For much of modern history, men did not merely study women's sexual responses. Male physicians, psychoanalysts, researchers, and authors claimed the authority to define those responses. They determined which part of a woman's body should give her pleasure, which sexual act should produce orgasm, when orgasm should occur, and what a woman's failure to meet those expectations supposedly revealed about her health, femininity, or psychological development.

Women whose experiences contradicted prevailing theories could be described as hysterical, frigid, immature, masculine, repressed, or sexually maladjusted. The terminology changed from one generation to another, but the underlying structure remained remarkably constant: men established the standard, and women were evaluated according to how successfully their bodies conformed to it.

The history of the female orgasm is therefore not simply a history of improving anatomical knowledge. It is a history of power. Medicine first interpreted women's physical and emotional distress through the supposedly unstable female body. Psychoanalysis then created a hierarchy between the allegedly immature clitoral orgasm and the supposedly mature vaginal orgasm. Popular marriage manuals carried those theories from the physician's office into the marital bedroom. Women were instructed not only that they should experience orgasm, but that they should experience it through heterosexual intercourse and, preferably, at the same time as their husbands.

Only during the middle decades of the twentieth century did researchers begin seriously comparing these prescriptions with women's actual sexual responses. The women's health movement then made the most radical change of all: it asserted that women themselves possessed the authority to describe what their bodies felt.

Hysteria and the Medical Ownership of Female Experience

A history of the medical treatment of female sexuality frequently begins with hysteria. For centuries, hysteria functioned as a broad and unstable diagnosis applied disproportionately to women. Fainting, anxiety, pain, irritability, sleeplessness, convulsions, sexual distress, and conduct considered insufficiently feminine could all be interpreted as symptoms of a disordered female nervous or reproductive system.

A popular modern story claims that nineteenth-century physicians routinely treated women diagnosed with hysteria by manually stimulating their genitals until they experienced a "paroxysm," and that mechanical vibrators were developed to make this treatment faster. Historian Rachel Maines popularized this interpretation in The Technology of Orgasm. Later historians Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg reexamined her evidence and concluded that it did not establish routine physician-induced orgasm as a standard treatment for hysteria. The familiar vibrator story should therefore be identified as a disputed historical claim, not presented as settled fact.

The weakness of that particular story does not undermine the larger argument. The diagnosis of hysteria still demonstrates how readily male physicians assumed the authority to interpret women's physical sensations and emotional lives. Women were often treated less as reliable narrators of their own experience than as bodies whose meaning had to be deciphered by trained men.

A woman's fear, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, anger, or physical pain might arise from a coercive marriage, social confinement, economic dependency, sexual ignorance, trauma, or the absence of meaningful choices. Yet medicine could relocate the problem inside her reproductive organs, nervous system, or feminine constitution. The physician's explanation displaced the woman's own account.

The woman lived the experience. The male authority determined what the experience meant.

Freud and the Invention of the "Mature" Orgasm

Sigmund Freud gave the distinction between clitoral and vaginal pleasure its most influential psychological formulation. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905 and later revised, Freud argued that the leading erotogenic zone of the young girl was the clitoris. Adult femininity supposedly required the center of sexual excitability to move from the clitoris to the vagina.

Freud stated that a woman's development required the transfer of excitability "from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice."

That brief statement carried enormous consequences. The clitoris was associated with childhood, while vaginal response was associated with mature womanhood. A woman's route to orgasm was no longer merely a matter of sensation or anatomy. It became evidence of whether she had developed properly.

Freud also acknowledged the inequality built into his theory. The boy's principal sexual organ remained the same from childhood into adulthood, while the girl supposedly had to abandon or subordinate the organ that had originally produced her pleasure. In a later discussion, Freud wrote that a man had "only one leading sexual zone," while a woman had two: the clitoris and the vagina.

The man matured without changing the bodily center of his pleasure. The woman was required to relocate hers.

