You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The main thing about this book is that it represents an extraordinary amount of work. Very lengthy questionnaires were submitted to 1, 200 married women and 1, 000 single women, and their answers on the subject of sexual life are here presented. The data are then analysed and correlated from every conceivable point of view with the aid of the most expert mathematical devices. The work is so laudable that it hardly becomes the reader to ask whether the results justify it. We would, however, express our regret that no summary of whatever general conclusions may be supposed to follow is added, and that only one of the twelve chapters contains any sort of summary at all. In consequence the book is chiefly of value to those workers who feel disposed to undertake a similar study. When this is done, however, we hope that in the presentation of the material the author will be aided by someone with a modern knowledge of sexual psychology, a step unfortunately omitted in the present instance.
There is no reference to any of Freud's writings in the bibliography and we have come across only two allusions to the subject in the text of the book. One of these is extremely misleading. Discussing female homosexuality, the author quotes a passage from a paper by Stanford Read, in 1921, where the narcissistic aspect of homosexuality is the only one mentioned.
From the data quoted we may cite the following. Among the married women twice as many said they had learnt masturbation spontaneously as said they had been taught it; one-third stated they had never masturbated. 'It would appear that pleasurable reaction to the marital relations was significantly higher during the first five years of married life in the group that masturbated, but that the pleasurable reaction persisted longest in the group that never masturbated' (p. 183). Of the thousand unmarried women, 605 described recognisedly sexual experiences with other women.