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The number of women who went in for petting jumped to 91% among those born in the first decade of the century, and to 99% among their kid sisters and their daughters. The proportion of those who would carry petting, as Kinsey puts it. "to the point of orgasm'' rose from one-fourth to more than half.
Among women born in the early 1900s intercourse before marriage was twice as frequent as among those born in the '90s. More than one out of three lost their virginity by age 25. and three out of five, if they were still unmarried at 40.
These more daring women of the restless generation enjoyed marriage more. Kinsey takes sharp issue with psychiatrists and a few gynecologists who have estimated that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of U.S. women are frigid. Even during the first year of marriage, when the most drastic adjustments have to be made, three wives out of four reach complete fulfillment at least once. Between the ages of 21 and 40 they attain it from 84% to 90% of the time. In sum. says Kinsey, about three-quarters of all sexual relations within marriage end in a satisfactory climax for the wife. However, he reports no case of a woman who attained climax 100% of the time.
Most women born before 1900 had enjoyed no such fulfillment. Many of them, according to Kinsey. did not know that it was possible for a woman to have an orgasm, and if they did know they thought it was "not nice." Now. says Kinsey. who puts great stock in quantitative analysis: "To have frigidity so reduced in the course of four decades is ... a considerable achievement which may be credited, in part, to the franker attitudes and the freer discussion of sex which we have had in the U.S. during the past 20 years. and to the increasing scientific and clinical understanding . . ."
Fidelity. Among Kinsey's sample of women who had premarital intercourse, one-third had relations with from two to five men, more than half with only one man—and 46% only with the fiancé in the year or so before marriage. Are these women sorry? No. Whether they had later married or not, about three-fourths said they had no regrets, and 12-13% had only "minor" qualms. Among those who avoided intercourse before marriage, nine out of ten said they had done so primarily for moral reasons.
There have been other changes. A full third of the women born before 1900 told Kinsey that they wore night clothes during sexual intercourse. Now, more & more U.S. couples are having intercourse without covers or clothes (all but 8% of today's newlyweds), and sleep "in the raw."
Most societies, remarks Kinsey in an anthropological aside, have a double standard about marital fidelity. A few, though they take a dim view of a woman who strays openly, covertly condone her actions if she is discreet and her husband does not become, particularly disturbed. That, suggests Kinsey, is "the direction toward which American attitudes may be moving."
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