This theory transformed a male-centered sexual practice into a test of female psychological health. Penile-vaginal intercourse became not simply one sexual act among others, but the act through which a properly developed woman was expected to reach orgasm. If intercourse did not provide sufficient stimulation, the act itself was not necessarily questioned. Instead, the woman could be diagnosed as frigid, neurotic, resistant, or unable to accept her feminine role.

The word frigidity concealed many entirely different possibilities. The woman might have received little or no direct clitoral stimulation. Her husband might have ejaculated before she became fully aroused. She might have been frightened, ashamed, angry, coerced, inexperienced, or uninterested in her partner. She might simply have required a form of stimulation that penetration did not provide.

Nevertheless, failure to orgasm during intercourse could be interpreted as a defect within the woman. The theory was protected from contradiction because the woman's disagreement with it could itself become evidence of her pathology.

Freud did not merely describe women's orgasms. He helped establish which orgasm a psychologically mature woman was supposed to have.

Marie Stopes: Recognition and Regulation

Marie Stopes's Married Love, published in 1918, represented a significant departure from the silence surrounding women's sexual desire. Stopes openly discussed female arousal, orgasm, marital compatibility, and the husband's responsibility to consider his wife's pleasure. Her book reached a popular audience and helped establish that respectable married women were not naturally passionless.

Stopes named the clitoris and recognized its importance. She also condemned husbands who treated their wives as passive instruments of male satisfaction. She understood that women often required more time to become fully aroused and criticized the "excessive speed of the husband's reactions."

That was a meaningful challenge to traditional marital sex. The husband's ejaculation could no longer automatically define a completed sexual encounter. Stopes insisted that the wife's experience also mattered.

Yet Married Love reveals how recognition of female pleasure could become another form of regulation. Stopes continued to interpret the woman's orgasm through marriage, reproduction, and the husband's sexual performance. She described simultaneous climax as an important marital ideal and connected female orgasm with the possibility of conception.

Stopes wrote that some women might conceive only when orgasm occurred while sperm was present in the vagina.

The reproductive theory was medically questionable, but its cultural meaning was significant. Female orgasm became easier to defend when it served marriage and motherhood. Pleasure was recognized, but its proper location, timing, and purpose were still being defined.

Stopes was progressive in insisting that husbands had responsibilities. She opposed the sexual selfishness that allowed a man to obtain satisfaction while leaving his wife repeatedly aroused and unfulfilled. But the woman's orgasm remained embedded within an authorized structure: marriage, heterosexual intercourse, reproductive possibility, and mutual completion with her husband.

The wife was now permitted to experience pleasure. She was still being told what that pleasure was for.

Van de Velde and the Ideal of Simultaneous Orgasm

Theodor Hendrik van de Velde, a Dutch gynecologist, published Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique during the 1920s. The book became one of the most influential marriage manuals of the twentieth century. Its authority came partly from its explicitness and partly from the medical status of its author.

Van de Velde acknowledged female desire, discussed women's anatomy, and placed responsibility on the husband to understand his wife's arousal. Compared with earlier traditions that expected the wife merely to submit, this represented a genuine change.

Yet the book's title announced its prescriptive purpose. It was not simply a description of the many ways married people might experience sexuality. It established an ideal against which couples—and particularly women—could measure themselves.

"In normal and perfect coitus, mutual orgasm must be almost simultaneous."

That sentence is almost a perfect exhibit for this paper.

The words normal and perfect convert a difficult and highly variable sexual occurrence into a medical and marital standard. The woman is not merely told that her pleasure matters. She is told when it should happen, through which act it should happen, and how closely it should coincide with her husband's orgasm.

Simultaneous orgasm sounds egalitarian because both partners are supposed to experience pleasure. But it places a demanding burden on women whose anatomy does not reliably produce orgasm through penetration alone. It also allows the husband's response to remain the clock by which the encounter is measured.

A woman who did not reach climax at the designated moment could believe she had failed to achieve not merely an orgasm, but normal and perfect coitus. Her body became evidence about the quality of the marriage and the adequacy of her femininity.

The standard had changed from female passivity to female responsiveness, but male authority still defined the required response.

