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Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, physicians writing for American medical journals created a vision of female heterosexual health that linked vaginal orgasm with marital stability and community security. This article focuses on how physicians sought to ensure healthy female heterosexuality through the use of state-mandated premarital consultations. Physicians repeatedly asserted that by monitoring a woman's response to penetration during a premarital pelvic exam, they could anticipate her ability to experience vaginal orgasm during intercourse. A sexually fulfilling relationship, physicians explained, was the foundation of marital stability. These marriages would then serve as the building blocks of a morally, and therefore politically, secure nation during the early decades of the Cold War.
In 1966 physician William F. Sheeley wrote an editorial for the Journal of the American Medical Association urging his colleagues to take a more active interest in the sex lives of their patients. "That basic unit without which few societies can survive-the family-depends upon discipline and control of sexual behavior," he cautioned. "Without such control, the family soon breaks down, and soon thereafter the whole society comes crashing down-like the mighty Roman Empire, which is no more."1
Although it would be easy to dismiss Sheeley's editorial as overly dramatic, in fact, his statements echo the fears and anxieties expressed by numerous physicians writing in American medical journals throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In essence, these physicians engaged in a three-part dialogue over female heterosexual health, marital stability, and community security. At the intersection of these three conversations was the premarital consultation and physicians' efforts at sexual instruction as a means of ensuring both the psychosexual adjustment of their patients and the stability of their patients' marriages. The healthy female orgasm was the key to it all.
In the 1950s and 1960s, physicians devoted a great deal of attention to marking the accepted parameters of "normal" female heterosexual behavior, particularly the distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasms. Their efforts were, in part, a response to the 1953 publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. While Kinsey dismissed the vaginal orgasm and instead pointed to the clitoris as the site of female sexual pleasure, physicians, with little dissent, maintained their commitment to the vaginal orgasm well into the mid-1960s, when the conversation...