Clelia Duel Mosher

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Clelia Duel Mosher

Clelia Duel Mosher (born December 16, 1863 in Albany ; died December 21, 1940 in Palo Alto ) was an American doctor and sexologist .

Life

Clelia Duel Mosher was the daughter of the doctor Cornelius Mosher and Sarah Burritt Mosher. She attended Wellesley College from 1889 , then the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University, and received a bachelor's degree in zoology in 1893 and a master's in 1894. From 1896 Mosher studied at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine , where she received her MD in 1900 .

In her master's thesis, she wrote about the physical difference between men and women and the supposed physical inferiority of women to men. She then tried to set up a private medical practice, which failed because of the discrimination, and went back to Stanford University in 1910. She did research on the menstrual cycle and menstrual cramps . In 1928, a year before her retirement, she was given a full professorship.

After the American entry into World War I in 1917, Mosher volunteered for the Red Cross and was deployed in France. She published a report on this in 1921 in the Medical woman's journal .

Sexual interrogation

In 1892 she began a small survey of women of her own social class about their sexual habits. Her questions about sexual pleasure and contraception with the contraceptive techniques and means of the time were in contradiction to the “prescribed” Victorian sexual morality . The 45 questionnaires created between 1892 and 1920 were not systematically evaluated by her and also not published, but only discovered in 1973 by the historian Carl Neumann Degler in the university archive and published posthumously in 1980. In his first evaluation in 1974 in the American Historical Review, Degler highlighted the difference between appearance and reality in the title of his essay; the statements made by the women in the interviews contrast with what is understood by Victorian prudish.

Fonts (selection)

  • Functional periodicity in women and some of the modifying factors. In: American Physical Education Review. Vol. 16 (1911), H. 8, pp. 493-507, doi: 10.1080 / 23267224.1911.10651297 .
  • The physical training of women in relation to functional periodicity. In: Woman's medical journal. April 1915, pp. 3-5, 9, 11.
  • Health and the woman movement. The Womans Press, New York 1918.
    • Woman's Physical Freedom. The Womans Press, New York 1923.
    • Personal hygiene for women. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1927.
  • Some of the causal factors in the increased height of college women: third note. In: Journal of the American Medical Association . Vol. 81, H. 7, August 18, 1923, pp. 535-538, doi: 10.1001 / jama.1923.02650070019007 .
  • The Mosher survey: Sexual attitudes of 45 Victorian women. Edited by James MaHood and Kristine Wenburg. Introduction by Carl Neumann Degler . Arno Press, New York 1980.

literature

  • Elizabeth Brownlee Griego: A part and yet apart: Clelia Duel Mosher and professional women at the turn of the century . Ph. D. University of California, Berkeley 1983
  • Estelle Freedman , John D'Emilio : Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America . Harper and Row, New York 1988.
  • Martha H. Verbrugge: Clelia Duel Mosher . In: American National Biography . Vol. 15, 1999, pp. 976-978.
  • David Spiegelhalter : Sex by numbers: the statistics of sexual behavior . Profile Books, London 2015.

Web links

Commons : Clelia Duel Mosher  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Clelia D. Mosher Papers , at California Digital Library
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Kara Platoni: The Sex Scholar , at Stanford University, March / April 2010
  3. ^ Clelia Duel Mosher: When Lille was taken , in Medical woman's journal , July, 1921
  4. ↑ Statistical study of the marriage of forty-seven women , in: Mosher's Study of the physiology and hygiene of marriage with some consideration of the birth rate , Stanford University, evidence from WorldCat . There are contradicting information about the number of questionnaire returns: 45 or 47.
  5. ^ Carl Neumann Degler: What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century , in: American Historical Review , December 1974, pp. 1467-1490
personal data
SURNAME Mosher, Clelia Duel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American doctor and sex researcher
DATE OF BIRTH December 16, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Albany
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1940
Place of death Palo Alto