The Marriage Manual Enters the Home

Hannah and Abraham Stone's A Marriage Manual: A Practical Guidebook to Sex and Marriage, first published during the 1930s and repeatedly revised, brought medically endorsed sexual instruction into ordinary homes. Later editions were marketed as a guide recommended by doctors and educators. A substantially revised 1968 edition remained in circulation on the eve of the women's liberation movement.

The importance of books such as A Marriage Manual lies not only in their specific advice but in their cultural function. The physician no longer needed to be physically present in the bedroom. His authority arrived in paperback form.

The manual told couples what counted as normal anatomy, proper preparation, successful intercourse, adjustment, frigidity, impotence, and marital fulfillment. The medical vocabulary gave social expectations the appearance of objective science.

The midcentury wife encountered a double command. She was expected to remain respectable, modest, and sexually faithful, but she was also expected to become responsive and orgasmic within marriage. Too much independent desire could make her immoral. Too little response to her husband could make her frigid.

Masturbation complicated this model because it allowed a woman to discover sexual pleasure without a man and to learn that her most reliable route to orgasm might not involve penetration. A woman who could orgasm alone but not during intercourse directly contradicted the claim that mature female sexuality naturally centered on the vagina.

Medical and marital authorities therefore faced a problem: the woman's body did not always obey the sexual hierarchy constructed for it.

Kinsey: Replacing Prescription With Report

Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues introduced a major methodological challenge with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953. Rather than beginning with a theory of what mature women ought to experience, Kinsey gathered sexual histories and asked women what they had actually done.

The study drew on interviews with nearly six thousand women and examined the incidence and frequency of many forms of sexual behavior. Kinsey's sampling methods were imperfect, and the participants did not constitute a perfectly representative cross-section of all American women. Nevertheless, the work exposed a wide gap between public sexual doctrine and private behavior.

Women reported masturbation, premarital sexual activity, same-sex experiences, extramarital relationships, sexual dreams, and patterns of orgasm that did not conform to respectable marital ideals. Contemporary summaries of Kinsey's data reported that 62 percent of the women interviewed had masturbated.

The importance of masturbation was not merely statistical. It provided women with direct information about their own sexual response. A woman who could bring herself to orgasm through clitoral stimulation possessed bodily evidence that contradicted the theory of immature clitoral sexuality.

Kinsey did not entirely transfer interpretive authority to women. Male researchers still gathered, categorized, and published the data. But the governing question had begun to change.

The earlier authorities asked: How should a normal woman respond?

Kinsey asked: How do women actually respond?

Women's bodies were beginning to contradict the prescription.

Masters and Johnson: Physiology Against Psychoanalysis

William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response, published in 1966, challenged the Freudian hierarchy through laboratory observation. Their research examined the physiological response cycle and included detailed study of the clitoris, vagina, uterus, female orgasm, male orgasm, and sexual response across adulthood.

Their findings undermined the theory that clitoral and vaginal orgasms constituted separate physiological events representing different stages of female maturity. A contemporary account of their work summarized the conclusion directly: there was "no physiological difference" between clitoral and vaginal orgasms.

That conclusion removed the anatomical foundation from the Freudian hierarchy. The so-called vaginal orgasm was not a superior response proving that a woman had outgrown the clitoris. The clitoris remained centrally involved in female sexual response, including responses experienced during intercourse.

Masters and Johnson also documented women's capacity for multiple orgasms and challenged the belief that masturbation was physically harmful. Their laboratory evidence made it increasingly difficult to classify women according to whether they climaxed through direct clitoral stimulation or penetration.

But the laboratory did not completely solve the problem of authority. Instruments could record lubrication, muscular contractions, blood flow, and orgasmic response. They could not fully measure fear, affection, resentment, coercion, shame, inequality, or what an encounter meant to the woman experiencing it.

Women were no longer simply being instructed. They were now being observed and measured. The medical theory had changed, but experts still retained considerable power to explain the results.

