Defying social mores and sexual myths to research male and female sexual behavior, Kinsey provided the dataset behind the sexual revolution of the 1960s
Alfred Kinsey
(1894–1956)
Alfred Charles Kinsey’s puritanical father wanted him to become an engineer. The boy tried to be a good son, dutifully enrolling at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where his father was a professor. After two years of misery there, he stood up to the senior Kinsey and took off for Maine’s Bowdoin College, where he studied psychology and biology. His father did not attend the 1916 commencement, at which Alfred was awarded his degree with high honors.
No matter. The young Kinsey began graduate study in applied biology at Harvard. His chief mentor was field biologist William Morton Wheeler, a father figure who was everything Kinsey’s biological father was not. Where the senior Kinsey was a fundamentalist Christian, Wheeler was an atheist and ardent disciple of Darwin. Where the elder Kinsey was pious and straitlaced, Wheeler was a close friend of the journalist, social critic, and satirist H. L. Mencken, the epitome of American impiety, irreverence, and skepticism. Guided and encouraged by Wheeler, Kinsey embraced the rigors of science as his one true religion and threw himself into an extraordinary evolutionary study of the gall wasp, based on a huge specimen collection he amassed and taxonomically catalogued. Early in the process, he identified a number of new species of the insect and was awarded a doctor of science degree in 1919. In 1920, he joined the biology faculty of Indiana University.
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As an evolutionary entomologist with a passion for taxonomy, Kinsey hardly seemed destined to shake the world. He shook the world.
Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, in Hoboken, New Jersey. His mother, Sarah Ann Charles, was not well educated, and while his father, Alfred Seguine Kinsey, was a professor at Hoboken’s Stevens Institute of Technology, a well-respected school of mechanical engineering, he was not well paid. The Kinseys did not live well, and the fact that Alfred suffered from poorly treated childhood cases of rheumatic fever and typhoid fever as well as rickets (which left him with permanent spinal curvature severe enough to disqualify him from military service during World War I) suggests the impoverishment of his early years.
The senior Kinsey’s social circle did not consist of fellow Stevens faculty members, but fellow congregants of the local Methodist church. Young Alfred became increasingly frustrated by the limitations of his parents’ narrow focus on religious routine. His family’s move from Hoboken to South Orange, New Jersey, when he was ten enlarged his scope, as he became a member of the local YMCA, which introduced him to camping and nature study.
Fortunately for Alfred, his parents approved of the YMCA—the C, after all, stood for Christian—and welcomed their son’s joining the Boy Scouts, which was unmistakably founded on Christian principles. Alfred loved scouting because it brought him close to nature, and he excelled in the organization, becoming an Eagle Scout in 1913—one of scouting’s very first, in fact. Much as Teddy Roosevelt had embarked on a self-imposed regimen of physical exercise intended to toughen him up after a sickly childhood, Kinsey embarked on long, arduous hikes and camping trips to build himself up—and, doubtless, to distance himself from his family.
In high school, he discovered another side of himself. He was not only a natural student, who thrived on hard study, but he proved to be a talented musician and a pianist of sufficient promise to prompt him to contemplate a concert career. While he ultimately decided on a life in science instead, he remained a lifelong lover of classical music and would entertain fellow faculty members at Indiana University, an institution celebrated for its superb music department, with impromptu piano recitals.
Quiet and polite as a young man, Kinsey spent much of his time in solitary study. His focus was sharp and sustained. He put in long hours, which gave him great satisfaction. His high school biology teacher, Natalie Roeth, opened to him the wonders of botany and zoology. In later years, Kinsey would credit her with having awakened his passion for the life sciences.
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Kinsey’s doctoral work on the gall wasp became the focus of his academic career at Indiana University through the 1930s. He published The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study in the Origin of Species in 1929, the year he was promoted to full professor. His immense collection of gall wasp specimens became a treasured research asset of the Department of Biology. In 1924, he married Clara Bracken McMillen, one of his students. The couple went on to have four children.
His was a successful career and a successful life. Yet he began to feel increasing disappointment at the limitations of being the world’s foremost authority . . . on gall wasps. While Indiana University was an excellent institution, he longed for offers from the likes of Harvard and Yale. They did not come. He wanted to make a mark on the world, but he seemed doomed to remain an obscure professor in a midwestern state university.
