rockefeller’s continued (if cautious) support, Davis founded the National Research Council’s Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex in 1921. She sent questionnaires to 2,200 mostly white, middle- and upper-class women—half married, half unmarried—asking detailed questions about their sexual knowledge and experiences. The resulting 10,000 pages of handwritten responses formed the basis of her landmark 1929 book: Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women.
The findings were nothing short of revolutionary.
Davis uncovered widespread sexual ignorance—many women entered marriage knowing almost nothing about intercourse, reproduction, or even their own anatomy. Only half of married respondents said they had felt “prepared” for marital sex. Meanwhile, unmarried women were so undereducated that one-third said they’d never been told anything about sex by their parents.
But Davis also found that, despite society’s repression, women were sexual beings—and many of them enjoyed sex. More than 60% of unmarried women and over 40% of married women admitted to masturbating, a practice then condemned as dangerous and immoral. A surprising number of married women reported using contraception, and at least 10% confessed to having had an abortion—despite its illegality.
Perhaps most controversial was the revelation that nearly half of all respondents had experienced “intense emotional relationships” with other women, and half of those relationships were sexual. In an era when homosexuality was criminalized, the candor and honesty of these women was groundbreaking.
Unsurprisingly, Davis’s work didn’t sit well with her male colleagues—or with Rockefeller. She was eventually pushed out of the BSH as it shifted back toward policing crime rather than studying sex. Her contributions were erased from official histories. A 1956 Rockefeller biography failed to even mention her, while her male colleagues were praised.
Despite being sidelined, underpaid, and constantly referred to as “Miss” rather than “Dr.,” Davis never stopped advocating for honest, science-based education about women’s bodies and sexuality. She helped close the knowledge gap between men and women—especially when it came to sexual pleasure. And she dared to declare what society wasn’t ready to hear: that “normal” women had “natural sex feelings” and deserved to enjoy sex just as much as men.
Today, we call that “closing the orgasm gap.” A century ago, Davis was already fighting for it.