Anne Koedt and the Political Meaning of Anatomy

The women's liberation movement transformed the physiological challenge into a political argument. Anne Koedt's "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," written during the late 1960s and widely circulated in 1970, directly attacked the assumption that penetration should determine the meaning of female sexual maturity.

Koedt began with the claim that "a false distinction is made between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm."

She then identified the power concealed inside that distinction. Women who did not orgasm during intercourse had been labeled frigid because male authorities defined intercourse as the proper and mature route to climax. The sexual act most directly gratifying to men had become the standard by which women's bodies were judged.

Koedt wrote that women had been "defined sexually in terms of what pleases men."

That statement captured the political heart of the argument. The issue was not simply that doctors had made an anatomical mistake. The mistake consistently elevated a male-centered sexual practice. Penetration remained the defining act, the penis remained the central instrument, and the woman's successful orgasm was expected to validate both.

Some of Koedt's anatomical language now appears too absolute. Contemporary understanding recognizes the extensive internal and external structure of the clitoris and the complex interaction of genital tissues, nerves, muscles, and psychological experience. But her central question remains powerful:

Why was orgasm through penetration declared mature, while orgasm through direct stimulation of the woman's primary sexual organ was declared immature?

And whose interests did that distinction serve?

Our Bodies, Ourselves: Women Become the Authorities

The Boston Women's Health Book Collective made a more fundamental break with the older tradition. The project began as a women's health course, developed into Women and Their Bodies, and appeared commercially as Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1973. The collective described the work as a book created by and for women, combining health information, personal testimony, and feminist analysis.

Its revolution was not confined to any single claim about orgasm. Its revolution was epistemological: women's lived experiences became a legitimate form of knowledge.

Women learned the names and functions of their anatomy. They examined their own bodies. They discussed masturbation, lesbian sexuality, contraception, abortion, pregnancy, sexual violence, desire, and medical treatment without automatically submitting their experience to male interpretation.

The clitoris no longer appeared merely as an anatomical object described by a physician. Women were encouraged to locate it, explore it, and discover what their own bodies found pleasurable.

That change was profound. The female body was no longer exclusively the object of medical knowledge. The person producing the knowledge and the person living inside the body could be the same woman.

The title itself announced the transfer of ownership:

Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Not the doctor's body. Not the psychoanalyst's body. Not the husband's body. Ours.

Shere Hite: Letting Women Answer

Shere Hite's The Hite Report, published in 1976, continued the transfer of authority by collecting detailed written accounts from women. Hite did not simply ask whether women experienced orgasm. Her questionnaire asked how they masturbated, whether they climaxed more easily through clitoral stimulation than intercourse, and whether the orgasms felt different.

Those questions mattered because they did not begin by assuming that intercourse was the natural center of women's sexuality.

Hite's respondents frequently reported that they could orgasm reliably through masturbation or direct clitoral stimulation but did not regularly orgasm through intercourse alone. Her sample was not random, and her percentages should not be treated as universal statistical facts. Hite's most important contribution was qualitative: women described their sexual experiences in their own language.

Hite's work argued that orgasm was neither mysterious nor inherently difficult for women when the stimulation matched their anatomy. A summary of the book's central claim stated that orgasm was "easy and strong for women, given the right stimulation."

This reversed the conventional diagnosis. The woman who failed to orgasm through intercourse was not necessarily blocked, immature, or sexually inadequate. The sexual practice might simply have failed to stimulate her effectively.

Hite's questions also exposed how thoroughly women had been trained to place male satisfaction before their own. Women often knew how to reach orgasm through masturbation but did not feel entitled to bring that knowledge into sex with men.

The problem was no longer female ignorance of orgasm. It was the cultural rule that women's knowledge should not disrupt the established definition of sex.

Conclusion

The history of the female orgasm is often described as a progression from ignorance to scientific enlightenment. The actual history is more complicated. Some early physicians and marriage advisers acknowledged female desire and criticized sexually selfish husbands. Marie Stopes insisted that a wife should not be treated as the passive instrument of male satisfaction. Van de Velde told husbands that women's pleasure mattered. These were meaningful departures from traditions that denied or feared women's sexuality.

