The women’s emancipation movements that arose between the second half of the 1800s and the first two decades of the following century are the first turning point in contemporary history that granted the moral and social change fundamental to the construction of the concept of sexuality as we know it today. These movements involved the United States and most European states, with the aim of winning basic civil rights hitherto denied to the female population.
Women were considered second-class citizens, and the man was the legal representative of the woman, whose only role in society was to be a wife and mother. Despite the economic and social development that was widespread in the Western world at that time, the female population still had no right to adequate education, no equal access to men in the working world, and no right to vote.
The subordinate status of women on all fronts led to the beginning of the first struggles with the activism of the suffragettes who were already beginning to demand equality within the family as well, both in terms of rights over children and in the marital couple.
The first real changes occurred only in the early decades of the 1900s, where starting in Finland(1906), the right to vote was extended to women: inEngland in 1918, in the United States in 1920, and only after World War II in Italy and France as well.
The early feminist movement thus focused on women’s suffrage and the removal of legal obstacles to gender equality, thus laying the foundation for the struggle for women’s emancipation. In the 1960s and 1970s., following a remarkable economic boom present throughout the Western world, a second feminist wave developed, closely interconnected with the sexual liberation movements, focusing in these years on women’s identity from a more intimate and personal point of view: women now spoke of contraception, decriminalization of abortion, interchange of male and female roles within the couple, and self-determination.
Sexuality and the woman-man relationship thus become a social-political issue: starting with abortion, sexual liberation movements will focus on sexual violence, sexual intercourse before marriage, and birth control, with the goal of men and women living in a society without psychological, economic, and sexual repression.
Against the backdrop of these major changes affecting the role of women in society and in the heterosexual relationship, those minorities – gays and lesbians – who claim their sexual identity and choose not to be ashamed of their “diversity” also take voice and are supported. Another central issue in the public debates of the time is pornography, previously kept hidden and unconfessed by most.
In 1966 Master and Johnson published “Human Sexual Response,” the result of eleven years of direct observations of the physiological responses of the sexual response of a sample of women and men aged 18 to 89.
Unlike Kinsey’s study, Master and Johnson carry out their observations in the laboratory, studying more than ten thousand sexual acts, from female masturbation to natural coitus (via penile penetration) and artificial coitus (via stimulating object). The results enabled the two scholars not only to theorize about a precise cycle of sexual response, but also to emphasize how female sexual response is fundamentally similar to male sexual response, unlike what had been assumed instead until then.
Although physiologically based, Masters and Johnson’s contribution broadened knowledge about the entire sphere of human sexuality, thus essential to all subsequent publications that arose as a result of these early revolutionary findings.
One among them is Kaplan’s “New Sexual Therapies” (1974), which in addition to revising on the basis of his clinical experience the previously theorized sexual cycle, focuses mainly on the female orgasm, hypothesizing four different ones. scenarios: the absence of orgasm, clitoral and coital orgasm (according to the author the most frequent ones) and finally orgasm with fantasies (Panzeri, 2012).
Considering what has already been reported on the role of women in society at the time of the publication of these texts, it is clear the impact that such publications have had not only within the scientific sphere, but also in the practical field, making them promoters of a new, more comprehensive and informed view of female sexuality.
Without rejecting the views of those who see feminism and the sexual revolution of these years as two unsuccessful and inconclusive movements, it is possible to believe without a doubt that the shift of the sexual sphere from the private to the public, political and even legislative place (with the divorce law and the decriminalization of abortion , in Italy in 1974 and 1978 respectively), has led to numerous changes in society, customs and beliefs that are still reflected in contemporary society today.
From the 1990s to the present, the debate on the status of women in Western society, sometimes identified as the third feminist wave or post-feminist movement, has focused mainly on discrimination in the working world, first and foremost the wage gap and harassment at work, but among the most discussed issues we also find reflections on the rights of transgender women, the objectification of women’s bodies by the media and, especially in the more conservative states of the U.S., the abolition of laws that still prohibit abortion.
