The Kinsey Reports are often credited as being the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in the United States, and their release profoundly affected the ways that people talked about sex (as well as encouraging future sex research). But how bad was the state of sexual knowledge in, say, 1900 or 1925 among the average 16-25 year old? I assume that knowledge was gendered (men perhaps having more experience) and affected by class (working-class women perhaps had more experience than upper-class women?) but those are just hypotheses. In particular, is there any credence to the idea that people might get married as virgins but not really understand how sex worked?
In particular, is there any credence to the idea that people might get married as virgins but not really understand how sex worked?
I can't tell you anything about in the US, but in the UK Sex Before the Sexual Revolution (Sretzer and Fisher) is good on this, especially. Its thesis is essentially that female respectability was maintained by not knowing much about sex and remaining innocent until one was married, while men were expected to try to find out about sex and subsequently -- with little or no experience of the actual act -- teach their wives.
However, it also argues that middle-class women were more likely to have some abstract/theoretical knowledge of sex that they obtained in a "respectable" manner, while working class women didn't have the same respectable ways of achieving this knowledge and so tried to maintain total innocence. (Not that this always worked, and a lot of their interviewees constructed rationales behind why their knowledge of sex that they obtained before being in a relationship with the man that they would marry was respectable and allowable...)
Edit: I should probably mention that Sex Before the Sexual Revolution theoretically goes up to 1963, that is, after the time of the Kinsey reports. The youngest person interviewed whose testimony the work is based on though was born in 1924, and so would have been 24 by the time of the publication of the first Kinsey report.
also how accurate was the Kinsey Report? I've heard wildly conflicting statements