Yet even sympathetic authorities continued to prescribe the proper form, timing, purpose, and meaning of female orgasm.

Freud converted the difference between clitoral and vaginal stimulation into a theory of psychological development. The mature woman was expected to transfer her sexuality from the clitoris to the vagina, although the man was required to make no comparable change.

Marriage manuals converted the theory into instruction. The ideal wife was not merely orgasmic. She was orgasmic through intercourse, within marriage, in response to her husband, and preferably at the same moment he reached climax.

Kinsey disrupted the model by asking what women actually did.

Masters and Johnson disrupted it by observing what women's bodies actually did.

Koedt exposed the political interest hidden inside the supposedly scientific hierarchy.

Our Bodies, Ourselves gave women the language and information to examine themselves.

Hite asked women to describe their own experience rather than forcing that experience into categories already created for them.

The decisive revolution was not simply the discovery that clitoral orgasm was legitimate. Women had always possessed clitorises, and women had always discovered ways to experience pleasure. The revolution was women's claim to interpret that pleasure for themselves.

The physician classified her.

Freud judged her development.

The marriage manual instructed her.

The laboratory measured her.

The women's movement finally asked her what she felt.

The history of female orgasm is therefore the history of a struggle over authority: whether women would continue to be told what they were supposed to feel, or whether the experience of living inside a female body would finally qualify a woman to speak for it.

Working Primary-Source Bibliography

Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.

Hite, Shere. The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. New York: Macmillan, 1976.

Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953.

Koedt, Anne. "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm." Written 1968; expanded version published 1970.

Masters, William H., and Virginia E. Johnson. Human Sexual Response. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.

Stopes, Marie Carmichael. Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties. London: A. C. Fifield, 1918.

Stone, Hannah M., and Abraham Stone. A Marriage Manual: A Practical Guidebook to Sex and Marriage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935.

Written by Susana Gonzalez, JD.

Every menstruation is a portal to a potential ego death, where we can begin anew - new perspectives, new dreams, new goals, and shedding anything we are no longer wanting to carry into the next cycle. This is the ever-shifting, evolving, creative, intuitive, inherent wisdom within every single person with a womb (or has once had a womb - cycle wisdom continues into menopause, including for those who have had hysterectomies).

Your cycle consists of:

• 2 phases - follicular and luteal

• 2 events - menstruation and ovulation

  
  

Important:

The following charts on the phases and events of the menstrual cycle are guidelines - and only that. What is true for you any particular day takes precedence over what your read here or from any other source. If you are near ovulation, and you read in the activity column “high intensity workout”, but you would rather take a nap or an easy stroll, that’s MORE than okay - honor what your body is actually communicating.

Pay the most attention to the “energy” column and the information given below each chart (especially for those with a history of body dysmorphia and/or disordered eating). The most impactful way to connect to your cycle is through your energy. Everything else follows as long as you are in tune with the energy of the phase.

The Portal of Menstruation

Bright red blood marks Day 1 of the follicular phase, menstruation typically lasts 3-7 days

Menstruation is an event, a portal, to your deepest intuition. This is a time to reflect on the previous month, and set intentions for the next month.

“Do” as little as possible, and focus on “be”ing with your Self. Spend time doing nothing, away from others if possible. Let yourself be bored, or go lie in the sun!

Stay receptive to messages/intuitions regarding what is true for you in your work and home life (even if they don’t make logical sense). Journal/free-write if that feels supportive.

If you are a mother, if possible once a quarter, once every 6 months, or once a year, ask for someone to take over parenting duties so you can spend a bleed really going inwards without consistently attending to the needs of others.

When we are working, parenting, or doing the tasks that we absolutely need to do while we are menstruating - you can do these necessary tasks in a different energy. You can show up to work while honoring the slowness, intuitive, and inward energy. Maybe you’ll only engage in conversation that’s absolutely necessary, and save the small talk. Maybe you’ll plan your week so that there are fewer tasks to do in this week. Maybe you’ll prepare meals for yourself and kids that require less work - like a one-pot or a crock pot recipe. Start brainstorming how you can support yourself to stay in the menstrual cave for your next bleed while still completing your necessary daily activities.