Then, in 1938, Kinsey nudged his career in a surprising new direction. Students had circulated a petition asking for a “course on marriage.” This was coded language for a course on human sexuality. Most faculty members would not consider the request. Kinsey, however, jumped at the opportunity to lead a team-taught course in the subject. He personally prepared and delivered the lectures—illustrated by slides—devoted to the biology and physiology of sexual stimulation, the mechanics of intercourse, and techniques of contraception. Clearly drawing on deep reserves of childhood repression, he also lectured on the damage caused by puritanical laws and social mores. It soon became apparent that he had a theory. If one defined sexuality in a strictly biological context, he argued, it would be apparent that “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality.”
Doubtless Professor Kinsey saw his approach to the subject of human sexuality as no different from his approach to gall wasps. Both were a matter of observing and cataloguing characteristics and behavior. At another level, however, Kinsey was clearly driven by a need to overcome the superego presence that was his joyless, disapproving father, the very embodiment of corrosive Victorian piety. Whether it was the product of objective science or personal passion, Kinsey’s “marriage course” was among the most popular offerings in the entire university, with four hundred students packing each lecture by 1940.
Kinsey looked upon the students who attended his lectures as he looked upon his gall wasps. As the wasps presented an identifiable range of variation, so, he decided, would these human organisms. He embarked upon a project of cataloguing, describing, and classifying the varieties of human sexual experience. His first set of “specimens” were his “marriage course” students, who, as a course requirement, were obliged to have private conferences with him in which he took, in exquisite but standardized detail, their sexual histories.
Later, he took his survey farther afield to several midwestern cities. He began presenting his results and wrote grant applications to the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation. Their funding not only gave the project what he considered a highly useful air of academic legitimacy, it also enabled him to hire paid research assistants and fund travel to other parts of the United States. In 1947, he founded the Institute of Sex Research at Indiana University as the center and clearinghouse for this research.
In 1948, Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male under the imprimatur of Indiana University Press. In contrast to most books published by this or any other university press, the volume made the national best-seller list three weeks after it hit bookstore shelves. The presentation was anything but sensational. Weighing in at more than 800 pages, it was written in the style of Kinsey’s gall-wasp studies, using the dry, concise language of a naturalist, with prose anchored by statistics, graphs, and tables. Released in January, it sold 200,000 copies by the middle of March. It embodied data from more than five thousand sexual histories, and it made national news with its revelations concerning masturbation, adultery, and homosexuality, all of which were presented as aspects of normal sexuality.
In 1953, Kinsey followed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. This volume was based on even more sexual histories—about six thousand—and was, if anything, an even more profound revelation, especially with regard to masturbation (frequency as well as method), premarital sexual behavior, and the subject of the “female orgasm”—hitherto the single greatest mystery of human sexuality.
Kinsey patterned the second book after the first, laying special emphasis on the gulf that existed between social attitudes and assumptions on the one hand and documented practices and behavior on the other. But while the book on men had provoked both outrage and praise, the study of women motivated a mighty counterattack, the shockwaves of which reached the halls of Congress, which conducted an investigation of Kinsey’s financial support. A panicky Rockefeller Foundation swiftly cut off Kinsey’s funding.
The tumult, in fact, began to kill Kinsey. His childhood ailments had permanently damaged his heart, and the stress he suffered after publication of the 1953 volume aggravated long-dormant heart failure. He felt neither guilt nor remorse, but great anger and anxiety that his work would be suppressed and that the Institute of Sex Research would be shuttered. (In fact, it not only continued, but was renamed the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in 1981.) In 1956, Kinsey suffered a serious bout of pneumonia, for which he was briefly hospitalized, but never fully recovered. He died on August 25 of that year, the cause of death reported by the New York Times as a “heart ailment and pneumonia.” He was sixty-two, cheated out of another decade or two of life. And yet he had changed the world by revealing some of the most intimate secrets of its inhabitants. Although his research upset many social norms, by casting light on hitherto dark taboos, Kinsey’s work removed perhaps thousands of sources of unnecessary guilt, bewilderment, and emotional pain. Even Kinsey’s pious father would have understood the words of Jesus as the Apostle John reported them: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”