Decades before Alfred Kinsey released his famous “Reports” on human sexuality, Katharine Bement Davis (1860-1935) conducted a pioneering study of female sexuality.
Published in 1929, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women was notable not only as the first major study of women’s sexuality and the first such study conducted by a woman, but also as the first published study of “normal” women’s sexuality ― what Davis defined as the study of women who were “not pathological mentally or physically.”
In Matters of Sex: Katharine Bement Davis and America’s First Sexual Revolution (NYU Press, 2026), Anya Jabour offers an in-depth exploration of Katharine Bement Davis’s life and work, revealing her pioneering efforts to promote scientifically accurate information about sex.
Even before publishing her study, Davis was a true trailblazer.
One of the first women to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Davis worked as a schoolteacher and a social worker in the Settlement Movement before serving as the first superintendent of Bedford Female Reformatory (now the state’s only maximum security women’s prison).
At the Bedford Reformatory, she offered inmates valuable educational and recreational opportunities and employed a team of highly educated women as physicians and psychologists.
She later served as New York City’s first female Commissioner of Correction, where she instituted critical reforms and quelled a major uprising. As Commissioner of Corrections, she tackled what was considered “a man’s job,” while also championing women’s suffrage.
The book traces her journey as an advocate for female sexuality, exploring her work with birth control and free speech advocates to promote both sex research and sex education.
Jabour showcases how Davis’s candid discussion of women’s sexual behavior ― from contraception to masturbation to lesbianism ― challenged prevailing ideas about “pure” and “passionless” women and drove the nation’s first sexual revolution.
It was in the final decade of her career that Davis led the eugenics-inspired Bureau of Social Hygiene, which focused on combating commercialized sex and curbing sexually transmitted infections.
It was during her time there that she conducted the first comprehensive study on female sexuality, including women’s sexual desires and experiences, and in doing so redefined the boundaries of “normal” female sexuality.
Drawing from organizational records, Davis’s own unpublished memoirs, and family-held materials never before consulted by scholars, Matters of Sex offers a comprehensive and engaging biography of a remarkable woman whose legacy still resonates today.
Anya Jabour is Regents Professor of History at The University of Montana-Missoula and author of Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women’s Activism in Modern America.
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