The Follicular Phase

Day 1 of bleeding through day of ovulation.

This phase is like riding up an incline of a hill. Day 6 versus Day 12 of follicular will feel different! Even day 6 and day 7 will feel different.

Early follicular energy is much more attuned to menstrual energy, and late follicular energy is much more attuned to ovulation energy. The in-between days are a unique variation between the two.

Focus on slowly and intentionally coming out of menstruation and into the higher energy state - You are more likely going to enjoy the higher energy state of late follicular/ovulation if you have actually RESTED enough during early follicular/menstruation.

The Surge of Ovulation

This is a 12-24 hour event that marks the end of the follicular phase and beginning of the luteal phase.

The exact date that you ovulate depends on many health and environmental factors - can be as early as day 6, or way later depending on your cycle length!

Only about 10-20% of women ovulate on day 14.

Your ovulation date will likely vary in-between your individual cycles.

Biologically, the egg “attracts” the sperm to it.

Energetically, when we ovulate we are in a state of “attracting” to us what we desire. Speaking becomes more fluent and easier, our skin tends to glow a bit more, and sometimes we feel more confident and outgoing in this phase.

While we are fertile, our womb becomes receptive to “social intuition”. In contrast to the inward intuition we experience in menstruation, this is an outward intuition more focused on those outside of us. We are particularly receptive to social cues. Studies show we experience increased emotion recognition accuracy, and stronger cognitive empathy (understanding another person’s perspective).¹

Note that not everyone experiences increased confidence and positive feelings during ovulation. For many women, the heightened state feels jarring and can lead to mood swings or emotional sensitivity. If this is your experience, hold yourself with so much love and compassion as you navigate the sharp ups and downs of the hormonal changes here. Seek professional help if these mood changes feel challenging or disruptive to your life.

Sometimes, rather than going to a social gathering, we actually feel like taking 4 extra naps. Take the nap. Every ovulation (and every cycle) will feel different.

The Luteal Phase

Starts immediately after ovulation through the next Day 1 of menstruation

Physically, our bodies don’t actually know if we’ve conceived until 1-2 weeks into the luteal phase. Your body is maintaining and protecting the uterine lining as if you were pregnant.

Energetically, our bodies go into energy conservation mode. We are not meant to expend energy on much other than protecting ourselves, our family, our womb, and potential pregnancy. Of course, there will be other tasks for work and home that need to be done, but stay in an energy of slowness and ease as you do these tasks when possible.

This is the ultimate self-care phase (along with menstrual!). In this luteal phase, set yourself up for a quiet menstrual phase by tying up loose ends (work tasks, home tasks) so you can rest while you bleed.

Eat enough calories! Our caloric intake increases about 200-300 calories/day in this phase. (Ever get super hangry before your period? This is why!)

Be protective with your self-care rituals and your boundaries, especially in later in the luteal phase as you approach menstruation.

Cycle awareness practice

Each day, take a moment to reflect on your cycle day, and how you are feeling physically, energetically, and emotionally. Write down a few words, or journal as much as you want, with your cycle day in mind.

Example:

April 21, cycle day 22

Physically: slept in late, a bit tired during the day, enjoyed some sunlight

Energetically: enjoying focusing on detail-oriented tasks and moving slowly today

Emotionally: feeling grateful for my pet, feeling emotionally sensitive, giving myself grace

I originally learned this practice from Veronica Rottman, IG @wakingwomb.

Do Not Reproduce Without Permission.

Study cited: Derntl B, Hack RL, Kryspin-Exner I, Habel U. Association of menstrual cycle phase with the core components of empathy. Horm Behav. 2013 Jan;63(1):97-104. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2012.10.009. Epub 2012 Oct 23. PMID: 23098806; PMCID: PMC3549494.