Monday the 14th Obituary Reads

Obituary:  Noted researcher and second-wave feminist Shere Hite, 77, author of The Hite Report of the 1970s, has reportedly died in London. She went through a lot of controversy over her book because she dared to question conventional wisdom about women and their sexuality or lack of it.  She used questionnaires of literally thousands received in order to reach her conclusions.  She also published two other books, one of them about men, and they were similarly trashed by some critics and jealous rival researchers .  However, much if not most of what she wrote is not controversial these days because it has been borne out since. In 2000, she published her memoirs.

However, she had to put up with a bunch of crap, so in the late 1990s, she renounced her U.S. citizenship (she was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1942 as Shirley Diana Gregory), then changed her first name to "Shere" (like "share" or "Cher") and finally adopted her stepfather's last name of Hite.  She later received degrees from the University of Florida at Gainesville and began a Ph.D. program at Columbia but later dropped out.

More:

What set the Hite Report apart from other studies were the questionnaires at the heart of it. More than 3,000 women were given anonymity in answering the queries, allowing them to write candidly and open-endedly — not in response to multiple-choice questions — about their experiences.

“Researchers should stop telling women what they should feel sexually and start asking them what they do feel sexually,” Ms. Hite wrote. She described her questionnaires as a “giant rap session on paper.”

In revelatory first-person testimonials, more than 70 percent of the respondents shattered the notion that women received sufficient stimulation during basic intercourse to reach climax. Rather, they said, they needed stimulation of the clitoris but often felt guilty and inadequate about it and were too embarrassed to tell their sexual partners.

Hite suffered from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
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Another obituary:  Women's studies pioneer and publisher of Feminist Press Florence Howe, 91 has died from Parkinson's.

When Howe began teaching at various colleges such as Hofstra, there was no such thing as women’s studies. In 1970, Howe and her then husband Paul Lauter began the Feminist Press, holding the first meetings in their home. They moved to the New York City area shorty after. The Feminist Press is a literary non-profit dedicated to promoting social justice and promoting writers with an activist spirit. They have published works by Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. The Feminist Press would lead to women’s studies being taught in universities.

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