SES 99-86182 - Miriam G. Reumann (Brown University) "'An Unexplored Country': American Sex Research and the Rise of the Survey, 1900-1948"
This research project examines the history, methodology, and cultural implications of sex research in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. The author of one 1920s sex survey referred to the field as "an unexplored country," but by 1948, when Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male brought the survey to the attention of a mass public, more than thirty American researchers had produced quantitative studies of human sexual behavior. This study will focus on several key questions: Who conducted sex research before Kinsey, and from what motives? How did they define their topics and choose their subjects? What methodological and cultural debates did sex researchers engage in, and how did their work relate to other kinds of enquiry into human behavior? Who read sex surveys, and how were they received and used by their audiences? Particular attention will be paid to the sex survey, which quickly emerged as the approach of most sex researchers: what accounts for its rapid spread and epistemological supremacy?
The investigators will examine published and unpublished sex surveys and the archives of significant sex researchers and funding institutions and will place them in scientific, historical, statistical and cultural context. The resulting work, which will illuminate the development of the field of sex research, will be of interest not only to historians of science and social science and to sex researchers, but also to a general readership.
